How To Make Money Online. The Real Truth.

This is just a little free business growth advice. Let’s say you finished brainstorming some product ideas. Your keyword research shows some possibilities, and you put them on a spreadsheet and have grouped the phrases. Then start checking the competition for each keyword phrase and feel the market is there, and that you can dominate in your cutoff area.

At this point, do you have a strategy or a plan in place to build a business out of your idea. I know I didn’t when working on my first information site, and I was working with a mentor. Even if I knew then what I know now my decision would have been still to pursue it because the information was something more than familiar to me. The niche itself is really not as small as my keyword research made it look. My cutoff was 50 searches per day for my keywords and the top phrase was 35 and right below that 15 using word tracker. So I used the second phrase for my domain name and the number one keyword phrase in the title of my book. That way I could use them both in my page title.

Now to be honest with you, I don’t think anyone would have pursued this with that type of research numbers and then because I didn’t have a process map with my strategy of up sells, side sales or back end sales in place. Once I launched, and worked my butt off to dominate, there was nothing else to sell, not even affiliate products. So I had no back end or up sells. Without them, you basically cannot grow an expandable business. The only way it could be done is with a high ticket product. This is the reason for mapping out your business plan first. Now your plan may have to change depending on your competition. This is very important! Always watch what your competition is doing, you want to get to know them and even how they think. This is really necessary when you find a niche that you want to grow into a big business.

Nevertheless, on the other hand, this site has never had one week of losing money, and I used ad words and yahoo search for the first thirty eight weeks. At that time, I hit number one in google, msn and yahoo for my two top keyword phrases.

The last fiscal year I set a goal of five figures. I got down to the final twelve weeks, there was no way I was going to make it. In fact, I wasn’t on pace to make what I had made the previous year. I needed to come up with something fast, and it had to work. So the only thing I could think of was to go to my business growth course and try to find an idea for a side sale. I got lucky and found an idea on the first video I watched.

All I had to do was use the knowledge I had gained from the course. So I wrote out a business plan for the niche. It included a mind map and process map along with how to create the whole sales funnel along with back end sales. Now I had a side sell for my site. I put it up for $17.97 and made a separate sales page for my list, sent the link to that sales page to my list with a price of $8.00 for the e-book. On the special sales page I put a 48 hour timer on it. Then on my website I took my main e-book and my side sell and made a package offer that would save a customer fifteen percent off the price of buying them separate, there was my up sell.

This was all finished with eight weeks left in the fiscal year. The site went from averaging around $165.00 per week to $277.00 for the last eight weeks, and I made my five figures.

Now, I made quite a few business mistakes with this website and because of that fact have left a lot of money on the table. I made the obvious mistakes of creating a product that had no chance of growth, but I knew I could make money with it. How did I know? Because I did the best I could do checking out the competition and felt I could easily out market them. This is why we look for small niches. We want to be able to dominate.

Okay, if you remember in the beginning of this post where I talked about the results of my keyword research and how small the numbers were. Now, the mentoring company wanted another six thousand dollars to teach me SEO. I took one hell of a chance spending what I already had given them. So I didn’t buy that program. I felt I was smart enough to get through that process by myself, and I didn’t have a choice financially.

It took me thirty eight weeks of trying different combinations on my sales page. There is one important thing that I learned. Make a note of this, google puts a lot of emphasis on your site title and your description. You obviously need to have your keywords in each, but it has to be a perfect combination. I actually spent more time getting that the way they like it, then my on page search engine optimization.

Back to the small amount of keywords that word tracker gave me. This is a little niche, and my traffic increases every year. I know of many web site and product owners that would kill for these numbers. This web site, now gets over 600,000 hits per month, of course we all know that hits are pretty well meaningless. Here is what should be one of your big concerns and that is visitors, obviously conversions are the biggest. This site averages over 700 unique visits per day. Combined with the small amount of keywords I started with and the articles I wrote on the topics without keywords in mind. This traffic all finds my site through generic search using over 3,000 different keyword search terms.

With this amount of unique visitors, I should be shooting for one percent conversion rate. I should be doing a lot more split testing with my sales page as I did when the site was launched. However, I made another huge mistake. I was already dominating the search engines but wanted to keep adding fresh content. So instead of leaving well enough alone, my site is somewhere close to ninety pages and probably over did it giving away free information. The fresh information was hopefully going to come from the forum that I put on the site. When I first put it up, the posts were coming regularly, and things were working as planned. Then it just totally died out.

The other problem I have with conversion is the geography of fifty percent of my traffic. They just don’t have the money. I probably still should invest some time in split testing, and it could possibly help.

The whole point of me giving you this example is, when you come up with a product idea that you feel very good about and all your research results indicate that you should go for it. Sit down and map out a strategy of how the business can grow and the direction you will need to take to make it happen. Remember, never drop your guard on the competition, always be aware of what they are doing.

As I mentioned earlier in what is turning out to be a report rather than a blog post. Once I felt good about selling in this market, I had to do it. The information is very familiar to me, and I was extremely comfortable writing about it. Am I sorry it doesn’t seem to have any growth potential, heck yes?

None the less, for the small amount of time that I put into now, which is very little, I’m not sorry I did it. The site seems to be evergreen, something that I hope for, in every site, and it pays me about $500.00 dollars an hour which is good. This website will never make life changing money. However, it just about runs itself now, has more than paid for itself, the mentoring and my time.

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