JL Forums

hey guys.

im a newbie to internet marketing and so far have had no luck whatsoever. i have just been running simple direct linking campaigns selling clickbank products and sending paid traffic to a masked affiliate link that goes straight to the sales page. i have not made one single sale   .i do realise that i should probably be setting up landing pages and capturing email addresses but im not really savvy enough to do those things(yet).
so...
i was just wondering if any has actually had reasonable success with this method of marketing or if i should just look at a different approach all together, im slowly losing interest and thinking of giving up but i just read a post by awoob saying not to give up and be persistent in your marketing efforts so now i think ill try a little more...
im not looking for a great detailed step by step answer but maybe someone can steer me in the right direction. im just hanging out for that first sale then i know ill be running with this thing.

Doggy,

Let me ask you a couple of things...

What do you want to do?  Do you want to buy traffic and direct ads to them to make a living?  Or do you want to build websites and direct free traffic to them and make sales? 

There are, of course, other ways to make money online as well.  But which of those 2 do you prefer?

Personally, I recommend all newbies staying away from buying traffic... here's why.  It's hard, you'll lose money and direct linking (usually) doesn't work very well.  If you really know what you're doing you can make great money at it.... getting to that point is usually the issue though.  The other problem with that is that the cheap traffic sources dry up fast.  This makes it hard to get tarted in buying traffic.  At one point places like Adwords didn't have many regulations and they were cheap to use.  Now, they have a ton of regulations and are expensive for the most part.

I always, always, always... recommend building a list.  The problem for most people is that thy don't want to wait for sales and they want instant gratification.  That is why most people direct link to offers and get discouraged when sales do not occur.  In my opinion, building a list is the way to go if you are going to buy traffic.

Hmigoupllc is right - people need to see your offers several times to buy (unless you already have a relationship with them.  The power of email marketing is it allows you to build a relationship so they trust you more.  My main business runs well because I built a nice list of buyers who trust me and want to hear from me.

I also currently train about 10,000 people a month in one of my membership on how to build sites and direct traffic & make money.

What might work well for you is to build some small review sites, rank them in Google and let the free traffic come in when you have the top rankings for your keywords.  You can promote Ebay, Amazon or other affilliate products this way, easily.

Nothing is Instant...nothing.  Treat this as a business and build it, grow it and keep learning.  In the beginning pick one thing you want to do.  Either build a list and promote things to them or build a large niche site and start pumping free traffic to it.  But, at first, pick one or the other and go after it.

Brett,

Glad you enjoy the info.  I've put in thousands of hours and just have a ton of knowledge I've built up over the last few years. 

As far as building a list.  Aweber is the best IMO.  It's $20/month.  It's $1 for the first month I believe.  I will have something free people can have soon (can't advertise it on the forum here though. I may toss something in the exclusive offers section soon though...)

In my opinion you can make good money with even 100 people on a list....  100 people isn't hard to build up.  Even niche sites with only a few hundred visitors per month can quickly lead to 100+ people on an email list.

The other thing I highly recommend, if you have small niche markets is find a way to get as many pages up as possible.  So if you only have 10-20 pages do some research to find out how to expand to 40-50 when you can.  The more content the better.  This way you can build a list.  Then email them something every week (just create a sequence in a day...7-15 emails programed in).  If nothing else at least send them good advice...

I love email marketing.  I am passionate about email marketing.  I could talk about it for hours.... so anytime you have a question, just ask!

Brett,

Sorry, yes I mean Posts.  Some people still aren't using the blog platforms so I always say pages.. but ys I agree, posts have a slight advantage plus they are easier to work with

IF you want to have a large number of sites AND a large amount of content THEN you need a degree of automation.
Re-read your hero's long post wherein he covers this issue and how to deal with it.

If you recall he uses ArticleBuilder.net to provide relevant niched content. There are other ways.

I wrote about this elsewhere here with the idea about 'stakeholder theory' also - how you serve different needs of different stakeholders in your site. When you look at why you are adding content to your site you need to understand the purpose of each piece and stream of content.

You need to understand WHY you are adding more content to your site. After all, in many cases all you really need is a couple of presell pages to get folks onto a sales page or a squeeze page. However if you are running an Adsense site then lots of content larded with relevant keywords to suit info seekers is the way to go (more pages equals more opps to glag a click)

IMHO a lead generation site will look quite different to an Adsense site even if they started out with similar elements.

Quote from: Michael Brown on December 28, 2011, 07:34:43 PM

I love email marketing.  I am passionate about email marketing.  I could talk about it for hours.... so anytime you have a question, just ask!

Michael,

I don't want to ask too many questions of you too soon, so if I'm overdoing it, let me know. 

I'm starting with small niche sites... hopefully similar to how you began.  My initial intent was to get around 10 posts or 'pages' and then move onto another site.  My plan was to have quite a few (hundreds) of 10 post/page sites , throw backlinks at 'em and see how they did.  However, I would consider a 20 and then 40-50 post site somewhat larger in scope than I was planning, and creating such an animal would take a considerable amount of time.  Therefore, since I intend to follow your advice, I think I'll be creating much fewer sites, but of higher quality and more content.

So, you recommend creating a smaller number larger blogs, with a greater amount of good content over having many smaller blogs?  Right now, it appears you're the sounding board for the creation of my business model!  Ha!

Thanks again,
Brett

Brett,

I agree with Andrew here.  To do it on a large scale you need to automate whatever you can.  When you are new or just starting out you can make your first few sites without tools.  You can also link build for them without tools.  However, as you grow you'll need to plug some certain tools in... i.e. 1waylinks, articlebuilder and so on...

But, when you are starting out you can do it without tools if you can't afford it.  Then, once $ starts coming in reinvest in the tools to automate and build faster, larger and more profitable.

Hi Andrew,

I knew you were joking and actually meant to put a  after my 'overstatement' question.  I'm not ready for any sort of automation yet, so I'll do my best to put out good content for those 'in power' - the readers.