Getting Traffic

The biggest key to all of these ways to turn your passions into profits is traffic. Traffic is the hardest piece of any monetization method. You must get eyeballs on your content in order to make money. So, if you decide on one of these methodologies for turning your passions into profits, make sure that you focus at least 50 percent of your time learning the traffic methodologies that go along with it.

The three main ways that well talk about are paying for traffic, sending an email to your mailing list (that itself takes time to build) and lastly to joint venture with another website owner. This means they send you traffic, and you split profits with them 50:50. You can use software to track the number of hits produced from their mailouts.

1. By buying traffic, you can target the people already looking

for your product. The biggest player here is Google. Im sure you know them well For those new to this industry, whenever you run a google search, the listings that show up on the right hand side can be bought by anyone. You pay 5 cents and upwards for each click. You can have traffic showing up to your website 5 minutes after setting up a Google Adwords account. Other search engines also offer this pay-per-click (PPC) service.

The next step after paying for traffic is to monitor results. You can track the number of hits from various sources to focus on those that are producing sales. Lets say you had 4 different advertising sources producing a total in sales of $200 and you spent a total of $80. Thats a profit margin of 250%. If you were able to see that the $20 you spent with PPC advertiser A produced 0 dollars in sales and the same for advertiser B. Advertiser C brought in $20 in sales but advertiser D brought in a whopping $180 in sales.

That's 900% profit and you could then focus your advertising dollars on that source to maximize profit. Every type of advertising must have a tracking system with strong accuracy.

2. Emailing a list is the next method that becomes your greatest asset with time.

There are no overheads and you can create a huge rush of sales everytime you send an email. In a previous article I mentioned that a signup should be between 10 and 33%. That is the percentage of visitors you can expect to sign up to a mailing list. By having autoresponders, you can attract these visitors back to your website again. Theres a good chance theyll buy the second time around. If they leave, you can send them another email to ask them to return and make them keep returning until they eventually buy.

Knowing how often to send emails to your list is also important. The key here is to add value and send regular free content. Imbetween asking them to buy something, send something free that is of value. Generally, once a month is an appropriate time period between emails, or more often depending on your market. Some people send emails three times a day and it works for them but heres what works for my mentor so thats the best of my knowledge.

3. Joint Venture.

The strategy is simple, other websites send out emails and place strategic links on their website to attract visitors to your website. YUou only pay them for the sales produced from any clicks. Generally 50% of the profits is the best since its an equal share. The key here is to make it as easy as possible for you JV partner. Create emails for them, banner ads and any other promotional material that will help them.