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PeterT
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Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2005 8:49 am
Post subject: The smart way to $10,000 pm?
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Hi all,
My apologies if this question has been discussed before. Please feel free to point me to a thread/s. I searched but couldn't find a complete answer.
What the best way to go from nothing to $10,000 per month in profits? Assuming you don't want to pay for advertising.
As I understand it, there are widely different approaches being used. Some, like Ken Evoy, recommend building super-high-value content sites and continually adding to them. Because of the nature of these sites, you can build only a small handful of sites in a given timeframe.
At the other end of the spectrum are TE sites and its clones, where you churn out 50 - 150 or more sites a month. Some really disciplined TE builders reportedly earn over $40,000 per month. Even today.
In between are sites like the James Martell type and now the Auto Income Secrets style sites. They require work, but not as much as the Ken Evoy type sites. I know Martell sites need more work than AIS sites, but I'm only painting a broad picture here.
I suppose many folks would go for a mix of different types of sites. So my question is, based on your experience, what sort of a mix would you say is needed to hit $10,000 pm? What proportion of each kind of site? And what timeframe would you look at?
The objective is to get to $10,000 pm as fast as possible, while also having some amount of stability. In other words, it won't do to make $10,000 in January and then crash to $1200 in February. But perhaps a drop to $6000 - 7000 can be tolerated without too much heartburn.
Would you build say, 2 Ken Evoy type sites, 15 James Martell sites plus 30 AIS sites (and maybe some TE sites as well)? Would it be some other mix?
I hope this isn't a completely crazy question! 
Any views you have based on your experiences is much appreciated!
Cheers,
Peter |
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AllanGardyne
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Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2005 1:47 am
Post subject: Re: The smart way to $10,000 pm?
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| PeterT wrote: | Would you build say, 2 Ken Evoy type sites, 15 James Martell sites plus 30 AIS sites (and maybe some TE sites as well)? Would it be some other mix?
I hope this isn't a completely crazy question! |
I think it's a very good question.
The answer depends a lot on your starting point - how much knowledge and experience you have. I recommend that newcomers start by building one or two SBI sites. This experience will give you a very solid grounding because of all the coaching you'll receive and the assistance you get on the SBI forums. You'll learn about how to choose a niche, effective pre-selling, search engine optimization the right way, how to choose affiliate programs, RSS, newsletters, forms, etc, etc. It's like serving an affiliate apprenticeship.
If you don't have basic affiliate marketing knowledge and experience and jump straight into building a large number of websites, you're likely to make the same mistakes multiplied many times. You might do something that gets all of your sites penalized by the search engines, for example.
SBI sites are good for earning, say, $300 to $500 a month, perhaps $1000 or so if you've chosen your niche really well. It would take a lot of work to generate $10,000 a month purely from SBI sites. The same applies to Martell type sites.
To speed things up, you'll probably want to do something a little more challenging. For example, you might decide to build an email list as fast as you can.
One interesting way to generate revenue quickly is to pounce on a new emerging industry or a brand new product and write a special report using screenshots and perhaps videos to show people how to get the most out of that new product.
Then you use innovative techniques and your own imagination to lure people to a NameSqueeze page where they give you their email addresses before they can download your special report. Your special report contains a small number of affiliate links to related products you use and strongly recommend. You earn commissions both from the affiliate links and from the helpful emails you send to they people who gave you their email addresses.
You could, perhaps, make the special report brandable, so that other affiliates promote it for you, earning you second-tier commissions and gaining subscribers to your newsletter, which you promote in the report.
When deciding which route to take, the same basic advice which is given to newcomers applies: It makes sense to analyze your skills and interests and build a site around those skills and interests.
To get to the $10,000 a month level quickly, try to figure out some way of using viral marketing, where people tell people about you and they tell other people.
You might need to be adventurous and outspoken and deliberately do things which attract attention and get people talking. Either that, or you'll need a high level of expertise so that you impress people and they'll tell other people about you.
You might choose to promote programs which pay lifetime commissions (like the ones reviewed at LifetimeCommissions.com) or monthly residual commissions, to increase the speed at which your commissions grow.
You might decide to sell your special report, paying your own affiliates a generous commission to promote it. Done right, that can be an excellent of getting leverage and growing fast. However, I've seen a large number of newcomers try this before they've taken the time to learn the basics of affiliate marketing. Inevitably, they stumble and are disappointed with the results.
I can understand your desire to build a business without using advertising. It's certainly possible. However, I strongly recommend that you don't blind yourself to the wonderful leverage that can be obtained by using advertising. Paying for visitors keeps you on your toes and forces you to keep experimenting and improving your conversion rate. If you can reach the necessary level of skill, advertising is a wonderful way to boost your business fast. If you don't reach that level, it's a good way to lose money fast.
Similarly, you might think you want to build a business doing everything yourself. That used to be my aim. Not any more. You can get wonderful leverage by hiring people to do things you aren't good at, don't like doing, or don't have time for.
Stability and TE? You've got to be joking! TE is one of the riskiest techniques out there. If you feel you must try it, I suggest you do it on a friend's website, using your friend's physical address and your friend's credit card for any expenses. Don't link to TE sites from any other sites you own. You can do all this legally if your friend owns the website and you simply rent it from him. If you're really paranoid, you might use a different computer and a different ISP when you're doing anything on that website.
Stability and search engines? Whew! I seem to have achieved it with a large, old, well established site that has lots of links to it. However, if it takes you several years to achieve such a position, the rules might have changed by the time you get there.
The more diverse sources of traffic you have, the less reliant you'll be on search engines.
One way to achieve some level of stability is to own different websites in different industries promoting a variety of different products. Do not rely on one web host, one affiliate network or one affiliate merchant.
A good way to achieve some stability is to build a huge mailing list. A mailing list gives you multiple opportunities to sell things to the same people. It also gives you credibility, builds trust and builds your reputation. In my experience, it's about 10 times easier to sell things to my newsletter subscribers who have learned to trust me than to sell things to website visitors who don't know me.
You'll probably also want to offer your site visitors RSS feeds. It's another way of diversifying and avoiding some of the problems that occur with email.
People make money in affiliate marketing in lots of different ways. Learn to study what the successful people are doing, not just what they say.
I recommend you start by analyzing your strengths and interests and see if you can design your own business around them. If you enjoy what you're doing, you're much more likely to stick at it when the going gets tough.
Hope that helps more than it confuses.
[Edited to fix a couple of typos.]
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Allan Gardyne
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Last edited by AllanGardyne on Sun Nov 06, 2005 5:41 am; edited 1 time in total |
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PeterT
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Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2005 3:55 am
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Hi Allan,
Thanx for that wonderfully comprehensive reply!
This question occured to me because someone who doesn't know a thing about online marketing asked me about the different kinds of sites I own and what he should do to get to 10K per month.
You make an excellent point regarding building lists. I really need to pay attention to this. I have a very small list in one niche (about 2300 subscribers) and I agree that they tend to trust you a heck lot more than a casual visitor to your site. I'll do more work on lists now.
My initial recommendation to the person who asked me this question was to get James Martell's manual. However, you're right about SBI giving a solid grounding in the fundamentals.
I'm sending him to this site and will recommend to him to read more about SBI here and get a subscription.
Thanks and regards,
Peter |
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AllanGardyne
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Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2005 5:57 am
Post subject: Re: The smart way to $10,000 pm?
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| PeterT wrote: | | And what timeframe would you look at? |
I forgot to answer this question. I reckon aiming to do it in three years would be an appropriate goal for someone who's really determined and persistent:
End of first year: $500 a month
End of second year: $5,000 a month
End of third year: $10,000 a month.
You'll receive lots of different answers. Some do it much faster, many never get anyway near achieving any of these goals.
I've set the target for the first year fairly low because I think the first year should be mainly a time for learning and experimenting, the second year mainly for concentrating on and improving what you've found works best, and the third year mainly for using all the knowledge you've gained.
I'm assuming that at the end of the second year, the affiliate has switched from doing this part-time to doing it full-time.
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Charlie
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Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2005 11:47 am
Post subject: Re: The smart way to $10,000 pm?
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| AllanGardyne wrote: | | I can understand your desire to build a business without using advertising. It's certainly possible. However, I strongly recommend that you don't blind yourself to the wonderful leverage that can be obtained by using advertising. |
Not only that, the instant results that PPC can offer might just keep you sane long enough for the organic traffic to build up.
| Quote: | | Paying for visitors keeps you on your toes and forces you to keep experimenting and improving your conversion rate. |
With content sites, testing elements is easy to dodge in the crusade for ever more quality content. Keeping a little PPC running is bound to help with headlines and other calls to action on your content pages (if you let it).
PPC can help when it comes to learning the language of your visitors, but also, the relative effectiveness of different PPC landing pages will throw up lessons you can apply with your on-site navigation.
Cheers,
Charlie.
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Sun Nov 06, 2005 4:40 pm
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Wow, great post Allan. That one deserves a place of prominence on your site, it would be a shame for it to get buried beneath all our yack here on the forum.
I'm not sure I can add much to the "fastest way to get to $10 grand a month" question other than to applaud Allan's post, and suggest that you hope you can marry hard work with good luck. Timing has a good deal with do with it, imho, and luck has a lot to do with timing.
I do think you are wise to be concerned with stability, and will comment on that.
Chasing Net business models is inherently unstable, so you might think more about traditional business models.
What ongoing problem can you solve for someone else? If you build up relationships with a group of people, and regularly solve some problem for them, you're on the way to a stable future.
One catch might be that if your customers are chasing Net business models, and that's what you're helping them with, then you're back in the Net biz model rat race.
Can you use the Net to help people solve the kind of problems they will still have 20 years from now? This kind of thing probably won't be glamorous, or have the clever idea appeal we so enjoy in Net biz.
But if you pull it off, you won't have to come up with a new clever idea every other year for the rest of your career. In my experience, that's not as easy as it sounds.
In the end, it's the amount of money you make over your life that matters, not how much you make this year or next.
Good luck, great question!
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Jscott
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Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2005 6:34 am
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Phil mentioned creating a stable business model. I will echo that. The dotcom business model, throw money at ideas without restraint, is foolish.
I have always followed a three tiered approach. I live off of 3rd generation income. Since you want quick that might not be what you are after.
I would ask, why do you want 10k so fast? I get nervous anytime someone needs money quickly and chooses business to sustain it quickly. Unless that person also builds up "stops" and cashflow controls that money is pure vapor.
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Dominique
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Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2005 8:42 am
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| Phil Tanny wrote: | | Wow, great post Allan. That one deserves a place of prominence on your site, it would be a shame for it to get buried beneath all our yack here on the forum. |
Could not agree more.
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2005 3:47 pm
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One way to measure how unstable Net business models are is to observe how much time we spend talking about them.
This endless business model analysis seems to normal to us. But if we look around at other industries, and view us from that perspective, we get a clearer picture.
Nurses, bus drivers, dentists, carpenters, hair stylists, teachers, etc etc, don't spend all day asking each other "do you think this will work?"
There's a balance point somewhere in between harvesting the opportunities created by a brisk rate of change, and protecting yourself from that same rate of change.
The easiest way I know to measure where we are in that regard is to ask ourselves, "How dependant am I on search engines?"
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Jscott
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Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2005 4:25 pm
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| Quote: | | One way to measure how unstable Net business models are is to observe how much time we spend talking about them. |
LOL---BOOOOOM goes the dynamite! |
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robertb
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Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2005 7:23 pm
Post subject: Re: The smart way to $10,000 pm?
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| PeterT wrote: |
Would you build say, 2 Ken Evoy type sites, 15 James Martell sites plus 30 AIS sites (and maybe some TE sites as well)? Would it be some other mix?
|
Sounds like you've got the diversification thing figured out. 
I have a variety of styles of sites that you've mentioned, and here's some general observations:
In general, you'll earn more with SBI sites than Martell sites than AIS sites.
With AIS type sites ( article bot, TE, splogs ) you're not going to earn much per site per day, I'd be THRILLED with $1 per day per site like this. You'll certainly want more a couple hundred AIS sites rather than 30 if you want to see decent income from them. But once you've got a system down for these, it's easy to put together 100 of them in a week without taking much time. Cents do add up.
But here's what I'm doing for long term viability. Honestly, I don't count on AIS style sites to earn forever; you'll need to constantly churn them out. But take most of the revenue these sites in your portfolio generate, and funnel it into unique content and one-way links for your Martell and SBI style sites, which are much more stable over time.
Think of it as reinvesting your dividends of your stock portfolio.
Finally, I'd recommend that you get whois privacy on domains for AIS sites along with hosting them on a server away from your Martell and SBI sites. This way you shield your viable business away from your AIS sites.
I know people that do very well with just SBI sites, with just Martell sites (Martell himself), and with only spammy AIS sites. Honestly, to put all of your eggs in just one style of site is extremely risky. I've had quality SBI sites dinged badly by Google; going from the largest source of my revenue to the least. But say I had a couple hundred other sites in the mix, it wouldn't have mattered as much.
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crush123
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Catalyst
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Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2005 7:59 pm
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Great posts and ideas everyone! I'm going to have to boomark this post to blog about too.
I would also suggest learning to work with datafeeds or using one of the datafeed tools out there. You need to be creative to avoid duplicate content penalties, but datafeed sites are a fast way to build income fairly quickly if you know how to do it.
Datafeed affiliates for some of our 5 Star programs are some of our highest earners. There's a free datafeed directory as well as a tutorial about datafeeds on my site if anyone wants to learn more.
Hope this helps!
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PeterT
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Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2005 2:35 pm
Post subject: Re: The smart way to $10,000 pm?
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| robertb wrote: |
In general, you'll earn more with SBI sites than Martell sites than AIS sites.
With AIS type sites ( article bot, TE, splogs ) you're not going to earn much per site per day, I'd be THRILLED with $1 per day per site like this. You'll certainly want more a couple hundred AIS sites rather than 30 if you want to see decent income from them. But once you've got a system down for these, it's easy to put together 100 of them in a week without taking much time. Cents do add up.
But here's what I'm doing for long term viability. Honestly, I don't count on AIS style sites to earn forever; you'll need to constantly churn them out. But take most of the revenue these sites in your portfolio generate, and funnel it into unique content and one-way links for your Martell and SBI style sites, which are much more stable over time.
Think of it as reinvesting your dividends of your stock portfolio.
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Thanks for the reply. Y'know, for some reason, reading your posts on this forum, I thought you were a pure 'whitehat' guy. It's interesting that you build a variety of sites. Don't get me wrong...I wear all types of hats too, not just the lily-white type!
And what you outlined is just what I do - funnel 'blackhat' money into longer-term revenue producers, including even offline stuff. That's always a good idea.
| Quote: |
I've had quality SBI sites dinged badly by Google; going from the largest source of my revenue to the least. |
Me too. That happened to the very first SBI site I built. Very discouraging for a total newbie. But then, I had discovered page generators by then and had a nice side income.
I have my own notions about the right answer to my original question. I asked because I wanted to get more perspectives.
It's somewhat similar to the way you would look at an investment portfolio. What percentage of your money would you allocate to assets of each risk class - from low risk treasury bonds to high risk private partnerships and everything in between.
The answer depends on each individual investor, I guess. And the same goes for the mix of sites you would build. As you rightly said, there are people who stick to just one 'asset class' or kind of website. I think that's too risky. But it works well for some.
Thanks and regards,
Peter |
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robertb
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Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2005 3:17 pm
Post subject: Re: The smart way to $10,000 pm?
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| PeterT wrote: |
Thanks for the reply. Y'know, for some reason, reading your posts on this forum, I thought you were a pure 'whitehat' guy. It's interesting that you build a variety of sites. Don't get me wrong...I wear all types of hats too, not just the lily-white type! |
You'd be surprised how many well-known people here wear all types of hats and just don't admit it publically.
I'd say a majority of my projects are "white-hat" and long term, and that I dable in "gray-hat" material. But the colors are in the eyes of the beholder.
What it comes down to is that I like to test things for myself; I've never been one to blindly follow advice. If I try something and it doesn't work, then I'll leave it and go. If it works, then maybe more testing is in order.
Another thing I read on this forum that someone said is "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."
| Quote: |
Me too. That happened to the very first SBI site I built. Very discouraging for a total newbie. But then, I had discovered page generators by then and had a nice side income. |
I guess that was my turning point into diversifying my assets.
Also, I've been doing more reading across the board and have gotten some new insights/opinions.
1) Google makes all of their money off our content. They scrape it and serve ads beside it. They have a policy of do as we say, not as we do. Don't get me wrong, I don't scrape a lot of content, but it's interesting to think about it this way.
2) People believe they'd be exploiting searchers / search engines or diluting the quality of the search results if they dabble in other methods. Well, unless you make all of your clothes, chances are everything you're wearing in a Western, industrialized country was made in China or that area of the world by exploiting workers and only paying them peanuts. Second, anyone that throws away trash or drives a car is polluting the world. Surely this arguement will receive replies claiming how these issues are completely different. Well, they are different: one is a physical world and the other is a digital world.
| Quote: |
The answer depends on each individual investor, I guess. And the same goes for the mix of sites you would build. As you rightly said, there are people who stick to just one 'asset class' or kind of website. I think that's too risky. But it works well for some.
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Well said. There's no right or wrong way.
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