Consider this:

You are making $1000/month from selling an eBook on your blog.

To make $3000/month, you could release two new eBooks.

But is that the best way to spend your time? Will that give you the best ROI? There is no doubt more products will mean more money, but in most people’s cases, you can make more money quicker, if you focus on what’s already making your money.

Improving our checkout page doubled our sales.

Adding a popup opt-in doubled the amount of people that signed up for our list. Our sales come from emails, so again, this doubled how much we were making.

When we significantly increased our page speed, our search engine traffic went up, people spent more time on our site and conversions went up too. All we had to do was spend 5 minutes hiring a page speed expert.

There are opportunities all around us. If you’re not satisfied with where you are right now, perhaps you should ask yourself, what isn’t working as well as it could.

Start here:

Our 9 Favorite Tips To Increase Sales and Conversions

#1. Increase Sales By Adding Upsells to Current Products

Most decent online marketers make as much money on the back end as they do on the front end.

By that I mean, if they sell a $97 product, when a customer goes through the checkout process, they spend at least another $97 on other products before they complete their purchase.

When I first heard about this, I thought it was an unbelievable statistic. Surely you can’t increase sales by 100% by doing something so simple.

We couldn’t ignore something that sounded so promising.

The first upsell we ever created was for PopUp Domination. Customers would buy our software, then during the checkout process, get offered purchasing options for multi-site licenses and additional popup designs. Incredibly, over night we were able to increase sales by 2x!

It makes perfect sense. The customer is already in buy-mode, they have already got their credit card out and ready to buy something. It’s impulse. They see something else they like that’s related and all they have to do is click one extra button.

Our good friend Yanik Silver had a rule of thumb I like to quote:

“60% of people should take your first upsell if it is priced at 60% of the front-end product price.”

That would be a good place to start for most people.

So for example; if your front end product sells at $49, an upsell priced at $27 should convert well.

The only problem we have ever had with creating upsells is the technical side of things. The first time we did it, we had to ask customers to re-enter their credit card details for every upsell they wanted to buy.

No doubt this had a negative effect on conversion. Although we were still able to achieve that industry standard of making just as much from our upsells as the front end offer.

We are not tech guys and even asking a programmer to set something up like this can be a pain because it’s just not something people have much experience with.

However things have moved along quite a lot since we first played with setting up upsells.

Our current checkout software SamCart, allows you to create upsells in seconds. All you have to do is insert the sales video code, set the price and it’s done.

Customers go from purchasing a product, to upsell page 1, upsell page 2 and finally the download page.

Here’s how we setup our upsells:

1. Click upsells on the left hand side of your SamCart dashboard and then select funnels from the drop down menu.
2. Click “new funnel”, add your funnel name and a short description, then click “create funnel”.
3. Select how many upsell offers you’d like to add from your product list and then select “enabled.” You’ll have the option to add up to 5 upsells and 5 downsells.

#2. Double Sales By Improving Your Checkout Page

The checkout page is a huge part of the sales funnel process, and is often forgotten or brushed off.

I remember 6 years ago reading a forum thread about the beta stage of Clickbank checkout page design. They allowed premier users (top earners) to customize the design of their checkout page from the default 1 style design. Users saw as much as 3x higher conversions by simply matching the header and background color to the one used on their sales page.

Checkout pages should have the following characteristics:

• Sales copy reminding customers of exactly what they’re getting.
• Branding that matches your main site.
  
• Product image.
• Clear instructions.
• Satisfaction Guarantee.

Another top tip to increase sales is to remove any checkout fields that are not 100% required. The easier it is to sign up and pay, the higher your conversions will be.

Our checkout pages are hosted and setup with SamCart, which makes the process incredibly easy.

#3. Add a PopUp Opt-in Box

If you make money from email marketing, then I would be surprised if you didn’t at least see a significant increase in sales by adding a PopUp to your websites.

Within the first 24 hours of promoting our free giveaway on our site using a popup, our subscriber rate increased by 524%

After seeing just how powerful it was at increasing sales and conversions, we developed it into the first WordPress plugin of it’s kind. When we released it, a lot of the top bloggers and gurus did not like it and even spoke publicly about not liking the plugin. In 2017, all of them have popups on their sites.

Here are 10 different ways we use PopUps on IncomeDiary.

#4. Launch an Affiliate Program

Having an affiliate program has allowed us to do $x,xxx,xxx in sales with zero advertising budget.

Affiliate programs give you the ability to track and pay people on commission for selling your products. Take PopUp Domination as an example. We let customers promote our sales page with a special tracking link. If they convince someone to click the link and they end up buying from us, we give that person a cut of the money for bringing us the business. This is all handled effortlessly by our merchant.

This is a great, low risk way to drive traffic to your sales pages. You only have to pay for the traffic that converts.

Affiliate programs are among the best ways to incorporate passive income streams into your business. Once your sales page is setup and you have affiliates promoting your products, you don’t have to do anything to drive traffic and make sales.

#5. Setup Autoresponders

One of the best ways to increase sales (and passive income), is to have an autoresponder.

An autoresponder automatically sends emails to subscribers that you have setup before hand. We use them for all of our mailing lists. When you subscribe to our list, you will automatically receive an email from us. Then again the next day and again two days later and so on, until all 30 emails have been sent. This means you can write a sales email today, then in the weeks to come when someone subscribes, they’ll get that email automatically, read it and hopefully buy whatever you are selling.

As far as we are concerned, the more autoresponder emails the better. We regularly look back over past emails we’ve sent to our lists, copy our most successful ones and add them to our autoresponder.

Autoresponders have been one of the most powerful passive income streams we have ever used. Everyone should have a mailing list and everyone should be sending emails. It doesn’t matter if you are a blogger, software owner, if you sell eBooks or want more clients.

To get started, we recommend and use Aweber for our email marketing! They currently have a $1 trial.

#6. Increase Sales By Increasing Page Speed

Speeding up your website is a guaranteed way to get more traffic and increase sales.

Google openly states that page speed is part of their search algorithm. Which makes sense because they want to connect their users with the best match. The best match is not a slow loading website that infuriates you.

We do a combination of things to increase our page speed. You can read more about it here.

The most important being:

1. Perfect code. Be careful which WordPress theme you are using.

2. Minimize page load by not having things slow the site down. One thing a lot of people do is have far to many WordPress plugins.

3. Pick the right host.

4. Use caching software. We use MaxCDN to significantly speed up our site & decrease server load. MaxCDN duplicates your website content across several servers globally, which presents your visitors with website content from whichever server is closest to their location. This increased proximity decreases page load time.

#7. Make Your Site Mobile Responsive

One in every three minutes spent online, is via a mobile device. If your website isn’t responsive, you’re losing money. Our websites are made with Genesis framework and all of our sales pages are created with OptimizePress. Both platforms are 100% mobile responsive!

Check out 15 best practices for responsible responsive web design.

#8. Increase Sales Page Conversions With Split Testing

Split testing is crucial for making money online and is something all successful marketers do on a regular basis. Most have tests continually running.

A split test is when you split your web traffic between multiple pages to see which one converts higher. For example, think of any sales page, now duplicate it, so you have two exact same versions of this page. Change one of the pages so that the buy button is a different colour. Now send 50% of your traffic to each of these two pages. After 100 sales, see which one made the most money.

There is a lot you can test. And you would be surprised how much small things can add up. Here is a list of things to start testing:

• Headlines text, colour, font, size
• Background colours
• Images
• Videos
• Videos Vs Images
• Video Vs Text
• Short Vs Long
• Price
• Scarcity
• What you are offering
• Name of your product
• Testimonials
• Guarantee

I could go on for quite some time… you can test EVERYTHING!

Both SamCart and OptimizePress allow us to split test our checkout pages as well as sales pages to ensure the highest possible conversions regardless of the product.

#9. Don’t Keep All Your Eggs In One Basket.

There are quite a few reasons why this saying is true for online business.

Firstly, if you only have one income stream, then you are screwed if for whatever reason it disappears. And don’t think that’s impossible because it’s happened thousands of times, to people far smarter then you or I. Let me give you an example:

Say you are a blogger and have 5 different income streams for your blog. You are making a lot of money. You should feel safe right?

NOPE.

Not if all your traffic comes from one source. Often I’ve heard horror stories of top bloggers being slapped by Google and losing all their traffic, therefor losing all their income.

You can’t set and forget about a business if it has a foundation like this. Diversify and make sure you have multiple traffic sources such as Search Engines, Social Media, Podcasting, Email Marketing and so on.

Ok, let’s put traffic aside and focus on blog monetization techniques.

Say your site is getting great traffic and it’s all good, but you only make money from Google Adsense.

Well Google can come along and ban you for 1 of a million terms violations. Again you are screwed.

Ok, it’s 2017, not many people do that. How about you sell an eBook online and all your income comes from that. You are doing great, in fact this month is your best month ever, you made $30,000!

Perfect, no troubles, right?

WRONG!

Your merchant shuts you down or puts you on hold because it’s worried you may be doing something fraudulent. Countless times I’ve heard online marketers moan about how their PayPal accounts have been put on hold for months and they can’t withdraw money. Why? Because PayPal would rather be safe than sorry. Although in most cases, PayPal eventually took these people off hold, how would you deal with not being able to access your money for months on end?

Another reason not to keep all your eggs in one basket is it just isn’t a smart business decision.

Take IncomeDiary for example. Say you are coming to the site today and the only adverts we have up are for our PopUp Domination software. If you already have a copy of it, then you can’t buy anything. These adverts are irrelevant. People love choice and you need to be able to show them multiple things they can buy to have the best chance of making a sale.

Like life, variety is key to business.

You must diversify.

There is so much you can do.

So many opportunities you are not taking advantage of yet.

I hope today’s post has shown you that.

There you have it, our 9 top ways to improve your website, to increase sales and conversions. Enjoy.

Read more: ‘14 Ways To Actually Make Money From a Website!’

The post 9 ‘Set and Forget’ Ways To Increase Sales On Your Website appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

This blog makes money by selling our own online courses, software and other peoples products as an affiliate.

However, there are a lot more than two ways to make money online.

Every site needs to be treated differently.

It can take a while to work out how to best make money from a website. If something doesn’t work, try something else. Don’t just give up. The main reason people fail with blogging, isn’t because their idea or website is bad but because they give up too soon.

Here are the 14 ways you can monetize your website:

Best Ways To Make Money Online

1. Email Marketing

This is one of my favorite things to talk about because it’s just so powerful.

Building an email list can make you a lot of money, help you build a solid brand and of course help readers come back to your site, time after time.

Email marketing can be seen to make you money in a few different ways, such as direct email promotions, to deliver free reports that are monetized and my favorite, to drive traffic back to your site where you make money from other methods.

Gone are the days of finding it hard to get people to subscribe to your website.

A few years ago, we added a lightbox popup to IncomeDiary. Over night, we went from getting 20+ subscribers a day to well over 100.

At the time, most websites hated the idea of using popups because of the negative association people have with them. But these popups are different. Instead of popping up in another browser window, they popup as part of the page you are on. It was a lot less intrusive. Even better, it wasn’t to promote something spammy, but rather something of value to the reader.

After seeing the massive results, we decided to create our own software, so that other website owners can experience the same huge gains we have. We called it PopUp Domination.

At the start, some big names in the industry spoke out, saying they didn’t like them and wouldn’t use them. That didn’t last long, once they saw how well they worked. Now it seems like every site uses popups and despite that fact, they still perform so well!

Love it or hate it but a big reason for the success of popup opt-ins is down to this site you are on right now.

PopUp Domination works on any website. Has over 30 different designs, each pop is customizable to match any colour scheme. We offer a full 60 day, no questions asked, money back guarantee, so there is no good excuse not to give it a try.

Another list building technique you should be trying, is a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a dedicated page on your site to getting a visitor to sign up for your mailing list. You can see an example of a page like this by checking out our squeeze page for our Traffic Domination video! If you want to create amazing high converting squeeze pages (+ a lot more), check out Optimizepress.

Here is an example of a squeeze page we created with Optimizepress for our photography blog:

In order to start collecting emails, you need to sign up for Aweber, which hosts your emails, which you use to send messages, create follow up campaigns, split test etc.

Personally I would say you should also get PopUp Domination, not because I own it but because it’s the best thing for email marketing. 63.9% of our email subscribers come from our popup.

Benefits:

• Very direct way to market.
• One email can make you thousands.
• Anyone can do it.
• Considered by most to be the no1 way to make money online consistently.
• Can work on autopilot, if you setup a autoresponder series.

Drawbacks:

• If subscribers don’t like your emails, they will unsubscribe.

2. Promote Products as an Affiliate

Another hot topic here on IncomeDiary.

We earn around 30% of our income from promoting products as an affiliate. What this means is we receive a commission when you buy something.

Don’t be alarmed, we promote what works for us, not because we will earn a commission. Fortunately nearly all products that exist, have an affiliate program. If you can’t find an affiliate program for a particular product, type product name + affiliate into Google. For example: PopUp Domination Affiliate. This should bring up their affiliate page, if they have an affiliate program.

In my experience, affiliate marketing works best when paired up with email marketing. Top marketers consistently agree, year after year, that email marketing is their most important income source. Combine that with affiliate marketing and you have a winner.

There are so many ways to go about finding a product to promote, it often depends on your industry. For a fitness blog, you could go to Clickbank, find a product about six pack abs and grab an advertising banner from their resources area and put it up on my website.

You could also do a blog post such as, 7 Ways To Get Six Pack Abs, then at the end, promote the product.

We have a photography blog. One of the ways we use affiliate marketing is to promote the cameras and accessories that we use. All of these are available on Amazon. So we signed up for Amazons Associate program and receive a commission every time a customer buys something through our link. We also get a commission on anything else in their shoppingcart which is kind of them.

Benefits:

• Can earn you big bucks!
• Easy to setup and doesn’t require much support.
• Passive income.

Drawbacks:

• Earnings are not guaranteed, can earn $100 one month, $1000 the next.
• Great products can have low converting sales pages.
• High converting sales pages can have rubbish products.

3. Create & Sell Your Own Digital Product

Something I’m experimenting more and more with and I’m not sure if it’s just me.. but it seems like the world has gone crazy about making products, they are everywhere which has educated the market so they know they have to purchase content now. The simple version of creating a product is as followed, create a 30+ page word document about something, turn it into a PDF and sell it.

You can find out more about creating a product and selling it online by reading these posts.

Personally I think your first steps would be to ask your audience what they want to know more about, create a product around that and sell it!

When it comes to selling any product of your own, I recommend using SamCart for your checkout page, upsells and affiliate program. They have a free trial, so make sure to try it out.

Benefits:

• Affiliates send you traffic, build your business.
• Passive income because of affiliates promoting it.
• Great for building your brand and authority.
• Big Money Earner.

Drawbacks:

• Time consuming to setup.

4. Sell Advertising Space

The most popular way to make money from a website is by placing ads on it. We all know what ads look like, but did you know that they function in many different ways such as Pay Per Click, Pay Per 1000 Views or Pay Per Time Frame.

The biggest downside of website adverting, is that most people know what they look like and avoid clicking them.

When selling advertising, you typically have two choices:

1. Find and work with advertisers yourself.

or

2. Work with a middle man who takes a cut for bringing you advertisers.

It all depends on you. Is this a business for you or is this just an opportunity to make a bit more money?

I always lean towards finding advertisers myself. In my experience you get paid more, build better partnerships and can do a better job for them.

Advertising sales makes up only a small portion of my earnings but it’s nice to know that money is almost guaranteed to come in every month.

Be warned, Google does not like the practice of buying and selling text links. People buy text links because Google rank sites better based on quantity and quality of links. When you link to someone, you are telling search engines that you trust this site and you are giving them some of your authority. Google likes this to happen organically. So when you buy/sell links and get caught, Google will punish you by slapping your site down in the rankings.

Benefits:

• Often guaranteed income.
• Little effort to monetize.
• Saves you a lot of time.
• Great way to connect with others in your industry.

Drawbacks:

• Takes away from user experience.
• If you set a set price per month, you can’t make any more even if you double your traffic.
• Advertisers come and go, you have to spend time editing, adding, deleting and finding more advertisers.

5. Create a Job Board

This works like so:

People looking to hire someone will post a job on your board and readers will apply for the job. This is a great method of monetizing a website which I have seen done by a lot of authority websites.

On the other hand, I have seen smaller blogs try to do this and completely fail because it’s competitive and if you can’t send them anyone to apply, it’s pointless for them to post a job. Jobs can be anything from, writers to trainers.

As for what software to use, I recommend you check out ThemeForest, they have a good selection of different job board plugins and themes.

When it comes to marketing your job board, you will want to use some of your advertising space to promote the job board so that readers will see it and apply for jobs.

Charge a low price at the beginning so that you can attract a lot of customers and if they get applications they will be happy to return.

Benefits:

• Completely hands of, you don’t have to do anything.
• Adds to credibility

Drawbacks:

• Doesn’t work for small blogs
• Very competitive at times.

6. Selling Services

Selling services is a very popular technique people use to make money from a website and is often the reason for them building a blog in the first place. They want to get more clients, to do that they need to get traffic and blogs are great for that!

The easiest way to start selling your services on your blog is to create a new page within WordPress and call it services. Here you can put in the information about what you offer, testimonials and a buy now button.

To collect payments, your best two options is either PayPal or Stripe.

Benefits:

• High converting, they see your blog and want more!
• Highly profitable.
• Easy to deliver.
• Low refunds.

Drawbacks:

• Exchanging time for money.
• Customers are always right (which we know isn’t true).
• Can be periods of time where you have no customers!

7. Review Products as an Affiliate

I know quite a few people who review products on their blogs, it makes great content and if the product you are reviewing has an affiliate program, can make you a lot of money. You can review anything from software, to bikes, cars, hotels, holidays, food, anything you could think of and it’s all tax deductible (I believe) if you buy something to review.

Check this post out about How To Start a Review Blog.

I personally want to review one product a month, it’s not so many that readers will be turned of but enough that it will make up a high proportion of my income. Doing small amount of reviews means you can pick all the best products and don’t have to speak about negative ones.

Benefits:

• Great source of income.
• Converts higher then banner ads and email promotions.
• Free products sent to you to review.
• Connect with industry leaders.
• Get noticed as a top affiliate.

Drawbacks:

• You can’t always say nice things.
• If you say bad things, don’t expect to work with that person.
• Products become irrelevant quickly in some industry’s.

8. Offer a Membership Site or Premium Content

This technique has become more and more popular over the last few years.

The idea is simply, people come to your website because they want to read your content. They love it and want more. So you offer them even better content, for a price.

Your first step should be to work out what you’re going to offer. Then, you will want to go ahead and create a membership area for them to login and see the information you’re selling.

Once you have set it up, you will want to focus on marketing it. For best results, I recommend focusing on email marketing and adding an advert at the bottom of every page, mentioning that if they liked what they have read so far, they should take a look at your even better paid content.

Another option would be to release an affiliate program for your membership site. This not only will increase sales but will bring you even more traffic.

For billing, checkout pages, upsell pages and affiliate program software, I recommend you use SamCart.

For your membership site, again you could use ThemeForest to find a good theme.

Benefits:

• Continuity income, keep making money, month after month.
• Can be set and forget, if you time release.
• Affiliates will send you traffic!
• Can be a huge earner, it accounts for over $90k a month for Tutsplus.

Drawbacks:

• Can be a lot of work to set up.
• Regular work to release more content.

9. Sell Paid Directory Listings

This isn’t very common but I believe it should be.

I see it as a smart way to sell advertising, you see instead of putting adverts on your sidebar, you have a directory on your blog where you link to different company’s and websites in your industry and charge a premium for the listing. If you charged a monthly fee, so for example, say you had 1000 people listed in your directory and charged $7 a month, you would earn $7000 a month in continuity.

In some ways, this is actually beneficial to the reader, say you have a website about becoming a model, in the directory could be a section for photographers, where photographers pay to list their services. Models will come and look for the right person to take pictures of them for their portfolio, helpful and profitable.

Just like a job board, I would add adverts to my blog, promoting the directory to make sure customers are happy with the number of people seeing their ad and the traffic they get. To start with, I would even advertise on other sites to get people to list in your directory, as well as reaching out to people and company’s to buy a listing.

Benefits:

• Highly profitable.
• Useful to readers.
• Makes you stand out as your doing something different.
• Nearly guaranteed income.

Drawback:

• Costs to setup.
• Smaller sites may not work so well.

10. Host Webinars & Sell Something

Webinars are great at selling high price products, either a the product owner or as an affiliate.

Alternatively, you could set up a free webinar that you replay once a week, teach something and then at the end you sell them into 4 more webinars. Once you complete the webinar series, you now have a product that you can sell as a home study course

Here is a great introduction to how to sell with webinars.

Benefits:

• High priced, low amount of customers, so low support.
• Readers want to connect with you.
• Highly beneficial to those who buy.
• Great way to teach.

Drawbacks:

• If your doing live webinars, your exchanging time for money.
• Investment for software.
• People have to turn up at a specific time, hard for different time zones.

11. Write Tutorials & Promote Something

Another thing I don’t see often, but I love to do!

Content is what everyone is after, that’s why they come to your website, so create content which includes them buying something so that when they do buy, they buy via an affiliate link, and make you money!

What I do to create a tutorial, is I start with the product, find one that you are using and you get a lot out of, it of course needs to have an affiliate program. Then do a tutorial about doing something using that tool.

So for example it could be a post about Photography and take a specific type of photo but you need this lens to do it.

Benefits:

• Makes great content.
• Good for search engines.
• Profitable long term.
• Quick to produce.

Drawbacks:

• Finding enough products that have affiliate programs.
• Some people may not be interested because they don’t yet have the product.

12. Publish a Book

A lot of people want to write a book, however they have no audience.

A blog can bring you branding, can help you connect with other people in your industry, help you understand what people like to read about, more importantly what people don’t like. All this can help you write a best selling book.

A lot of people don’t consider a book because you only get a couple dollars a book but that’s not just what you earn.

Publishing a book can allow you to then launch a product because people always want more, also a more exciting prospect is being paid to speak. If you are published, you’re automatically seen as an expect, it doesn’t matter if you never sell more than a dozen books, this means you can charge to speak and charge a lot more for consulting.

There’s so many different ways to go about publishing a book, most choose self publish but if your blog is successful, either they will find you or in my case, a friend connected me with his published and told me I should write a book. Someone in your industry who blogs, will also have published a book, help them and they will help you.

Benefits:

• Authority.
• Long term earnings.
• Increase your charge for consulting.
• Paid to speak at events.

Drawbacks:

• Timely or expensive if you have a ghostwriter.
• Doesn’t make you a lot of money on it’s own.

13. Offer Live Training and Workshops

Just like selling consulting and services, you could also use your blog to sell live training, workshops and seminars.

People read your blog but I wouldn’t be surprised if over 80% don’t act on what you say. Having a workshop means they learn from you and implement with you, this is a very attractive offer to some people and they are willing to pay high prices to do it.

You don’t just make money from the price of the ticket but you can also make money from selling follow up workshops and masterminds. If you bring in speakers, then you also collect 50% of everything they make if they sell from stage at the end. Another thing to consider is recording the event and then selling that as a product on your blog.

Putting on an event is a daunting thing, however it really isn’t to hard. Ring up a hotel, book a conference room, now you have a date, write a blog post and send everyone on your mailing list to that page.

Mention your event every where and keep hustling! Apart from that, all you NEED to do is create your slides and turn up. Some of my friends even hire people to run everything for them so they don’t have to worry about the event side of things themselves.

Benefits:

• Can make you a lot of money.
• Can be made into a product.
• People will invite you to speak at their events so that you can sell yours.
• Makes you an authority.

Drawbacks:

• Time consuming.
• Selling can sometimes be hard.
• Stressful for first timers and often the pros.

14. Sell Your Website

Definitely my favorite of all the above and also the one that pays the most.

Selling your website can make you very wealthy, or it could be just a nice retirement fund. Whatever it is, it can be a great way to get a large lump sum of cash.

Typically, websites sell for 12 – 24 months revenue, however if your site is old, has something unique about it or is the authority in your industry then you can expect any figure you want. I have seen some blogs go for over 200 years revenue and it didn’t even make $100,000 a year.

Work hard and it will pay off.

It is important to remember if you sold your site for 2 years revenue and it made $5000 a month, you would get $120,000. To earn that amount of money it could take you 6 or 7 years because of expenses and taxes. You also have to factor in how long it took you to build your business. If it took you two years and you sell for $120,000 – then it would be like earning an extra $60,000 a year.

If you are already at the stage where selling your website is an option, read this post on selling your website.

Benefits:

• Large amount of cash.
• Can be sold within a month.
• Enough money not to have to work for years.

Drawbacks:

• You lose an asset.
• You lose an income stream.

That’s it. Our top 14 ways to make money from a website.

Here is a quick recap of what I recommend you do:

• Get Aweber.
• Get PopUp Domination.
• Get Optimizepress.
• Create a free report or eCourse to give away as an incentive for signing up for your list.
• Create your own online training to sell to your subscribers.
• Find highly rated products to promote as an affiliate to your list.
• Reinvest earnings to make even more.
• Get Samcart to increase checkout and upsell page conversions.
• Use Samcart to release your own affiliate program to get other bloggers and competitors to promote your stuff.
• Expand, expand, expand!

And here are some more posts on monetization that I recommend you read:

• The Best Ways To Grow Your Email List
• 9 ‘Set and Forget’ Ways To Increase Sales On Your Website
• 10 Ways SamCart Will Increase Your Checkout Page Conversions
• How I Get Over 100,000 Visitors a Month With Top List Articles

Good luck.

The post 14 Ways To Actually Make Money From a Website! appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

I’ve known Pat for a while now and I consider him a very good friend of mine, which is one of the reason’s I’m so excited to have him here on the Income Diary series: Why I’m Successful. Pat does a great job of providing quality content and real world examples of his own income via his very successful website; The Smart Passive Income Blog. Pat is now making a very healthy living from his online business and it just goes to show that f you have the passion, drive and the ability to connect with your readers (as well as working extremely hard) then you too can be successful; just look at myself and Pat, were making things happen. Here’s why Pat is successful at what he does:

Quick Fire Questions

Best Business Purchase? My iMac computer.

Biggest Inspiration? My 1 year old son. Everything I do is for him.

Favourite Business Website? Viperchill.com and Entrepreneurs-Journey.com.

Favourite Business Resource? Market Samurai

How I Started

It all started back in 2008 when I was laid off from my architectural position. Unlike most, I loved my 9 to 5 job and never really had any desire to leave, but I was forced to because of a bad economy and the company’s downsizing efforts.

At the time, I had one little blog to my name (now at GreenExamAcademy.com) that I used to keep track of my notes for an exam that I was taking, the LEED exam, which deals with green architecture and sustainable design. Having the blog made it much easier for me to study because I could study from anywhere – work, while on travel, or at my apartment without having to lug around a huge notebook. I could easily share my notes with my co-workers, but never had any intention of making money from it.

After getting laid off and being inspired by a number of online business blogs and podcasts, I eventually learned that each day thousands of people from around the world had been using my blog as a resource to help them study for the LEED exam too. Apparently, my website was ranking very high in Google for relevant search terms, and I didn’t even know it.

It was at that point that I decided to have a go at doing business online, and so naturally I added some Adsense to my blog and immediately saw results. The results weren’t spectacular and clearly not enough to make a living off of, but seeing an extra $2 to $5 a day for doing practically nothing was the most amazing feeling in the world. It gave me enough motivation to keep going and really make this work.

Pat Flynn’s Work Station

The next thing I did was sell advertisement space on my blog. I had a lot of targeted traffic coming in (a few thousand uniques per day), so I knew I had something of value to offer companies. I easily sold 2 125×125 pixel spaces on my blog within a couple of days. I was at a point where I was almost earning $600 a month from both Adsense and advertisements, but again this was definitely not enough to live off.

This is when I got very serious about what I was doing and joined an online business mastermind group. One of the best business decisions I’ve ever made because it was from my mastermind group that I decided to write an eBook study guide for my blog.

After spending about 2 months writing my eBook, I finally launched it and earned $7,906.55 during the first month, which totally blew my mind! The next month, I had earned nearly $10k, and after introducing an audio version of my guide, I peaked in March of 2009 grossing over $30,000 in one single month.

Also, because of the way the business was setup (again thanks to the mastermind group and inspiration from The 4-Hour Work Week), it was running virtually on auto-pilot. I still had to answer questions from time to time and respond to comments on the blog, but I did not have to be present in order for a transaction to take place. Now, I literally spend 2 hours a month on this business and it still earns thousands every month.

This site is where I learned all about passive income and its ability to create a location and time independent business and lifestyle. I’ve since created several other passive income businesses, including an iPhone application company, which helps provide an income for myself and my family while I’m able to spend most of my time at home with them.

Nowadays, most people online know me from The Smart Passive Income Blog where I share with the world how I run my online businesses and to give back for all of the wonderful and fortunate things that have happened in my life recently. I guess you could say I’ve joined the “make money online” and “blogging” niche, but I try to do things a little differently by revealing everything about what I do, including how much I make, where it comes from, and both my wins and my failures. Since starting the blog I’ve acquired 15,000 RSS subscribers, a very active and responsive community, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be ranked amongst some of my favorite bloggers in Michael’s 50 Most Influential People in Blogging 2010.

The Best Things I Did For My Business

The best thing I’ve done for my businesses is give away as much free information as possible. I find that the more quality information I give away, the more I get back in return.

You might think that this isn’t a good move because if you give it all away, then what do have left to monetize?

When I wrote my first eBook, I felt the exact same way. I was worried about selling an eBook that comprised of the same exact material (about 90% the same) that people could find for free on the blog. I went through with it anyway and over 7500 transactions later, I’ve never had one person complain.

Darren Rowse from Problogger did something similar with a 31 post series he entitled, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, which I’m sure many of you know now is an eBook that Darren sells on Problogger. His book has been wildly successful despite the fact that most of the same material can be found for free on his blog.

Part of the reason this works well is because people will pay for a well designed, organized package, whether it’s an eBook, course, membership site, etc. Also, if you’re an authority and you’ve taken care of your audience by providing them with lots of free, high quality content, many will feel they owe you for all that you’ve done for them already.

What Makes Me The Most Money

In the beginning, it was creating my own products. Lately, my affiliate income has matched and surpassed that amount, although I am currently working on some more products of my own.

The only difference between the two forms of income is that one comes from a product that I created myself, and the other are products that other people have created. Everything else is exactly the same, meaning I strive to only sell or promote products that have the highest value, that I’m familiar with and I know will be beneficial for my readers to use.

I may be leaving a lot of money on the table by not promoting certain products that could potentially be big-time moneymakers (not only for The Smart Passive Income Blog, but for my other websites as well), but by recommending products that I’ve used I can only add value to my own brands and build stronger relationships with my audience, which I believe will ultimately make me more money in the long run.

How I Work

Ever since the birth of my son about a year ago, my schedule has been determined by him. That’s what it’s like when you become a parent – at least for parents that work at home. I love the fact that I get to work from home with a very flexible schedule and be here for my wife and son, but on the work side of things, it can be very very difficult to manage.

I typically work about 4 hours a day (when my son gives me the time, such as during his naps or after he goes down at night), on a number of different things, which I’ll explain below.

Since most of my income is from passive income streams, most of the work that I do is for new projects that I’m working on, besides adding content to my blog every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, of course.

I try hard to stay focused on one project at a time and make sure that I’m at a stopping point before I spend my time with another.

For example, I may undertake the development of a new iPhone application (my partner and I currently have 27 live in the App Store). I’ll spend time developing the idea, drawing it out on photoshop and creating graphics for it, at which point I send it off to our developer to complete, which usually takes about 2 weeks, depending on how complicated the application is.

During that 2 weeks, I may work on a new project, such as a niche site, which will usually takes me a couple of weeks to build and create backlinks for before I can ease down and let it do it’s thing. Lately, I’ve been utilizing a virtual assistant to make these tasks even easier so I can work on even more projects, or just take some time off.

Staying organized is key, and also limiting the amount of distractions that could hold you back. So, when I do find time to work, I close all other programs and applications except for the one I’m working on.

Step By Step – How Do I Podcast

A podcast is what inspired me to get into this business in the first place, so it was always my goal to eventually do one. I had first mentioned that I wanted to host a podcast in November of 2008 but it wasn’t until July of 2010 that my podcast finally went live in iTunes.

I wish I had done it sooner, because I’m seeing loads of brand new, targeted traffic coming from this untapped resource.

Since July, I’ve had over 250,000 downloads and was featured as a top podcast in the overall business category, right next to Jim Cramer, Suze Orman, Harvard Business Review and Dave Ramsey. For a while I was the number one podcast in the Marketing and Management category, which was awesome.

Setting up a podcast is no easy task (which is part of the reason why it took me so long. The other reason was my fear of speaking on the microphone, which I’ve since overcome), but it’s not rocket science either.

Here’s a basic step by step procedure:

#1 Determine what your show is going to be about. Make it about a specific topic related to something you know you’ll be able to talk about comfortably for a certain number of minutes. Many people have a co-host on the show because it makes the episodes a lot easier to produce, since most of the content is just conversation.

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#2 Invest in a good microphone. I’m using a Heil PR40 which runs about $300, but the sound quality is AMAZING. Sound quality is huge because many people will not listen to a show if it has bad sound quality, even if it has the best content in the world. You want people to enjoy listening to you while at the gym, running around the block or in their cars.

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#3 Outline and structure a “typical episode”, which usually includes an introduction, a little bit of royalty-free music (not too much), and then right into your content, which could either be just you, you and your co-host, or also a guest for an interview.

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#4 Record it. You can use Garageband if you have a Mac, or Audacity if you’re on a PC – both are free on whichever platform you’re running.

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#5 Create a special category on your blog that will be used for the podcast. When you come out with an episode, create a specific blog post for it owithin that category and link to the mp3 file that you recorded (which is stored on a server such as AmazonS3 or Libsyn.com). The way iTunes works is that it reads a feed from your blog and looks for audio files embedded in the posts. You don’t directly upload stuff to iTunes.

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#6 In iTunes, there’s a specific section for submitting your podcast which has you fill out information about it, including the feed for the category that you created for it on your blog. Do this after your first episode and it’ll take a day or two, but then you’ll see yourself in iTunes.

Obviously there’s a lot more to it, but that’s the basic skeleton. I received a lot of great advice for The Smart Passive Income Podcast from a great resource: podcastanswerman.com.

The Day I Realized “I MADE IT”

I had a lot of “I MADE IT” moments during my online journey.

The first one came when I sold my first eBook. It was such an amazing feeling because I had no idea if I would sell even one single copy, and it just helped me realize that the 2 months of work that I put into the eBook was totally worth it.

Another “I MADE IT” moment came when I received a call from my previous boss, who was also eventually let go from the company. He had started another company and asked me if I was available to work for him, but I turned down his offer because I was making a lot more money and living a better lifestyle working online from home.

One of my biggest “I MADE IT” moments came when Yaro Starak asked me to share my story with his audience. Yaro played a huge role in inspiring me to do online business, so for him to ask me to share my story for his podcast was such an honor.

I Would Have Been Successful Sooner If…

I would have been successful sooner if I didn’t wait to get laid off.

You see, my lay off pretty much forced me to do business online and figure out a way to make it all work. My back was up against the wall, and that’s usually when I take action and do my best work.

I had always listened to internet business podcasts and read a ton of blogs about it while working my 9 to 5 job, but mainly just for fun and to live vicariously through other people’s success stories. If only I had really believed that I could do it myself, I would have done something about it then instead of waiting until I had no other choice.

The key point is that in order to find success you’ve got to take action now.

What You Should Be Focusing On

Plain and simple: focus on what’s working.

It’s WAY too easy to get distracted by things that supposedly help your business or blog, but really don’t. You should have some soft of idea of what it is that is truly helping you reach your goals. Do more of that.

Why I’m Successful and Why You May Be Not

When people ask me what they can do to be successful online too, I usually tell them to make sure you do something that adds some kind of value to the Internet, whether it’s informational, educational, entertaining or just plain ol’ useful. This is how you build a long term and potentially self-sustaining business online.

I know a handful of people who try to make money online using methods and “get rich quick” schemes that don’t really add any value to the Internet, and as a result they fail or just aren’t seeing the results they want.

Take bold actions, step out of your comfort zone and over-deliver. That’s the recipe to success.

Want to learn more about what Pat? Check out The Smart Passive Income Blog.

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The post Pat Flynn – Why I’m Successful appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Today I decided to research how much my favorite blog’s are earning every month and I wasn’t surprised to see some of them make over $100,000 per month.

These are blogs and success stories that have inspired me to become a blogger. These Superstar bloggers continue to inspire me to this day – and they have kept me motivated to not give up whenever it got tough, especially in the early days.

I hope this inspires you. If you think it’s time to start your own successful blog, then you absolutely must check out my post on how I create websites.

Special Notes:

1) To give you some idea of the potential available – top blogging network, Weblogs, Inc. is believed to earn about $30 million a month revenue from 13 million unique visitors.

2) And it is not just about making money monthly it is also about building a BUSINESS that can be sold, such as 22 year old Johns Wu did when he sold his blog for $15 Million.

Disclaimer:

Some of the website’s featured in this top list are only estimates and are not all 100% correct just a indication of how well they are doing regarding making money from their blog. If you would like to be featured in this list or know of any blogger’s that should, please comment below!

Check out the TOP EARNING BLOGS list below. I have already interviewed a number of these Superstar bloggers but hope to interview a lot more of them over the coming months – so watch out for that.

30 Blog’s That Make A Lot Of Money Online

How They Make Money From Blogging

There are over a dozen methods these top blogger’s are using to monetize their blog, different techniques for each niche. Some niche’s are easier to promote products to, some have high paying keywords and some are easy to drive millions of visitors every month! Below is a run down on some of the techniques used.

Advertising Banners

By far the most popular advertising method so far in 2017. Website owners love this because they know they are guaranteed the money, other techniques such as affiliate marketing can go up and down a lot depending on what you promote.

CPM Advertising

This method is really popular for the website’s that receive a huge amount of traffic, advertisers pay you for impressions rather than sales or clicks! As long as you can predict your impressions which is usually east to do, you know how much you will earn.

Affiliate Sales

Selling on commission depending on your niche can be a huge earner and is by far my biggest earner. You promote great products and then get great commissions.

Pay Per Click

By far the easiest way to earn money online from a website or blog is from Google Adsense and being paid per click. Can be very lucrative if done right!

How We Make Money Blogging

We have spoken a lot about how we monetize our blogs and make money online.

On IncomeSup, we don’t sell any advertising or have any advertising banners. I feel like it limits how much you can make.

Say you sold an advert for $1000. You now know you are guaranteed to make $1000 this month, but, you also know you are going to only make $1000 from this advertising space.

When it comes to making money from blogging, we focus on two techniques.

Technique 1: Affiliate Marketing

Selling other peoples products and get a commission every time we make a sale.

Technique 2: Selling Our Own Products

Creating and selling our own eBooks and software. For example, we sell an eBook on getting more traffic and we have a software product that lets you create high converting popups.

We go into a lot more detail about these two monetization methods in this post about monetizing your blog.

The Longer You’re Not Taking Action, The More Money You’re Losing

The biggest difference between people who create successful websites and people who fail, is those who make it, didn’t give up.

If you want to get more traffic to your website, click here!

To Your Blogging Success,

Michael Dunlop

The post Top Earning Blogs – Make Money Online Blogging appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Some bloggers toil for years trying to get noticed. Others, like Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal, attract five million monthly readers before their blog’s first birthday.

Below, I’ll profile Matthew Inman, tell the story of how he started The Oatmeal, and how he’s turned it into a $500,000 per year online business.

What You’ll Learn:

• How Inman “Brain-Farms” his content
• Why “SEO has no bearing on The Oatmeal”
• How The Oatmeal attracts email subscribers without an opt-in box
• Why Inman wants to get rid of ads, even though they earn $175k per year

How The Oatmeal Began

Early in 2007, Inman decided to create a free dating website called Mingle2. In order to drive traffic to the site, Inman began creating web comics and quizzes with names like, “The 8 Phases of Dating” .

The content was unique, fun, and very viral. Before long, Mingle2 had attracted a huge user base and was winning the search ranking war against established sites like eHarmony and Match.com. It wasn’t long before one of them made an offer to buy out Mingle2 – and Inman happily accepted.

He stayed on making viral content for the dating site, but he wasn’t totally satisfied with his work:

That’s around the time when one of Inman’s comics (How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You) blew up so big that he couldn’t ignore it. He decided that he had what it takes to be a comic writer full-time. In July 2009, Inman launched TheOatmeal.com with three comics – and within a year it had 5 million visits per month.

The Oatmeal Today

Global Alexa Rank: 2,071

Approximate Yearly Income: $500,000.

Now, onto how Inman creates content, drives traffic, designs, and monetizes The Oatmeal.

Content

Simple Ideas for Viral Content

In a five minute Ignite Speech, Inman gave a some simple advice on how he creates the content that had five million people reading his website per month before it was even a year old.

Here it is in bullet points:

• “Oftentimes, what I’ll do is pick a topic that I have a gripe with.”
• “Other times, I’ll pick things that everyone can relate to and then make a quiz out of it.”
• “Pick something that you can react against that everybody hates but is popular for no reason.”
• “If you want to get attention to a website, make something disgusting. So I made a website called WomenwithMoustaches.com.”
• “Lastly, I like to educate people. I put my comics in an educative format.”

Brain-Farm

“Brain-farming” is what Inman calls his creative process. He described the concept to The Chicagoist thusly:

Inman credits his realization of “brain-farming” to a scene in the television drama Mad Men (one of my personal favorites). The show’s lead character, Don Draper, is the creative director of an ad agency and he gives this advice on overcoming writer’s block: “Just think about it. Deeply. Then forget it. And an idea will jump up in your face.”

The creative process is a mysterious beast. Sometimes the only way to think up a brilliant idea is to not think about it at all.

Don’t Sell Out

It’s hard to spend much time on The Oatmeal’s site without reading a comic about Siracha Hot Sauce. Your cynical side probably assumes that this is paid advertisement content. But the truth is that Matthew Inman writes comics about Siracha simply because he loves the product.

In fact, Inman has denied lucrative opportunities to make advertisements out of his comics. Inman told the Washington Post that he turned down a deodorant company because, “It’s pretty much got to be a truly exceptional client. If it were Comedy Central, I’m all over that. Maybe if it [involves] an actor or actress I like. But Diet Coke, that’s not gonna happen. The money would be great, but the detriment to my comic would not be.”

Integrity – it’s a big part of the reason Inman has been able to create such a massive and loyal online following.

Driving Traffic

SEO isn’t Everything

The Oatmeal comes in at the top of a Google search for ‘oatmeal’, above Wikipedia and Quaker Oats. In fact, Inman’s comics do very well with Google, always ranking near the top.

So The Oatmeal gets plenty of traffic from search. But it isn’t because the site’s so well optimized for search:

The Oatmeal’s content ranks well because it’s heavily trafficked and shared by visitors and heavily linked to by bloggers and authority sites. In Inman’s case, content really is king.

Build a Social Media Platform

The Oatmeal initially got traction through sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, which Inman has called “very powerful.” Today, The Oatmeal has over 700,000 fans on Facebook and 315,000 on Twitter.

Easier said than done, right? Well, luckily Inman’s already written a funny take on “How to get more likes on Facebook”.

Rally Around a Good Cause

If you just heard about The Oatmeal in the last few months, there’s a good chance it’s because he was raising money for a charitable cause.

It all started in May 2012, when Inman received a letter from lawyer Charles Carreon, of FunnyJunk.com. The letter threatened to sue The Oatmeal for defaming FunnyJunk and asked for payment in the amount of $20,000.

Inman was having none of it (the whole row had started because FunnyJunk was posting The Oatmeal’s content without his consent) and instead decided to try to raise $20,000 for The National Wildlife Federation and The American Cancer Society through crowd-funding site Indiegogo.

Instead of raising $20,000, Inman’s campaign raised $220,024 – largely for two reasons: (1) the viral nature of charity (people are more likely to share if it’s for the greater good) and (2) because it incited a firestorm of media coverage (including stories on sites like Forbes and Ars Technica).

Not two months later, Inman is in the midst of a second fundraising campaign, this time to help build a Nikola Tesla Museum in New York. This one’s even bigger than the last: 28,000 people have already donated $1,157,294 for Tesla and there are still 32 days left in the campaign.

You can donate here.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that Inman took on these noble causes because he wanted to drive more traffic to his site. But both campaigns have only raised The Oatmeal’s profile and earned him more die-hard fans. It’s certainly nice as a blogger that doing good is so good for you.

Design

Simple, Tile-Based Design

Inman is a graphic designer and most posts on TheOatmeal.com are comics, so it makes sense that the site’s design skews toward the visual.

His tile-with-a-headline approach is very economical with space and it allows his home page to show 25 posts without looking anywhere close to cluttered.

This design choice plays a big role in how “sticky” TheOatmeal.com is (a website is “sticky” when a visitor spends a lot of time there visiting multiple articles). At the bottom of each post, after the comments there are eight of these tiles – each one inviting the visitor to click on its clever headline.

Slim Header

The Oatmeal’s header area is less than 70 pixels tall. A larger header can make a strong visual statement and grab people’s attention, but The Oatmeal’s short header leaves more room above the fold for people to see post images.

No Opt-In Box

Instead of the traditional email opt-in form with a field to input your email and a submit button (see Income Diary’s “Get Weekly Updates” box on the right of this page) The Oatmeal simply offers a pair of text “Email” links that take you to this page:

It wouldn’t surprise me if Inman could get more email subscribers with an ever-present opt-in box on each page, but doing it this way is less pushy and it ensures that everybody who is on his list truly wants to be there.

Monetization

The Oatmeal First Monetized with Donations

Once The Oatmeal to start receiving enormous amounts of traffic, the image-heavy site was costing him, “a couple grand a month in hosting fees.” Inman didn’t have a monetization plan yet in place, so he put up a simple Paypal donation button and the words, “Like The Oatmeal? It’s a one-man operation, so buy me a cup of coffee.”

Inman told The Chicagoist what happened next:

Inman was in fact earning hundreds of dollars a day. It was more than enough to pay the hosting fees, but he was nowhere near his current figure of $500k per year. That income would come from his next monetization strategy.

Selling ‘Posters and Stuff’

Today, about 75% of The Oatmeal’s profit comes from merchandise: informational wall posters, greeting cards, calendars, clothing, coffee cups, signed prints, stickers, magnets, badges. Inman is also the author of two books, which he’s supported with national book tours (5 Very Good Reasons To Punch A Dolphin In The Mouth (And Other Useful Guides) and the upcoming How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You.)

Danny Bradbury of The Guardian offers this informed analysis of The Oatmeal’s earnings from merchandise:

Inman uses a ‘Shop’ tab at the top of his site to sell his products, but he’ll also occasionally include information about products in his posts. Inman revealed to The Washington Post his most successful products:

The Power of the Discount

We all know that a limited-time sale can increase conversion, which is why the occasional bargain is a big part of The Oatmeal’s monetization strategy. Abe Aboraya of Seattle Weekly tells the story of Inman’s first big sale:

Advertising

The other 25% of The Oatmeal’s income comes from advertising. That may not sound like much, but it amounts to about $175,000 per year.

Still, advertising isn’t in Inman’s long-term plans. He told The Washington Post:

The Final Takeaway

At the heart of The Oatmeal’s success is the unique, creative, and genuinely funny content that Inman creates week after week. He’s simply great at what he does – and it’s not because of luck, but because he had the courage to take a chance on that one thing he wanted more than anything.

But Inman succeeds in a way that other great comic writers don’t because he has forged a personal connection with his readers. He lets it all hang out, refusing to censor himself online even as he’s more and more in the spotlight. The result is a loyal following of people who trust Matt and actually feel like they know him personally.

In all likelihood, you’re not operating an entertainment website and you can’t afford to be as crass and comical as The Oatmeal. But we can all try to emulate the candor, integrity, and commitment to excellence evident in his work. That’s what sets him apart and makes him one of the world’s most entertaining – and successful – bloggers.

The post Blogger Profile: How Matt Inman of The Oatmeal Built a $500k Blog appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

This year, I actually set myself over 10 resolutions, which are mostly just areas I want to improve in my work and personal life, but my main focus this year is to do better financially. I’ve never really been that focused on making money, more about pursuing a career and finding something I wanted to do, but that’s going to change this year.

How To Make Money Creating and Selling Online Courses

Coming Up With a Product Idea

I’ve always know that I’m limited by what I can make with Google AdSense and if I wanted to start making some big bucks, then I needed a product. Over the past month or so, I’ve started to think about what I could offer, and then it struck me. Around two months ago I wrote a post called ‘The Beginner’s Guide To Photography’ on my own website, and since that’s been published, it’s been my most popular post. It’s really just a collection of tutorials I had already written with a bit of information linking them together, but it serves a very important purpose, and I’ve had people like it so much that they share it with other people too.

So my website is now 8 months old and I found which of my content is currently the most popular, but I still have a problem, I’ve already written the content. This is when I had my lightbulb moment, because I realized that I could make videos instead.

Now, I’m not crazy about the idea of standing in front of camera and teaching, but this is going to be an exclusive product and not something that’s going on YouTube (hopefully), so I’m not going to worry about it. Never let that sort of thing hold you back.

Now that I know what I’m going to make, it’s a just a case of producing it now. I already have a lot of content that I’m going to adapt from my website, but I’m going to write a script for each video to make sure I’ve covered everything and I’m not a bumbling idiot. Teaching through a video is much easier than it is in writing, because you’re never sure which parts people are going to skim over and ignore. I personally don’t read tutorials online, I’d much rather find a book or a video, because I’m a kinesthetic learner, and I like to be able to practice what I’m learning, so I look forward to teaching people in a more personal manner.

I aim to produce roughly twelve different videos related to the basics of photography, ranging from how to use a camera, to custom settings, and taking photos. The idea is that rather than spending money on a book that they probably won’t read, the followers of my blog will buy these videos instead and actually learn something. It will be broken up into different sections so that anytime someone wants to go back and refresh on something, they can do so easily.

When you’re creating a product to sell, you need to think about how much it’s worth to your fans, and how you can improve the quality for them. I started off with a price for my product before anything, and that was set in my mind at $47. I then had to think what could be worth $47, before I even thought of the videos.

When I came up with the idea, there’s the age old problem of ‘is it enough?’. I’m thinking that for someone to want to buy this product, then they’re going to want it to be quite big, and in terms of videos, perhaps 2-3 hours worth. A friend pointed out that this is the completely wrong way of thinking about this, because it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. So long as someone is getting the knowledge they’re looking for, then they’re going to be happy to pay the price.

Look for what people want, and look for a gap in the market. Then fill it. As far as I can see, there’s no video tutorial packages which cover the beginner’s guide to photography.

Setting Targets

Set yourself some targets and then stick to them. Think about how long it would reasonably take you if you used the time available and started today, and then stick to that. If you set yourself a target for the end of the year, is it likely that you’re going to even start in the next six months? Don’t start putting off till tomorrow, what you can do today.

I’m estimating that I can complete mine with all the bells and whistles in about 4 months, and earlier, I decided to set the date of the 25th of April, which happens to be the day my site really launched, a year ago, with the first top list.

Setting yourself a target for completion is one thing, but how about setting a target for sales, and when you want to reach those sales points? I personally set myself a financial target, so I just need to work out how many products I need to sell.

Finishing The Product

If you’re just putting something on YouTube, then you don’t really need too worry too much about production values, but when you’re trying to make a product sell, it needs to look good too. To finish the videos, I’m going to put together some video branding that makes the videos look more professional, and when filming, I’m going to use some extra lighting setup, perhaps even a backdrop.

When it comes to marketing the videos, I’m going to create an extra video with extracts from previous videos and put them all together to make a single sales pitch. I will also change my Facebook fan page to include an autoplay video with an introduction on what the videos offer and why they should buy them. Other than that, I would market this product as I would any other product.

Selling Your Product

This is where things start to get interesting because you can start investing your money and see an immediate return. Obviously if you have a Facebook and Twitter following, you can market to them for free and start earning money if you market it properly, but you will ultimately want to appeal to a much wider audience, and to do this, you need to do some advertising.

The first way that I will market my product will be with Facebook ads because that’s a really good way of tracking your progress. Let’s say for example my product is worth $47 and every 20 of my fans will buy the product, then I need to see how much it costs me in advertising to gain 20 fans, and then that’s how much it costs to make $47.

It’s that simple.

Lets say that it costs you c50 in advertising to find a new fan, then it would cost $10 to get enough traffic to sell a product which costs $47, leaving you $37 profit.

NOTE – This is a very rough estimate, and it may in fact cost more than this, but the point still stands that if you invest the money, you will see a return. Not only do you start to see an immediate return in terms of sales, but you’ll start to grow your Facebook fan page in a big way, which will start to see a growth in your website. This means that you’ll start to make money through your other channels, such as advertising and affiliate programs.

On the subject of affiliate programs, they’re another excellent way of selling more products. As what I’m creating is going to be a digital product, it doesn’t cost me anything to reproduce and I can give away a large commission to people who will sell it for me. It’s pretty standard to give away 50% of the profit to the affiliate, because selling the product really is half of the job. When I start to see my sales slow down, I will contact potential affiliates with large followings and ask them if they would like to sell for me.

Going Further

There is a limit to how much I can make in the early stages using only advertising, so I need to release more products in quick succession. The goal here isn’t to just make $100,000 and call it a day, it’s to make my website into a business that will grow for years to come. My plan in the future is to continue making videos and sell them in packages, and make a living that way, until my website is in a position where I can start approaching other people, while taking in on as a full time job.

The plan is that after 3-4 releases, I will have a solid business model and following for these videos that I can commission other people with large following to take part too. You’ll find that there’s plenty of people with the knowledge, but neither the means, nor the know how to create a product for themselves. That way we can offer a different range of tutorials, whether it’s advanced lighting or Photoshop, and access a new customer base. Always think one step in the head, and have a target of what you want to achieve in your business.

Read more: ‘How to Plan and Write an eBook For Sale’

The post How I’m Going To Make $100,000 This Year Selling an Online Course appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

While creating your first webinar sales presentation might seem like a daunting task – it’s actually not that bad, and there are simple, successful formulas that you can follow to create a high converting webinar.

Basically, a successful webinar presentation is broken down into a few key components, which I will break down and explain, and provide examples from my own webinar to help you guys:

1. Introduction & Social Proof

The first thing you need to do in a webinar presentation is actually introduce who you are. Take 2-3 minutes to explain who you are, and why your attendees should listen to you. The goal here is to build rapport, get people to like & trust you. (which obviously helps you later, when it’s time to pitch!)

Ex: I quickly give an introduction – my name, the company or entity I am representing, and why I’m credible (the businesses that I’ve run, the people that I’ve worked with, the results I’ve gotten, etc.) I usually add in some self-deprecating humor that people tell me I look like Jesse Eisenberg or Mark Wahlberg – though I prefer Mark Wahlberg.

2. Benefits – Get Them To Stick

Now that they know that you are smart, handsome, funny, and credible, (because your intro was so killer) it’s time to explain the benefits that your attendees are going to get from watching the webinar. You can either restate whatever was on your webinar sign up page/squeeze page here, or just restate it in different words. You also want to make sure that they not only are excited for the content they are about to receive, but that they have a reason to STICK TO THE END. That is very important as if your attendees leave before you can even pitch to them, then, well, you’re screwed.

Ex: I said something along the lines of “At the end of this webinar, I will show you exactly how I can help you, and how you can get 1 on 1 help from me to get your site ranked – which is a $1,000 value – yours free, ONLY for [friends of webinar host]

This created an open loop (you’ll find out something but only if you finish this presentation) and hinted that they were going to get a ton of value if they stayed until the end (1 on 1 help for free).

3. Present The Problem & Identify an Enemy

Alright, now we get into the good stuff. This is where you really need to flex your copywriting and sales skills. You need to show them exactly what the problem is (that your product that you are eventually pitching to them will fix), and explain to them exactly what the IMPACT of that problem is – how exactly is this problem hurting them? You also, if it makes sense for your niche, want to present an enemy here – someone who you can place the blame on for causing this problem. The sad truth here is that usually it is people’s own fault for causing their own problems, however, presentations where you berate people on their faults don’t really sell well – so you need to find an enemy that you can place the blame on and tell your prospect “It’s not your fault.”

Ex. For my presentation, the problem is that SEO is overhyped and misrepresented by evil “Guru’s” (the enemy) that are just trying to make a buck. (This is totally and 100% true, by the way!) The impact of the problem is that most people end up with websites that get 10 visitors a month, and make zero dollars.

4. Empathize and Future Pacing

Here’s where you really get to build up your rapport with your attendees. This is where you explain to them that they are not the only ones who have suffered from this problem, but you have as well (only if it’s true!). In this section, you want to show them that you are just like them (or were just like them), until you found a solution (which you don’t mention yet) that has provided you with phenomenal results, that they can also achieve. You want to basically show them, through your success, and through painting a picture of their future success, what their life is going to be like with this problem SOLVED.

Ex. For my presentation, I talk about how when I first started, I had no idea what I was doing and my website got 0 traffic, and that I feel any struggling internet marketers pain. I then talk about how I found out the truth about SEO – that it’s easy, systematized, and outsourceable, AND profitable. I use a screenshot of one of my site’s traffic from Google – and show how each visitor that Google sends my site is worth $1.07 to me, and talk about how they can get similar results.

5. Content!

This is where you give the meat of your presentation. The real reason why your attendees signed up for your presentation was to learn whatever it is that you teased them about on the webinar sign up page – so it’s time to deliver the goods. Basically, you want this content to do a couple of things:

• Continue to demonstrate your credibility for the subject you are teaching
• Demonstrate your passion and that you’re a real, legitimate, trustworthy, awesome person
• Provide value, usually basic “What to do” content, but limiting the “How to do it” side of things. Do NOT skimp, though, if your content sucks you definitely won’t be able to sell. There’s a fine line between providing value and just providing filler content – so make sure that you are careful here.

Ex. Ours was our companies “Top 7 Linkbuilding Techniques” that we’ve used on our sites and clients to get them ranked. This was complementary content as the product we were selling is about On-Site SEO, and the whole point of the presentation is that if your On-Site SEO is not setup properly, then all the stuff that we JUST taught you becomes less effective. So the solution is to buy our product and learn On-Site SEO.

6. Provide Your Solution

Now that you’ve presented your badass content, it’s time to start moving into the pitch. The solution to the problem that you had discussed before is, of course, your product. However, you don’t want to make that connection just yet – you want to present the solution as an individual entity, explain it, and then connect that entity to your product or service. At this point, you should put in a testimonial or two of someone who has used your solution and gotten great results from it.

Ex: Our solution to SEO traffic woes is On-Site SEO, and then we have three slides showing it’s value. The first slide is a screenshot of Michael’s traffic increase from our SEO tactics, the next is a testimonial from a successful customer, and the final slide is a screenshot of us outranking a well known “guru” for a competitive keyword.

7. Present Your Product + Build It’s Value

This is where you introduce the product that will provide the solution you’ve been discussing, and you show present and explain each one of the products components, their value, and how they will benefit your attendees if they purchase the product. If you have a specific bonus for your attendees (if the webinar is being hosted by an affiliate, for example), this is where you would also present it and show it’s value. At the end of this product presentation, you want to add up all the value for them (just like in the infomercials!), show them how much it SHOULD cost, and then show them how much you’re going to charge for it if they order TODAY.

Ex: Our product had something like 10 components, so each component got it’s own slide and explanation. At the end, we had a slide with a list of all of the components, what each of their individual values were, and then what the total value of each component was. The following slide was the actual price. “You get $1,327 of real world value for just $67 if you purchase today.

8. Risk Reversal + Urgency

Whew! We’re finally at the end. The last step is showing your attendees what your guarantee is – we had a whole slide dedicated to this – and really demonstrate to them that you believe strongly in your product and you know they are going to love it, so you’re happy to provide a 30/60/90/lifetime moneyback guarantee. And if they are not satisfied with the product, they can get a refund in that timeframe with no questions asked. Once you’ve gone through the guarantee, it’s time to put up your sales link, and give some urgency for them to purchase your product right now.

Ex: We offered a free SEO report if prospects purchased in the next 10 minutes, and had a countdown clock in the powerpoint presentation that ran in the background while the 10 minutes ticked down. During the 10 minutes, we took Q&A. However, if you don’t want to do a regular Q&A – or plan on reusing the webinar as a sales tool, my biggest suggestion here would be to have the webinar moderator ask you Q&A questions that answer your average prospects biggest objections. The biggest objections are usually whether or not they can get a refund/the validity of your guarantee, how fast they will get their results, what happens if they don’t get results, is the solution easy, etc.

And that’s it! That’s how we put together our webinar presentation and it’s worked out pretty well for us so far. One thing to note is that the first time we ran the webinar, we didn’t have a slide for our guarantee and it only converted at 11%. When we added in the guarantee slide, it doubled to 22%. Granted, I could have done a better job presenting the webinar the second time, however, I am firmly convinced that making your guarantee extremely clear to your prospects is HUGE for conversions.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments!

The post How To Sell With Webinars appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Today I wanted to let you know… I’m a millionaire! Well… sort of.

I’m a millionaire just like Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire. You see Mark founded Facebook and Facebook is worth billions so technically he’s like a billionaire?!

You see, I own IncomeDiary and a whole bunch of other websites and based on what a broker told me, I’m worth a fair chuck of change.

Websites typically sell for 12 – 18 times monthly revenue. However this isn’t the rule. If your website is an authority website, has a great brand, has real “potential”, is making a significant amount of money (lets say… at least tens of thousands of dollars a month), then well it can be pretty much any amount you money someone is willing to pay for it. In a down economy (or so the broker called it), you should expect 2 – 4 years revenue. But again, let me stress, this isn’t the rule. Some sell for a lot more.

Back to my point, based on that hooharr of a paragraph, yes my business would in fact sell for at least $1,000,000 (I’d hope significantly more), which would make me a millionaire? Right?

It’s a weird world but I wouldn’t ever consider saying that out-loud in a public places around actually people. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have a million dollars till it’s in your bank. Having said that, I do own a website network worth a lot of money, so let me give you a few ideas on how you can do it yourself.

First however I would just like to make perhaps the most important point in setting up any business:

What is your website exit plan?

Who is going to buy your online business and how much for?

I can’t tell you how often I ask a website owner what their Exit Plan is and they cannot give me a straight answer. Yet so many website owners just make this assumption that somehow it will just all work out fine? To put it another way, lets say today that I want to do a North American road trip from New York City to Los Angeles – do you think I would ever get to Los Angeles if I did not decide in advance that was my destination? My Exit Plan? Of course I wouldn’t make it – and nor will you either with your business if you don’t have an exit plan!

How To Build a Web Business Worth a Million Dollars

Building a massive online business is quite simple. Actually, when I go over it in my head, it seems almost idiot proof, that surely nobody could get it wrong. Of course I don’t believe that to actually be the case but I do believe online entrepreneurs who have made a few bucks online can follow in my footprints and do the exact same thing. The idea is simple, build a great website portfolio with lot’s of great websites.

Here’s how:

My 6 top tips for creating a big, bad-ass, money making online business.

1) Outsource Everything (Not like those newbies tell you though)

Whoever is going to buy your business, they want to know that they can be relatively hands off and that you have a great team that runs everything. (If the website relies on you alone it will be difficult to sell)

So just hire lot’s of people in India to do everything right? Wrong!

Nothing against Indian Programmers or article writers – (Or indeed any non-native English Speaking teams) there are some fine ones around but my experience has been that I get a better result for some skills – hiring locally. Sure it costs me a lot more but if it gets me a better job done and adds more value to my business, that is what counts.

You will have heard me say before – “You can’t outsource Passion” – and it is true, but you will get closer to it I find with individuals who understand you and your objectives and my experience has been that I stand a better chance of that by hiring locally.

I pay my web team lb45 a hour (approx $70 per hour). In the past year I have spent well over lb40,000 ($64,000) on my blog network alone with them, getting them to improve sites and build new ones. Every time they do a redesign, I make more money because I learn from the past one.

I pay my brother a decent wage for his age and education. He does a lot of articles for different sites I own and that means I can spend that time I use to spend on writing, on doing other things like managing my team. If I paid $6 for a article on some forum, I would see a article written by someone most likely who’s first language is not English and doesn’t have any interest in what they are writing about. This is obvious to the reader and Google and doesn’t benefit my business in anyway. Bottom line, pay more, get someone better, it’s so worth it!

OK, I will admit there are some excellent overseas outsource teams – I have friends who swear by teams they employ in the Ukraine and also Romania and of course India – but all of them admit they had to go through a lot of teams before they found a team they could rely on. And yes, you can get let down by local teams also – it is just that my personal experience that you can manage local teams easier and while cost will almost certainly be higher the chances of getting what you want, done as you wish and to the standard you require first time is much higher!

2) Diversify Your Traffic Sources

One thing people buying your site will be looking at is Google Traffic. If I’m getting 1000 visitors a day from Google and that’s 60% of my traffic and then Google decides that they are going to change their algorithm and rank sites differently, then I’m screwed! Thousands of top sites have over night lost over half their traffic from Google because of something just like this. To a potential buyer, this would worry them because you are so reliant on the big G.

Here’s what you do: You drive traffic in more than 1 way. Here’s a quick check list of things you must be doing:

• Social Media
• Social Networking (network with people online so they become your friend and then make them link to you Mwahahahahah).
• Content Directory’s
• Make Your Website Sticky (so people keep coming back).

3) Invest, Invest, Invest!

Hand on heart, I would not be anywhere near as successful if I didn’t invest so much into my business. If your making money, forget spending it on a nice car (at least not right now) and invest it into your business. Spending $5,000 on getting some software developed could see a $50,000 return in a month. The same for so many other things. I’ve begun investing quite a lot of money into article writers, not cheap ones, but ones that know a lot about the subject that they are writing about! Content means I can get more traffic which means I’m going to make more money. Here’s a few suggestions on what you could invest in:

• New website design
• Article Writers
• Software Development
• Graphics
• Buy Other Peoples Websites
• Invest in Educational Products To Further Your Learning
• Buy Traffic
• Get a Better Computer

The list is endless. I’ve done all this and it makes your business bigger and better. Here’s the simplistic way to show you why you should invest:

Build a website, make $100 a month and do nothing new month after month and keep making $100 a month.

Month 12, your making $100

Or….

Build a website, make $100, invest the $100 into a premium theme, next month you make $120. Keep investing and investing.

Month 12 your making $340

Now imagine the increases when your making $10,000 a month and investing half of it.

4) Work Hard (At least at the beginning)

Entrepreneurship is about living a few years of your life like most won’t so that you can live the rest of your life like most can’t.

This means, work now, make lots of money and spending years to come in a lovely house watching your neighbor go to work every day while you live your idea of “the dream”.

I’ve always been lazy, it’s so hard to work when you don’t have to. When I lived at my parents, I was young, didn’t have to pay much rent and my lifestyle didn’t require me to earn a lot of money. I moved out, had to make more money, worked hard, got my business up to the level where it could maintain my lifestyle and then got lazy again. This is something I’ve done time after time as I have increased my spending and lifestyle. The importance here is, make sure you have the right team so you aren’t reliant on the success of your business.

5) Build a Network Of Websites

When you start your online business it’s vital you don’t do the following: Build lot’s of different websites.

It is not best to have 10 small websites, it’s best to have 1 massive one. Once you have achieved that, then you move on and build more sites related to that first website. This is exactly what I have done. A great example of this is TutsPlus network. They started with a blog about Freelancing, then Photoshop Tutorials, then Coding Tutorials and it just kept growing, creating new sites offering what their readers wanted to know more about. In 5 short years they are making millions because they expanded and invested.

6) Have The End In Mind & Work Towards It

I find this to be really vital to my success. If I didn’t have a clear understanding of where I wanted my business to go, what I wanted it to stand for and what It’s going to look like, then I wouldn’t be as successful as I am. I know that replying to negative emails won’t get me closer to my goal. There are so many things you are probably focusing on that are irrelevant to your end goal and the success of your website. Cut them out and you find you will have a lot more time to focus on the things that are import.

Just make sure you keep working towards an Exit that makes you very wealthy!

I would really love to hear about your exit plans in the comments below? Better still if you have already made a successful exit? Share the experience – and of course if you have any questions or suggestions for even more improved business clarity share that as well.

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