Your Step-by-Step Guide to Making over $329 a Day
By
John Stevenson
Copyright & Disclaimer Copyright Š 2014, John Stevenson.
Except as provided by the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Disclaimer: Please note the information contained within this document is for educational purposes only. Every attempt has been made to provide accurate, up to date and reliable complete information no warranties of any kind are expressed or implied. Readers acknowledge that the author is not engaging in rendering legal, financial or professional advice. By reading any document, the reader agrees that under no circumstances are we responsible for any losses, direct or indirect, which are incurred as a result of use of the information contained within this document, including –but not limited to errors, omissions or inaccuracies. If you click a link to buy a product or service in this report, I may be compensated for the sale.
Introduction Starting and running your own business is an amazing adventure whether it’s an online or offline business. Millions of people dream of being their own boss, setting their own schedule and reaping the riches that come along with having their own business. I won’t lie to you and tell you that you can start a business online, do nothing, spend nothing and make millions of dollars. That’s just not possible. But, what I will tell you is that when you compare the costs to start an online business vs. a more traditional business, the difference is astounding. You can start your online business with as little as $100, maybe even less. Is this ideal? Of course not. Like anything else, if you have more resources available, you can grow faster and explore more opportunities. But, when the cost to start a restaurant or a franchise can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, just to get started, the lure of the online business is very appealing. While there are many different business models you can follow to start an online business, I’m going to show you, step-by-step, what I (and many others) think is the absolute most profitable and easiest business model out there. If you want a business, a real business, that you can start today, here it is. Follow the steps, put in the time to learn and you can live the life of your dreams. But, if you want a real business, you have to run it like a real business. The concept is easy to follow, and it definitely isn’t new. It’s not revolutionary, but it is proven (and simple). The top internet marketers in the world ALL use this formula. ALL OF THEM. Yes, some use other methods as well. And of course many use much more advanced methods of this simple formula, but they all use some variation of this exact same formula. If you follow the plan I’m about to lay out for you
and take the time and put in the necessary work, then this simple plan can help you build a business that can easily make you over $100,000 a year or more, and you can start making money TODAY. Are you ready for the method? Here it is…Email Marketing. Crazy right? Now I’m not talking about spamming people or buying lists and sending millions of random emails out. You’d be lucky to make $10 doing that stuff. What I’m talking about is building a list of people that want the information you’re providing. I’m talking about people that will look forward to your emails and happily open them and read them. They will buy things that you recommend that solve their problems…and that’s how you make money. The earnings potential is huge. A number of experienced email marketers are making millions of dollars as we speak…following this exact system. Email is not going away, in fact, it continues to grow. “The Money is in the List”. The saying has been around forever. It used to be a mailing list and for a while it was a telemarketing list, well these days it’s an email list. There is an accepted metric in this business that says every name on your email list is worth $1/month to you. If you have a list of 100 emails, you should be able to make $100/month. If you have a list of 1,000 emails you should be able to make $1,000. If you have a list of 10,000 emails, you should be able to make $10,000/month. $10,000 a month...from emailing your list! Let that sink in. And what’s even better is that the list is yours…forever. And it’s not any more work to send emails to a 10,000 email list than it is to a 100 email list. So let’s not make this harder than it needs to be. I’m about to lay out a simple plan for you. Just copy the system, add your own creative flair, work hard and the results will follow.
Ready to go?? Let’s get started…
Researching Niches First off, what’s a niche anyway? Simply put, it’s a need in the marketplace. Examples of niches are making “money online”, “dating advice”, “health”, “weight loss” and “self-help”. Some niches like “health” are huge and they can further be broken down into “healthy cooking”, “dieting”, “high blood pressure” etc. There’s two parts to selecting a great niche: 1. Choose a niche you have a passion about and that you are very knowledgeable. You don’t have to be an expert but you should know more than an average person. Otherwise, it’s going to be very hard for you to earn trust from the folks in your database. Write down a list of at least 5 things you really enjoy and that you have knowledge about. At this stage, don’t leave anything off your list. Brainstorm…if you have a list of 20 things, that’s ok too. 2. Choose a niche that you can make you money. This is very important. If you choose the wrong niche, you could waste lots of time and money. This is where your niche research becomes crucial. So, you’ve got your list from the previous step, now we need to take a look to see which are profitable. How can you be sure you’ve got a profitable niche? You should be able to answer yes to the 3 following questions:
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1. Can You Market Online? In a nut shell, you need to be able to advertise effectively online. If you are competing in a huge and ultra-competitive niche like “weight loss” you might not be able break into the niche in a cost or time effective manner. So you might want to pick something like “weight loss without exercise” for
example. Now I don’t know if that would be a great niche or not but chance are you’d have better luck since it’s smaller and more focused. -
2. Are There Offers to Promote? Are there multiple products that you can promote to your email database? The “diet” niche makes a great example. Not only are there physical products to promote like weight loss pills and cookbooks, there are lots of digital information products to promote. How can you find the answers you need? Well Google is always a great source. You can often just Google [Your Niche] + products for sale to see what’s available. You can also visit Amazon to research the physical products. Chances are if it’s not on Amazon, it doesn’t exist or not too many people want it. For digital information products, www.Clickbank.com is a great tool for research. Clickbank is one of the largest and most respected affiliate marketplace out there. You can also check out www.JVZoo.com. Inside the Clickbank marketplace, you can type your niche into the search bar and see what products are available to promote. If there aren’t multiple products to promote, you probably don’t have a profitable niche on your hands.
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3. Are There Customers That Buy? A really good example would be a flat screen LCD TV. Yes, you can buy it online, but most people (not all) are going to do their research online and then purchase it locally. With a large purchase like that, a lot of folks just want to touch it and see it up close before they purchase. So now you’ve got some good ideas for niches and probably some that you crossed off you list that just won’t make any money. Which one should you choose?
Picking a Niche The most important thing to remember here is to “follow the money”. Chances are good that if other marketers are making money in a given niche, you will be able to make money as well. So what are some of the more popular niches? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Weight Loss Personal Development Video Games Bodybuilding Dating Cooking Pets
These are just some of the hundreds of niches that can be profitable. And for the most part, each of these niches can be broken down into sub-niches. For instance, in the “Pets” niche, you could break that down to “dogs” and further break that down into “dog training”. And that’s just one example. As an exercise, take out your list of niches and try to break them down into sub-niches. I think you’ll be surprised to find that one of your sub-niches might actually be a better choice for you to focus on. At this point you should have: - Researched niches and products. - Chosen a niche or sub-niche that you enjoy, have knowledge of and looks profitable There’s one last step in this section now that you have chosen your niche. You’ll need to get yourself a domain name or two. You can search and register for domain names at www.1and1.com or www.GoDaddy.com. Sometimes one will have a special or reduced
price, but the “normal” price is around $12/year. I won’t get into too much detail on choosing a domain name because the name itself isn’t crucial to your success. Here are my quick tips: - Try to pick a .com. .net is ok too, but if you can get the .com it’s better. - Pick one that describes your niche. If your niche is “puppy training”, a good domain would be www.learntotrainyourpuppy.com. That’s just an example and I have no idea if it’s already taken or what’s on the site. It just came of the top of my head as a good domain for puppy training. Now you’re ready to move onto the next step.
Set Up Your Page & Autoresponder This is where your list begins. Someone will land on your page as a result of your advertising efforts (we’ll talk about those in a bit), and based on your message on the page, they’ll give you their email address. Now you have what’s called an “opt-in”. Someone has optedin to your list to receive more information or to get the offer from your page. An autoresponder allows you to automatically (and manually) send messages to your list.
Capture Page Don’t worry, you won’t need any programming skills or any technical knowledge at all to set up a really great opt-in page. There are two really get places where you can make a great opt-in page (or multiple pages) very easily, very quickly and for not too much money. - www.Leadpages.com - Leadpages is one of the easiest sites to make beautiful opt-in pages. You can literally have your page up and live in 30 minutes or less. Also, they can host your page which means you don’t have to have a hosting account (we’ll
talk about that later). So it makes it really quick and easy to put together a nice looking page from one of their templates. Now if you already have hosting, you can choose to create the page and host it on your own site. And the pages will easily integrate with your autoresponder (we’ll cover that soon). Now it does cost money to use the service each month, but I think the time saved and the ease of page creation is well worth it. If you are on a super tight budget, the next option might be a better choice for you. - www.GetResponse.com - This is the service I use to manage my lists. It’s low cost to get started, easy to use and integrates well with Leadpages. You are also able to create opt-in pages and have them hosted if you don’t have your own hosting account. The pages are easy to set up and design and it will make your life easier to have your opt-in page and your list all in one place.
Autoresponder As I mentioned before, www.GetResponse.com is the autoresponder I use and there are many others you can use also. The basic process of the autoresponder is as follows: - Create a web form. Once you sign up for an email service (Getresponse, Aweber or others), you will need to create a form. The form is where someone will enter their email address and any other information you’d like to require such as their name, phone number, address etc. The contact information is then added to your list and you are able to communicate with them. Note - The more information you ask for, the fewer people will opt-in to your list. I like to just ask for the bare minimum which is the email address, but sometimes I’ll ask for a first name too. Unless you’re in a niche where you really need the address or phone number, don’t ask for it – it
will really reduce your opt-in rate. What’s the opt-in rate? It’s the number of opt-ins/the number of visitors to your page. You want this rate to be as high as possible. What’s next? - Integration. Don’t get scared. Integration is nothing more than putting your web form (where you ask for information) on the opt-in page you created. If you use Getresponse for your autoresponder and to create your opt-in page, the integration will be automatic. If you are using Leadpages to create your opt-in page and Getresponse or Aweber for your autoresponder, the integration is super easy. When you are creating you page, there will be an integration tab and you just click the autoresponder you are using and Leadpages will integrate automatically. Now is a good time to mention that all the services I’ve mentioned have great customer support. If you have a question about setting up a page, web form creation, integration or anything else, you can typically find the answer in the knowledge base or ask customer support. If you get stuck, don’t be afraid to contact support of the service you’re working with to get yourself back on track.
What’s Your Offer? The most important element of your opt-in page is your offer or “freebie”. What are you going to offer your visitor in exchange for their email address? Is it information? A video? A free PDF? Each niche is different and you can have great results with any of the offers I mentioned, but my favorite is to offer a free report. Everyone loves getting something for free, especially if it has a high perceived value. How should you create your free report? - You can write it yourself – Your report doesn’t have to be a book, but it does have to offer really good information if you want to build trust with your list. It can be as short as 3-4 pages and as long as 50 pages. If you have some material you’ve already written, you could convert that to a free report. - You can hire someone to write it. If you don’t have the time or desire to write a report, you can hire someone to do it for you. I’m a fan of outsourcing. We all have the same amount of time in the day, the most successful folks just use their time more effectively. You can find someone to write a report for you on a number of sites: o www.SEOclerks.com – You can find all sorts of projects on here, but there are some very talented writers that can write or re-write your report for not too much money. It’s very similar to Fiverr, but not everything costs $5. I like this site because sellers can choose to charge more than five dollars for their work which leads to a higher quality result. o www.Fiverr.com – Fiverr is a great site to find low cost, quality writing. Just make sure to check the reviews and look for a seller that can get you what you need in a few days.
o www.Freelancer.com – You can post your project and your budget and experienced freelancers will begin bidding on your project. - You can buy PLR – PLR means “Private Label Rights” and it’s information that you can use and change as you see fit. There is some PLR that you can sell, giveaway, change, repackage or just about anything else you need to do with it. When you are looking at the PLR, you should be able to see what you can do with it after you buy it. Ideally, you’ll want the ability to change, sell and give away your PLR. Once you find some suitable PLR, you’ll want to re-write it to give it your own personal touch and to match your niche. You can either do this yourself or use SEOclerks.com or Fiverr.com to find a low cost writer to re-write it for you. You can access to some really good low-cost PLR here. Now that you have your “freebie”, you want to offer it in exchange for the visitors email address. So if your niche is “puppy training”, the headline on your opt-in page could be “FREE Report – Learn How to Easily Train Your Puppy in 5 Days or Less”. And your entire page could simply be your headline, a background picture or in this example a picture of a really cute puppy and your opt-in box. I’ve found that simple pages convert better than complex pages in many cases. Remember you aren’t trying to sell anything, you just want someone to give you their email address in exchange for the free report. One more thing before we leave this section. You always want to be testing and tracking your results. What’s that mean? It means that once you put together your page and start to get visitors, you want to test how it performs after you make a change. The goal is to increase the performance of your page which in reality is increasing the number of opt-ins you get. If you make a change and your page performs better?
Great! Make another change and see if you can do better still! Did it perform worse? Oops! Go back and try another change. Ok. You’ve got your “freebie”, you’ve got a great looking opt-in page and you have your autoresponder set up and ready to go. You’re ready to start building your list. Where is everybody??
Traffic and More Traffic! It’s FREE!! While there are many effective paid advertising methods that can get results and traffic for you fast, I’m going to focus on some extremely effective FREE TRAFFIC methods. At this point it’s worth mentioning that you are building a real business. Your database can generate a solid income for you for years to come. And when you want to retire, you can sell it….for a LOT of money. While you can start to make money in as little as a day or two, this is definitely not a get rich quick scheme. You’ll need to put in the time and the work needed to succeed. But you can do it…I know you can. How do I know? Because many others have done it before you….by following these exact steps. If you can follow these steps and are willing to put the work in, you can change your life. 1. Youtube – Youtube is an amazing way to drive targeted traffic (the best kind) to your opt-in page. You can create a video with information on your niche, useful tips or product reviews. You don’t need any money and you can make a simple video with your webcam or even your phone. It doesn’t have to look like a professional made it, but it does have to be informative and offer some value. In the information box below your video, Youtube allows you to put the link to your website and a description of your video. Use that space to target keywords that relate to your
niche. Note – Don’t just make one or two videos…make one or two videos a DAY. EVERY DAY. The key to FREE traffic is consistency. Make your videos, get them on Youtube and watch the traffic flow. 2. Twitter – Don’t have many followers? No problem. Here’s how you get them and use your account to drive targeted traffic to your site. a. Do a search of users that are in your related niche. If your niche is “puppy training”, do a search of #puppies, #puppy training, #puppy obedience, #puppy potty training etc. b. Start following all of those users and try to engage as many of them as you can. Re-tweet some of their posts and message them back if they thank you for following. Some of them will start to follow you. c. Provide USEFUL information. Don’t just blast a link to your page in every post. d. Build your following and the traffic will flow. 3. Forums – Forums are a great source of targeted traffic. a. Do a Google search of [Your niche] = Forums to find forums related to your niche. b. Answer questions IN DETAIL. Go above and beyond to give really helpful and in-depth answers. This is another reason that it’s really helpful to be an expert in your niche. If you can give great answers, people will start to notice you and recognize you as an expert. c. In most forums, you will be able to post a link back to your opt-in page. When people begin to notice all the great answers you give, they will go to your bio (or wherever your link is in the forum) and click it. That’s some of the best targeted traffic you’ll find anywhere.
4. Yahoo Answers – Very similar to forums. Search for questions related to your niche and give GREAT answers. Don’t give average answers or good answers. Make sure they’re all great. You can get traffic for YEARS from just one really great answer. Make each one count. 5. Craigslist – Although Craigslist doesn’t allow live links in most categories, you can still get some free traffic with a few good ads. Make sure you have a great headline and post a simple ad with the link back to your opt-in page. You can just make a small note that someone should copy and paste the link into their browser. Some niches will work better than others, but it doesn’t take much time to post an ad and you can renew it every 48 hours fairly easily. 6. Blogging – Blogging is a great way to get traffic to your opt-in page. If you take the time to set up your blog and just post a few great posts every week, you can get tons of free traffic from Google. You can also get targeted traffic from Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter and more when you share your amazing post through social networking. How do you start blogging? There are entire books dedicated to blogging if you really want to be great, but I’m just going to go over the basics. a. Get a domain name from www.1and1.com or www.GoDaddy.com. b. If you don’t have a hosting account, you can get one from www.Hostgator.com for a very reasonable price. In fact, when I wrote this, you could get started for just a penny. That’s pretty reasonable! That may not be available anymore, but they typically run discounts so you should get a pretty good deal. During the signup, you’ll need to choose a hosting plan, I recommend the “Baby” plan which will do everything you need.
c. Once you’ve got the plan, you simply install the Wordpress blog from your control panel in your Hostgator account and you have a blog! There are more detailed instructions available from Hostgator, but it’s pretty easy to do. Hostgator offers great technical support if you need assistance. d. Keywords Matter – Take a little time to choose the keywords that relate to your niche. Once you’ve found some good ones, write a great blog post. Make sure your keywords are in the title and in the post. DON’T keyword stuff. Write for the reader, not to get ranked. Google loves blogs right now and they get ranked very high. If you write great posts, Google (and targeted visitors) will find them. e. After you’ve written your great blog post, share it on Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter etc. f. Watch the traffic flood in as you write and share more great posts! Don’t try to tackle all these traffic methods at once. Pick one that sounds good and become a MASTER. Learn everything you can. And do it. Don’t expect immediate results…you won’t get 1000 visitors a day right away. Once you’ve become a MASTER of one method, move on to the next. Don’t stop doing your first method, just add the new method and repeat. Before long you’ll start to see some major traffic and the prize…opt-ins.
What Do I Do With This List? Your list is your business. It’s an asset. If you want your asset to grow you have to nurture it and provide value on an ongoing way. There are two factors of email marketing to take into consideration: 1. Emailing Frequency – How often should you mail your list? The answer is every day. You’re probably thinking that your list will get sick of you or won’t want to hear from you that much, and you’d be right if you just sent offers and promoted products they should buy. But you’re a smart marketer now and smart marketers don’t treat their lists like an ATM. You need to mix up the TYPES of emails you send. 2. Email Type - There are 3 types of emails you can send and you should definitely mix them up. What you should always do in every email is provide value. Always promote a useful product. Always send helpful information. Always send answers to common questions. If you keep these things in mind, your list will look forward to hearing from you. Here are the 3 types of emails: a. Content Emails – This email should contain useful, helpful or productivity information. Did you find a great new free tool or product? Let your list know about it. Did you read a great blog post that relates to your niche? Forward the link to your list. b. Relationship Emails – Your list might not want to hear about your dog or family every day. A little personal information is ok, but I like to use these emails to pass along motivation information. Maybe a pep talk here or there. Some words of wisdom. A couple of Zig Zigler quotes (or a quote from a big name in your niche). c. Offer Emails - If you’re sending the other types of emails on a regular basis, then the offers you promote should have a much higher conversation rate and that’s where you will
make money. And continue to make money on a regular and ongoing basis. What should you promote? Well it should be related to your niche of course. And it should be a quality product or information. Don’t just promote something to promote it. If you use it and it’s great, promote that. Thinking about promoting something? Try it out yourself to see if it’s any good before you recommend it to your list. Depending on your niche, you can promote physical products or you can promote digital information products. You can join the affiliate program with Amazon to promote their physical products and Clickbank is a great if you want to promote digital information products.
Well that’s it. That’s the step-by-step system that you can start today and use to change your life. I know you can do it…I believe in you. Believe in yourself, take massive action and you WILL succeed.
To your success, John Stevenson