Top Customer Acquisition and Retention Strategy Tips for Business Growth

If you’re looking for how to monetize a website, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of ways to make money online if your only goal is to generate cash flow. When thinking about how to monetize a website though, you need to consider what your business does, and then put together a website monetization strategy that helps back it up.

Now, we have our favorites… Your sales letters, backed up by lead magnets and landing pages fueled by paid traffic sources that you control tend to perform the best over time.

… But not every business has things that they’re selling. Or, they’re just starting and don’t have the sales material and assets you need to successfully convert buyers. That’s where this blog post comes in.

What you’re about to discover is how to monetize a website with and without stuff to sell!

Google AdSense

Hands down, Google AdSense, is still one of the easiest ways to make money online. It’s easy to set up and optimizes itself based on what keywords appear on your page. Plus, you can do text-based ads or banner ads.

The downside? You won’t make a tone of money unless you’re getting a lot of traffic and that traffic is coming in on high dollar keywords.

Banner ads

If Google Adsense doesn’t tickle your fancy, you might consider banner ads.

Buy-Sell Ads is a self-hosted banner service that lets you post your blog details. If your site is getting solid traffic, BSA will connect you with advertisers who will pay for space on your website!

Product Reviews

Product reviews used to be our bread and butter. We’d review products and then generate cash from the affiliate arrangement that was set up. I still see a lot of it happening. A great example is ThePointsGuy.com. The articles are awesome and written for their customer avatar – they just generate revenue through affiliate marketing.

Blog & Freelance Services

If you’re good at what you do, have skills that other people can utilize, and are just not making money on your site yet… You can offer to help others with theirs! Also, you can sell logo services, writing services, theme creation, or plugin creation services on your site to earn money.

You can even go outside of your blog and pick up work on a site like Upwork.com which matches freelancers with service providers!

The great thing about this monetization model is that you don’t need lots of traffic to generate more revenue. You do need exposure from the RIGHT people to use your services though. The more customers you have, the faster your business can grow.

Affiliate Marketing

Do you want to sell something on your web pages but don’t have your products? Affiliate marketing is a great option for you. In fact, inside Scriptly, we’ve even got Done For You Email Campaigns for Affiliates that’ll help fast-track you on the affiliate marketing front…

The key is to find (and write content for) a group of people who are experiencing a similar problem. Then, solve that problem through an affiliate offer!

Sell Your Products

One of our favorite ways to make money online!

Our absolute favorite way of monetizing a website is to sell products and services directly on the pages. If you’ve got traffic, why not sell them the thing that’ll help them solve their problem? From selling eBooks, digital information products, software, coaching packages; there are so many ways to make money online.

We’ve got an entire book on that very thing, Creating Products! Click here to learn more >>

Build An Email List

One of the greatest ways to build a business online and monetize a website is to build an email list and send those subscribers relevant offers that you get paid for.

Not only that, but you can also build a relationship with your email list subscribers and they’ll stay with you for a long time – far longer than just reading a blog post and then going away, never to return.

At the end of the day, an email list will turn into your biggest cash producing asset if you decide that you want to get one started… So let’s look at some more tools and instructions on how to do that!

• Offer a lead magnet: If you want to build an email list quickly, give away something for free. Your prospects won't sign up just because you tell them to. They need a reason to optin. Put some thought into your customer avatar and write a solid ebook or free report for them. You can also give away podcasts, videos, etc. Make sure your lead magnet is something worth value.
• Use email marketing software: If you are serious about creating an email list, use a service to help you manage and mail to your email list. There are lots of them out there - Aweber, Drip, GetResponse. Pick one and set it up :0)
• Use landing pages: Website pages are a huge distraction in general. To optimize the your conversion and turn as many prospects into leads as possible, you'll need a solid landing page. Scriptly's got a great Page Builder that'll get you set up fast!
• Use calls to action: To convert prospects to leads and buyers, you want to make sure to use the right calls to action. If you're selling services, you want them to qualify themselves and book a strategy session with you. If you want them to buy something, you need to make sure they hit your order form from your sales letter!
• Send traffic: No matter how great your offer is, you won’t get email subscribers without a quality traffic source.
• Use social media sites: Social media is the dominant way to get more traffic and leads. There's a great write-up on getting traffic from Instagram here. You can also create Facebook pages, be engaging on Twitter and get in touch with people on Linkedin to expand your network.

If there’s anything we can do to help you on your digital marketing journey, hit the button below and book a call with us!

Video Transcript

Ways To Make Money Online From A Website: Video Transcript

Today we're going to talk about how to monetize a website.

There are lots of different ways to make money online from a website. Whether it is a personal blog, a corporate site, or a site promoting your business... There are so many different ways of generating revenue. And one of the things that I have been fortunate enough in my career online is that I have tested and played with pretty much every single one of them.

I've done everything from affiliate marketing to creating and selling digital products, to selling links to generate cash, to coaching and consulting. There are so many different ways to make money online from a blog.

One thing is for sure - you need traffic coming to your website. YOU CAN NOT make money on a website without traffic. There are no two ways about it. If you don't have traffic then you don't have any distribution, If nobody is going to be coming to your website, there's no way you can generate revenue on said website.

So traffic is the main ingredient when you're searching for how to monetize a website. There are lots of ways of getting traffic and there are lots of ways to make money online once you get it. So I'm going to assume that you're on this page because you have some sort of traffic, whether it's 50 people a day, or 100 people a day, or 10000 people a day... You have some traffic coming to your website currently. Whether that is from search engine optimization or search rankings, affiliate emails, or paid traffic / paid ads like Facebook Advertising or Google Advertising or Content Marketing...

You just need traffic.

So once you have a website out and you have some traffic, there are lots of different ways to make money online. The one that everybody starts with, the default one, is generating advertising income. What that means is you post banner ads on your website that some company pays you for. It might be $50 a month, or $100 a month, or $200, or $250, or whatever. Some monetary figure is exchanged for putting ads on your website. Another way to do it is Google AdSense.

Adsense is the web 'publisher' side of the coin. To fully understand Google Adsense, you need to know about Google's Advertising arm.

Google has an ad platform called Google AdWords that charges businesses per click or per impression when the business' ad shows up on someone's screen and the prospect clicks through.

Google also has a sister platform called AdSense, where everyday bloggers like you and me can log in, create an account, and embed a little code snippet on our site that'll allow Google to show their advertisers ads based on the words that are on our page. Then, when someone clicks on the ad, Google will give you a portion of that ad money!

Cool, right? And simple.

Now, Google doesn't tell you exactly how much you going to getting, but it's in the neighborhood of 25% to 40%. So if you have a Google ad that is on your website and somebody clicks it, then you get a portion of what the advertiser pays Google.

Those are two big ways to make money online.

If you're not creating and selling your digital products, there's a lot of other places you can go to... BuySellAds is one. If you have a lot of traffic, then you can get your site included in their listings and they will help sell ad inventory for you...

Some people put up sponsorship pages and then they're looking for sponsors.

But the more effective way of generating revenue is by selling your things, by selling your products, by selling your services.

You aren't splitting that money with anybody else. So having your digital courses, having your eBooks, having your coaching or consulting offers. Having your offer is a much more effective and fast way of generating significant revenue. If you are good at something, you can put an ebook together, a video course together about how to do that thing.

I wrote an entire book on it called Create...

The book is about putting together an offer that you can sell on your website, day or night, allowing you to generate tremendous revenue online without needing to share or split it with anyone...

You can also use affiliate products to monetize your website. So affiliate products or CPA offers are offers that you don't own, but you get paid a commission whenever someone purchases AFTER having clicked your link. That sometimes includes people taking a free trial or when fills out a form online.

Keep in mind, these are just some different ways to make money online.

There are so many different ways to make money online from a website.

As long as you have the distribution, whether that's from paid traffic sources or organic traffic.

You just have to ask yourself, do I want to...

A) create a product and go out and find my customers? If the answer is yes, then write an ebook, build a digital course. There's plenty of material on this website for that.

B) If the answer is no though, then you want to look at maybe some other options. You want to look at advertising and generating revenue from ads, putting ads on your website, and then when somebody clicks, you get paid. Or affiliate revenue, where another product creator has created a product and you just help them sell that and you get a portion of their sales paid as a commission. You can go to a site like clickbank.com and they have thousands of offers, thousands of affiliate offers or commissionjunction.com which has a bunch of CPA offers you could pay the commission from.

GSDdaily #30 - 7 Ways To Make Money Online From Your Website

Today we're going to talk about 7 Ways To Make Money Online With Your Website. Now I feel like I kind of stepped back into some of the shit we did back in 2012. All this stuff is now cool again because we used to do a lot of work from home, make money online, affiliate marketing, how to make money from ads, how to get ranked in Google, all of that kind of crazy stuff.

It's interesting to kind of refresh all of these strategies because they are, I mean they're crucial now, especially if you have a website that is getting traffic. People still need to buy stuff and affiliate marketing is a great way of providing services and providing products that you don't have to fulfill, you don't have to support, you don't have to write sales copy for, any of that stuff.

The previous four days of this week have been affiliate marketing. We have kind of beaten affiliate marketing to death. We introduced affiliate marketing on Monday. That was episode 26. In episode 27, we talked about the different kinds of affiliate marketing programs. Then Wednesday episode 27 we talked about finding affiliate marketing products. Yesterday we talked about building a lead generation marketing engine for this affiliate mix.

Today we're going to talk about seven ways to make money online with your website. One of those ways is affiliate marketing. There are some other ones that I want to introduce you to today. Then next week we are getting into Facebook advertising. We're going to start talking about setting up Facebook ad campaigns that work, that convert, and we're going to do it based on video views, video campaigns, that kind of thing. That's kind of the roadmap of what has come in the past and what we're moving into. So that's where we're going.

Now let us start by going over and checking out kind of the source material, the source article that we're going to be talking about. So in the comments, I'm just going to drop this here, so this is how to monetize a website. All right, so in that article is where we're going to start kind of hashing stuff out. Then also to dive deeper into this and have a conversation about different ways to make money online, different ways that you can use some of what we're teaching here, to kind of get started, go ahead and join the DFY Accelerate Facebook group.

I post a bunch of stuff, training videos, articles, future episodes, all that stuff in there. If you have questions about basically getting started and what are some of the best practices for posting ad blocks or look at affiliate marketing programs or whatever, then that's going to be the best place for you to go. This article is written was a couple of years ago but the landscape hasn't changed a whole lot.

The idea of making money on a website is you have traffic that advertisers want to pay you for, that they want access to.

There's a couple of different kinds of levels of it. It might be you have 50 or 100 or 200 people a day coming to your website and they're all kind of centered around a certain niche. Advertisers will give you money for posting ad blocks or give you money per click or per impression that those ads are on. So we're just kind of going to go through this.

1. Google Adsense

Now Google AdSense is where I started. One of the very first ways to make money online that I found was using Google AdSense. Now AdSense is the other side of the coin of Google AdWords. So now if you go to Google, just ads. Google, you will hit the advertising part, the advertising section.

Whatever the reason, it's saying that I don't have an internet connection, which means you are about to probably go down maybe. So I don't know. It looks like I'm still streaming though, so that's good. So, but anyway, so maybe it's just down. Its ads.google.com, that's the advertising arm of Google. You can think of it as if a company wants to go and advertise on Google, they're going to go here, which used to be called AdWords.

They're going to start advertising for the keyword phrases that somebody's typing into the search engines. That part is pretty easy to understand. So if we go to Google and we type the words, I don't know, home repair, let's say, if we're looking for home repair, well this is an ad and then this is an ad and then this is an ad. And then here is where all of our organic listings start coming up.

These ads are all booked through Google AdWords here. So that's pretty simple. Now, there is this other service called Google AdSense and Google AdSense allows bloggers and website owners to publish an ad block inside their website they then get paid for. That ad-block is filled up with Google AdSense ads. Basically, it's the other side of the same coin.

Google is taking money from advertisers on one side and then Google is giving that money to bloggers and website owners on the other side. You can have a website and post AdSense ads on your website and every time there's a click, every time somebody, you know, there's an impression, however, you set it, then you get paid. You get paid a couple of cents. It might be two cents, it might be 32 cents. For certain keyword phrases, it might be $8.

Maximizing your AdSense earnings is a whole different conversation around the keyword phrases that are the most in-demand and the most valuable. But it can be done. You can have, like for instance there some cash-for-house kind of keyword phrases that are very, very expensive to rank for and advertise for. So if you have a website that is a cash for houses website and you don't plan on doing any cash for houses stuff, you can drop an AdSense block and then get paid every time somebody clicks an ad in that AdSense block. AdSense is one of the easiest ways to make money online on your website, bringing it back full circle. With that, it's one of the easiest ways to make money online.

You build the website and then you can just drop a piece of code in any portion of the website. It can be in the sidebar, it can be above the blog post or below the blog post or whatever. But you can drop that AdSense block anywhere and every time it displays or every time somebody clicks an ad, then they get paid. Or then you get paid, like 30 days later.

The first check I ever received for my internet marketing efforts and activity was through Google AdSense. Google sent me a check for like $104. There's a picture of it on this website somewhere, but I don't remember where it is. It's in a blog post buried somewhere. But yeah, that was a crazy day. It was like I remember telling my professor at college, "Google just paid me money to show ads on my website." Kind of crazy. That was back in 2006 maybe? Yeah, I think it was 2006. 2005, I don't know, something like that. So it was when I was still working at Pepsi and also going to school full time and the whole deal.

Another one that I did, it's not on this list, but it was called text link ads. So text link ads, I think they're defunct now. Textlinkads.com. See if anything comes up. Basically text link ads, what they were doing is they let people buy links in your like a blogroll. Like it used to be a blogroll, but it was like a section of links in your sidebar and then they let somebody buy links there, and then they... Media Whiz, text link ads with hyphens is a Media Whiz company, which I think it always was. But anyway, text link ads, it was the most profitable way. So it was like just a block of 10 links that you put in your sidebar. And for a while, I had a website that was making $100 per link, and then I had to split half with text link ads.

I was making $500 a month for just a little section of links. And those links were ended up being SEO'd, as people bought them so that they got the link juice from my site to go to their site. So it is one of the fastest ways to make money online. Banner ads are another one. So it's very similar to AdSense, but rather than Google, what it is is you're posting a banner ad on your website. So you can sell banner ads one-on-one to a buyer. When I had marketing hacks, there was Full Sail University, the college they'd send me an email and said, "Hey, can we buy an ad block on your website for six months for $200 a month?" And I was like, "Well, shit, yeah, okay, cool. Whatever."

They sent the ads, they sent the code, I dropped the code in, and then they were paying every month for just a little banner ad site-wide. So the same thing still holds. You can sell ads on your website and that is fine. You can use a service like this BuySellAds, which I have used quite a bit in the past, both to buy ads and then also to sell ads. BuySellAds is a marketplace for advertising. So you can search for websites that are open to advertising. And then you can also if you have a lot of traffic, you can list your ad or your website on BuySellAds and they will actively sell ad inventory for you. So it's just an advertising marketplace.

2. Banner Ads

One of the ways to make money online to get this started without having a whole lot of website or having a lot of traffic and also without having sponsorships is just to make up a banner ad and put it on your website and fill that space and promote like an affiliate product. And you can use a piece of software very, very easily, and inexpensively called Canva to make banner ads.

I use it for a lot of our stuff too, just because it's like ding, ding, dink, you just put it in and you're up and running. So banner ads are a great way to kind of fill a space on your website before somebody paying you money for the banner ads. So it's one of the best ways to make money online.

3. Product Reviews

Product reviews are another one. I used to do a lot of affiliate marketing product reviews. I don't anymore. That's how we did a lot of traffic or how we made a bunch of affiliate money way back in the day. But product reviews work well still. So you can review products, link, through the product review, you can link to, through your affiliate link to the product you're reviewing, one of the most consistent ways to make money online. It still works out well. You can do top 10 lists, you can do top four lists.

You can just literally do a product review and a product review only. It's up to you how you want to do it. But product reviews are fantastic moneymakers because you're tying them to an affiliate offer. In that affiliate offer, they are going down.

Now the reason product reviews work so well is because of buyer intent. So there are three classifications of buyers. So you have like your level one buyer, which is the person who they know enough to start being dangerous. Like they're starting to get into whatever it is they're looking to buy. So I used to use the example of a baby stroller a lot. Probably because Sebastian was little or just becoming a thing. So with the baby stroller, somebody finds out or a family finds out they're pregnant, and then they're like, "Oh, we need a baby stroller." And then they go and they start researching baby strollers. They have no idea of the brand, they have no idea features, they have no idea of what they need or price points or anything. But it's a discovery process.

Your level one buyer, they're actively looking for a solution for their problem, but they have no concept of what it is they're looking for really. Then you have your level two buyer who knows what they want. So that person, they're becoming familiar with brands. They know the features and the benefits they are looking for. Furthermore, they know the colors they want, they know the price range they're looking at spending.

They haven't narrowed it down to a few choices. That level three buyer is the person who narrowed it down to a few choices. So usually they're just weighing a couple of things between them and in this particular instance, with a product review or if they're looking for product reviews, they're actively looking for somebody to help them make that decision.

If they're between one or two or three offers or products or whatever, then they're looking for justification in pulling the trigger on one of them. So you, as a content creator, as a blog owner, a website owner, whatever, if you write a product review and help them make that decision, you're pushing them over the edge of whatever it is they're trying to do, whatever it is that they're trying to buy.

Your reward for that is them clicking the link in your product review and then going and you're making your affiliate commission. So that's how product reviews work. That's why they work so well. That's why you see a lot of the top 10 review sites. You search for anything like I was looking for a video wall controller yesterday. I thought a cool DIY project would be to turn this wall back here into screens. So it will happen eventually.

But so I was looking at video wall controllers and the reviews are random. This means it's not like people use them for big installations and stuff. I thought it'd be a cool DIY project to do and I thought it would be nice on like these things if that back there could light up and show something or whatever.

I started looking at video wall controller reviews and there's two by twos and one by fours and three by threes and four by fours and I don't need anything that big, where it's like four screens by four screens, so 16 total screens. But there wasn't a whole lot of like feedback on Amazon because people purchase these things usually commercially and then they install them commercially. The best unit had like 24 reviews and 24 four or five-star reviews and had very little feedback on it.

I was trying to find someone else, something else that I could kind of because I don't know what the hell I'm buying either. Aside from trial and error, I was looking for more information. And the product reviews, there were a couple of them that I saw, it was like the top 10 lists, and they were helpful.

I haven't purchased anything yet, but I mean when I do I will probably go back there, grab their affiliate link and then buy it that way, just because they were helpful when I needed them to be. So blog and freelance services, we've talked a lot about freelance services or services in general on GSDdailies. So a way that you can generate traffic coming in is you can move them into some sort of a strategy session or some sort of a consultative sales call.

4. Blog and Freelance Services

When we did the funnel week, which was two weeks ago, we talked about a fully qualified lead sales funnel. That is what this is. So basically if you have website traffic coming in, what you want to do is you want to focus all of them onto a sales page. That sales page then has a sales video with an application form underneath and then the form forwards respondents to your calendaring service, Calendly, or whatever.

Generally how you can sell services from a blog or a website. And that focusing is well done through like an exit pop or like a top bar kind of plugin. So that way everybody who comes to the website, they ended up leaving, they see the exit pop or they see the top bar and they know that you have services available that they can go watch your video and ultimately apply to work with you if they are interested in that. So that's how the blog and freelance services would work, generally.

You can have banner ads inside the blog post and stuff too, but even then people have banner blindness. But if something pops up when they're leaving the website, they're forced to read it one way or the other. Even if it just pops up once and then is set to be off for the next week, they still have to read it in order either to exit out or exit out of the website or whatever. They know you're offering services, which plants the seed in their mind if in a week or two weeks. They come back and they need you, they need accounting help or whatever, then they will be back for you.

5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing, this entire week has been about, so but a website that has affiliate links. You can have banner ads with your affiliate links, you can do product reviews that are through affiliate links. You can build an email list and then monetize through affiliate links.

There are lots of ways to make money online that we've covered already in the previous four days of this week that you can tie into the affiliate marketing trend. There are just so many different things. You can treat affiliate offers like you would treat your internal offers, with the understanding that you can't change the sales copy, you can't add upsells. There are lots of things you can't do with affiliate offers. But the biggest advantages are you don't have to control the sales copy.

You don't have to invest in the sales copy or the website or the sales funnel or the customer service or any of that stuff. Products. You just get to send a sale which is one of the easiest ways to make money online... And that's it. Selling your products. So a couple of weeks ago we did an entire five-day boot camp on creating your products. So you can figure out what it is you like, what it is you in you're into, what experiences you have, what history you have, what you're good at, what people ask you for.

You can kind of figure out what you want to provide and create for the world. And then in that, in coming up with that, framing up that solution to a problem in the world or the public, I should say, then you can create a digital course, an ebook, a coaching program, a consulting program, a mastermind, a service, an offer that helps somebody, that transform somebody's life, in just a big way or a small way, it doesn't matter. But give somebody transformation so that they can adjust and so that their life can be better because of you. At the end of the day, people are looking for transformation when they're searching for solutions for their problems. So if you can provide that transformation and then you can sell a service or a product on your website that helps get them there.

6. Sell Your Products

It's the best way of generating money from your blog or your website is to sell your products because you control the entire buying cycle. So you start with them through your blog and then you can move them through a buyer's journey. You can move them through an automated webinar or your product or your service or whatever, and ultimately fulfill to them on the backside, and build your brand longterm. So that is awesome. That's where everyone should go. But sometimes there are stepping stones. Like for me, I didn't start there. I started with affiliate marketing. I started with having banner ads on a blog post and trying to get traffic. And then I moved into the product creation piece. So it's a journey. It's just always a journey.

7. Building an Email List

The last part is building an email list. So when I started a long time ago, forever I didn't have an email list. I didn't try to build an email list. I thought email marketing was, well, they're already here, why not try to get them to buy something? Why throw up an email opt-in before we send them off to buying a product or buying an affiliate product or whatever. And it was a mistake. So there could have been a lot more leads than we have attracted. I could have been able to scale a lot sooner if I would've grown an email list, but I didn't. And it's more like a marketing tactic. So you want to grow your email list so that you can advertise to them in the future.

One of the things that I have seen, especially through this pandemic, is the folks who can pivot. They're able to pivot because they have distribution through the email list. After all, they have website traffic, because they have some way that they're able to reach out to all of their past customers. They also have prospects or everybody's who's interested and say, "Hey look, we're doing this new thing. Come follow us here.". If you don't have an email list and you don't have website traffic and you don't have an audience, there's no one to pivot to. It's just another startup.

Building an email list gives you the best chance of future growth. And then also like just being recession-proof because you have your distribution and then you can pivot, you can start something new. You can do something different, you can use that audience to scale into a bigger audience through shares and likes and all that other stuff. But if you don't have an email list, you don't have anybody to reach out to, then you don't. So it's just a super, super important point.

As I'm saying this, just that chunk out and throw it in a different video. Then run some ads to it because everybody needs to see that message right there. Because an email list is going to save your business in the future. It sucks to build right now. I mean it's fucking hard. You've got lead magnets and landing pages and email copy and ads and exit pops and all kinds of other crazy shit. But you got to have it, for the future business and to protect your future growth. You can do whatever you want. You can sell services, affiliate products, and banner ads. Also, you can drop them into blog posts. You can write every day, you can do whatever the hell you want if you have the email list. But without it, you can't.

Those are our seven ways to make money online on your website. Affiliate marketing is one of them. Google AdSense, nice, easy, quick way of doing it. Banner ads are a nice way. You just want to remember to fake it till you make it. Grab an affiliate offer, make a banner ad, promote a friend's site or whatever with the banner ad that you control, so that you can take that place.

Nobody wants to be the first, no advertiser wants to be the first advertiser of a website. So give them the impression somebody else is paying you money for your ads. Doing product reviews for affiliate products is a great way of doing it. Offering services, selling your products, building an email list. All good stuff. So if you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/GSD. That's going to ask questions and put them in the queue for the next week.

Like I said, next week is going to be Facebook ads. We're going to talk about creating Facebook videos. I'm not real sure how I'm going to pull that off yet, but we're going to try. And then, so we're going to do Facebook videos, and rolling those Facebook videos into Facebook ads. We're going to talk about audiences and demographics and ad set up, conversion campaigns, all that stuff.

We're kind of going to do a five-day intensive on Facebook ads, which is going to be pretty exciting. And then from there, I don't know what we're doing after that.

For Questions and Guide

Go to doneforyou.com/start, book an action plan call with my team and me, and then we can go through and kind of put together revenue-generating strategies, sales funnel strategies, any kind of an action plan for getting you out there and scaling. And if you have any questions, just send me a Facebook message or post in one of the groups, the Accelerate group, or whatever. And we'll talk to you soon, all right? Thanks. Bye.

The post 7 Ways of Earning and Increasing Your Revenue appeared first on Done For You.

You might be in a place where you're getting into lead generation marketing or are trying different affiliate marketing tactics. Truth be told, there are several approaches to affiliate marketing strategies and tactics, and most of them can be found with a simple Google search.

Most affiliates are willing to share what they do and what works for them. So, if you look for successful affiliate strategies in Facebook groups, YouTube videos, or podcast interviews, you'll be able to find chunks of gold. Success leaves clues," and super affiliates often share their path to success either for free or in premium courses that they create and sell.

In this article, we've picked out the most important tactics you can implement to make affiliate marketing work for you.

We have excluded shady affiliate marketing strategies and dubious tactics because we believe that quality and real value in business always payback.

Keep in mind that affiliate marketers have been accused of trying to scam people - so you must follow a route that proves your business is not like that. That's not meant to say that affiliate marketers are scammers - it's meant to alert you to the preconceived notion that a lot of people have about this particular type of marketing.

Now that we got that out of the way, let's move into the real affiliate marketing tactics that work today. Use these to put together a plan on how to attract an audience and monetize your web properties. It's important to keep in mind that any business needs an audience and a product. We know that this is basic, but sometimes you are caught up in the "shiny object syndrome" and forget the business fundamentals.

These two - an audience and a product (or service) - are the minimum prerequisites to build and grow a viable business. So, no matter what affiliate marketing tactics you choose to follow, always keep building your audience to promote affiliate offers that are a good fit.

Real affiliate marketing tactics that work today

Niche site optimized for long-tail keywords

It wasn't too long ago that Greg Jeffries, a ClickFunnels super affiliate, won the "dream car" competition with no paid advertising at all. His affiliate marketing strategy was optimizing his niche sites for search engines.

Here's a video where Greg Jeffries talks about how he did it:

Specifically, what he did was go after all of the long-tail keywords he could find. His approach was that you cannot guess ahead of time what keywords your site will rank for. That is why you need to create content for all of the long-tail keywords you can find, even if the monthly search volume is low. Ranking for a lot of those will create a compound effect.

To our ears, this sounds like a solid affiliate and lead generation marketing strategy. Compared to trying to rank for high-competition keywords, or running high-CPC advertisements, Greg Jeffries' affiliate marketing tactics are low cost and can allow you to achieve long-lasting success.

Authority website

Having the go-to resource in the industry is a smart way to go about affiliate marketing. Either you attract organic traffic or use paid advertising - having an authority portal will help you build and monetize a brand.

Look at what Pat Flynn did, as an example. He built an authority site targeting food truck owners at foodtruckr.com. He researched the needs of this sort of professional and created a website with the tips and paid products a food truck owner would need.

Pat Flynn was able to rank the site for a lot of keywords and also attract publicity and social media buzz. After that, monetizing an authority website is not hard, either by selling your courses or by promoting affiliate offers.

Don't want to build a website? Here's what you can do instead...

Now, the aforementioned affiliate marketing tactics involve building a niche website. But you might not want to do that because it takes a lot of time and resources. However, we recommend that you consider going down that road because it will allow you to build a lasting brand and business in the years to come.

If you decide that these affiliate marketing tactics are not for you, we can present you with some other options. Here they are...

Standalone sales funnels for affiliate offers

Sometimes you want to catch the wave of a trending product, or you just want to promote an evergreen offer, like a loan insurance program. If that's the case, then a standalone sales funnel is what you need.

To build that, you don't need a website. You need a page builder for the funnel pages, a hosting service to host your funnel, and an email marketing platform to communicate with your leads.

A lead generation marketing and sales funnel programs like ClickFunnels or LeadPages allow you to host your funnels in their servers. However, we recommend that you buy your domain and connect it to whatever sales funnel building service you are going to use.

DFY sales funnels

Sales funnels for affiliate offers is part of our business at DoneForYou.com. We have devised successful affiliate marketing strategies for our clients and built dozens of funnels that are evergreen.

Get in touch with us to discuss how we can build a DFY sales funnel for you, and show you examples of our portfolio. We also have data to back up affiliate marketing strategies that work. We'll be happy to help you decide on the route you want to follow to build a profitable online business.

By the way, we have prepared eight done-for-you email marketing campaigns for affiliates in various niches. Get these affiliate email sequences here.

Video marketing

Video marketing is big, and it's no wonder that many super affiliates use it as their favorite means of attracting the right audience and promoting offers. YouTube is the second largest search engine. As with Google, the allure of such massive traffic is obvious, but that’s also the pitfall for marketers who struggle to rank the videos.

The affiliate marketing tactics used by Greg Jeffries (as we described them previously) can be applied to rank YouTube videos, too. Alternatively, you can bet on classic keywords, like "product name + review" or "product name + alternatives," to attract those consumers that are looking to compare different solutions.

No matter what you do on YouTube, you always need to create beautiful videos that provide value and help the consumer get the answer(s) they are looking for. You intend to entice video viewers to buy through your affiliate link.

So, don't forget to add that link in the video description, and, why not, mention it in your video. To make it easy for viewers to type your link in the browser address bar, use a link shortening service to create easy-to-remember links.

Amazon affiliate websites

An affiliate marketing strategy that has been the pillar of many six-figure affiliate businesses is Amazon affiliate websites. How it works: You build an eCommerce or a review site that is completely monetized through the Amazon Associates program.

This program gives you access to an endless array of products that you can choose to promote on your web properties. There are two simple ways to go about it:

1. Create a WordPress/WooCommerce website, install a plugin that imports Amazon products automatically, and attaches your affiliate link to the imported products. So, when a web visitor clicks on a product “buy” button, they are redirected to the same product on Amazon through your affiliate link. Such a WordPress plugin is WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates.
2. Create a product review site, where you'll be presenting and comparing the top products for a niche. Again, these products will have your affiliate link and send interested buyers over to Amazon.

Examples of Amazon affiliate websites

Here are some examples of websites that follow this type of affiliate marketing strategy:

• borncute.com
• gearweare.com
• nicershoes.com

Want more ideas on affiliate marketing tactics? Read our complete guide to starting affiliate marketing the right way.

Tools and tips on implementing successful affiliate marketing tactics

Nurture your audience

As mentioned above, you always need to keep in mind that building an audience is vital to your success. Whatever way you choose to do it (email list building, social media marketing, video email marketing), you need to be attracting and providing value to your select audience of a particular profile.

Will it be men that are interested in martial arts?  Moms of newborns or lawyers? It doesn't matter. Whatever audience you want to target, keep growing it, and it will bear fruit soon.

Choose the right affiliate offers

Never promote bad products or services to your audience. Not only is it unethical, but it will also deplete your audience's willingness to hear what you have to say. Only promote products that deliver on their promises, are of value and that can transform your fan's life. Do that and your audience will trust you, love you and buy from you - again and again.

Learn from yours and others' successes

Focus on the affiliate marketing tactics that are proven to work. Look at what others do -not necessarily what they teach - but what they do. Sign up for their newsletters and see how they approach affiliate marketing and what they promote. Model their tactics, and - why not - improve them!

Also, analyze your data and see what works. Use tools like Google Analytics and Statly to track sources of traffic, user behavior, and sales funnel conversion rates.  Not all of your campaigns will bear fruits. Pick the ones with the highest ROI and scale.

Be consistent and patient

Rome wasn't built in a day. Are you willing to create long-term success? If so, then stay away from get-rich-quick programs and release yourself from the belief that you will be an overnight success. No one is an overnight success.

When you hear millionaires talk about their successful affiliate marketing tactics, they often are open to the fact that it took them years to discover and tweak a winning strategy. Plan your affiliate marketing tactics, keeping focused on what works, and take a step every single day (or a week, depending on your availability) towards your goal.

Do your research on affiliate marketing tactics

Sometimes there are secrets in an industry that you won't know until you implement your marketing plan. If you've never done affiliate marketing before, you might not be aware of some link restrictions that social media and email marketing services impose.

For example, if you are promoting a JVZoo product, you won't be able to post your affiliate link on Facebook, because Facebook has banned all JVZoo domains. Similarly, MailChimp will close your account if you send out campaigns with affiliate links.

What you need to do is ask and learn from expert affiliates and read each medium's (social network or email marketing platform) terms and conditions before you start posting your links.

The right tools to implement your affiliate marketing tactics

Hopefully, this article provided some direction regarding which affiliate marketing tactics are best suited for your affiliate business.

Now, to help you get started implementing your plans, we'll list some online marketing tools and services. These are widely recognized services; however, we recommend that you do your research to find out which ones are a good fit for your budget and required features.

Domain name registration

Namecheap: As its name indicates, Namecheap is an affordable domain registration service. They also provide affordable hosting services.

Hosting

Bluehost: Bluehost is a popular, shared hosting service. Remember - you always get what you pay for. So, this is a good and affordable hosting solution. However, if you plan to drive tons of traffic to your web pages, go for high-end hosting service, like SiteGround.

GoDaddy: The same goes for GoDaddy. It's a popular service that can host your website on a shared server with no problems at all. If you expect high traffic peaks, either go for a premium hosting plan or another hosting provider.

You can use either Bluehost or GoDaddy to register your domain too.

Website and page builders

WordPress: WordPress is the most popular open-source CMS, and it's free. The majority of affiliate marketers base their websites, blogs, and sales funnels on WordPress. If you don't know it, it's time to get familiar with it because it powers 31.0% of all the websites on the Internet. You'll find it on your hosting dashboard. Most hosting companies provide a script for a one-click install.

WooCommerce: This is the most popular eCommerce platform for WordPress. First, you install WordPress on your site, and then WooCommerce comes on top of it to add the eCommerce functionality. It's completely free and you can install it from your WordPress dashboard.

OptimizePress: OptimizePress is a fantastic page builder for WordPress. You can use it to build landing pages, sales pages, and membership portals. Should you choose to promote their software, they also have a lucrative affiliate program.

WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates: This is a must-have for Amazon affiliate marketers. It imports all related products from Amazon automatically and adds your affiliate link. Visit the official website to see how it works.

DFY sales funnels

DoneForYou.com: DoneForYou.com is the top resource and service provider for DFY sales funnels that convert. If creating a sales funnel is on your affiliate marketing tactical plan (and that's strongly recommended), then feel free to schedule a call with us to discuss how we can help.

DIY sales funnel builders

LeadPages: LeadPages is a popular affiliate marketing tool because it allows you to build landing pages quickly, without code. Of course, when using LeadPages, you won't be seeking perfection in design or copywriting. For those, you'd need to outsource to a designer and a copywriter, respectively, or a turn-key sales funnel agency.

ClickFunnels: Similar to LeadPages, ClickFunnels is a widely respected solution for creating complete sales funnels. This is also a good product to promote as an affiliate marketer. ClickFunnels has an attractive compensation scheme and insightful material on how to promote the software and how to implement effective affiliate marketing tactics.

Email marketing

Convertly: Our email marketing and marketing automation platform. Highly recommended if you require a high level of service and deliverability for your email marketing campaigns.

AWeber: Not all email marketing service providers are friendly toward affiliate marketers. If you want to include affiliate marketing links in your campaigns, AWeber is the way to go.

Web tracking and analytics

Statly: Statly is one of the most advanced, yet simple, web analytics services readily available today. With Statly, you can easily visualize complete paths, from random web visitor to buyer, and uncover bottlenecks that present opportunities for higher conversions.

Google Analytics: Unless you've been living under a rock, you should know that Google Analytics is the industry standard for analyzing web traffic and visitor behavior on your site.

Affiliate offers

ShareASale: ShareASale is a well-known, affiliate marketing network that features a lot of software companies, including SaaS products. Not only do they have a lot of business offerings, but also you can get access to commission-based partnerships with garden, home, and other retail stores online.

ClickBank: ClickBank is an affiliate marketplace for all sorts of downloadable goods. You can find ebooks, audio programs, and video courses in most popular niches.

JVZoo: JVZoo is another famous marketplace for digital goods. They focus on BizOpp offerings, money-making opportunity programs and small-scale, marketing software, and WordPress plugins.

Standalone affiliate programs: Whatever industry you want to focus on, there must be an affiliate program that you can enroll. From mattresses and blenders to loans and B2B services, you name it! Just google "niche/product + partner program" or "niche/product + affiliate program" and you should be able to find the right one for you.

How to plan your affiliate marketing tactics

In affiliate marketing, as with everything, it's important to have a goal. To follow the right path, you need to know where you're headed. The right goal will propel you forward…will be the guide for your next step…will help you believe it is possible to make your dreams come true.

So, start by setting the right goals. Where do you want to be in 3 or 5 years? What do you want to achieve through working on your business? Why does this business matter to you? How will your life transform when you build a successful business? And, of course, how do you define success in terms of monetary goals, sales volume, the number of people you will affect positively, and the amount of value you are going to offer?

Then, put in place a tactical plan to break down your goals into doable affiliate marketing tactics.

Break down tactics into small actions that you can take consistently and bring you one step closer to your goal(s).

This affiliate marketing plan of goals, tactics, and actions will help keep you on track and be accountable for success or blunders.

Need help?

Should you need help devising your affiliate marketing strategy and putting your affiliate marketing plan on paper, contact us! We'll be more than happy to discuss and plan the best strategy for your affiliate business, and build all the sales infrastructure that will attract online leads and convert them into customers.

We have gained experience in all sorts of industries and products and can draw the big picture of a successful online business and attend to every little detail that will make a huge difference. Interested in learning more? Click this link to schedule a free strategy session.

GSDdaily Episode 29

Affiliate marketing week, by and large, is about affiliate marketing, so it is generating revenue without selling your own thing, so that's the idea of all of the lessons for the week.

Monday we talked about affiliate marketing. We introduced you to what affiliate marketing is. Tuesday we talked about where to find affiliate offers. Wednesday we talked about CPA networks and some of the more advanced levels of affiliate marketing where you might get paid $25 for sending a free trial buyer.

Today we're going to talk about lead generation marketing and how that fits into affiliate marketing. I'm going to give an example of how we have used it in the past to generate revenue for ourselves and other people.

Sign up for our accelerator group to get more information from us.

DFY Accelerator Group: where a lot of the kind of startup-oriented conversation, startup-oriented articles and material and how-tos and all that stuff, that's where that stuff is being posted

DFY Funnels Group: where we talked about putting together automated processes and sales systems that do a lot of the selling for you

Accelerate Group

The Accelerate Group is more about creating products and services and creating offers, and kind of bootstrapping your way to generating revenue online. That's the idea of that group.

Funnel Group

Whereas the funnel group is more about building an automated framework around the offer that you have or the offer that you're creating. Those two things usually don't go hand in hand. Usually, you have an idea for a product or you are building the product before you create the framework around selling it, and once you have that thing, then you can start looking at creating the framework.

There are situations, especially in knowledge-based and expert-based kinds of products where you can do both of them at the same time. You can create the product and sell that product, so there's always that too but it just depends on where you want to go. Oftentimes like if something is related to both starting up and sales funnels and we have a traffic group too, then I'll kind of post in all three, but that's kind of the idea there.

Lead Generation Marketing and Turning Leads into Passive Revenue

Today we're going to talk about lead generation marketing and turning leads into passive revenue, so this comes in two flavors.

1. Adding affiliate marketing to your products

If you are selling your own thing, then oftentimes you can add affiliate marketing into the backside of whatever it is you're selling and generate revenue that way. Let's say you are selling a $5,000 coaching program so that the coaching program is three months. You sell that thing. So somebody comes into your silo, your world, your company, your ecosystem, and they go through an automated webinar or they go through a sales video and they are pitched that thing.

It is your $5,000 program. They either buy that thing or they don't buy that thing, so if you don't have anything else to sell them and they didn't buy your coaching program, then one of the best things to do is to then have them go down a different rabbit hole.

Send them through affiliate products so that now they are seeing different messages from different vendors. You are being paid for that lead that you already got, so it's a passive income stream for you. You brought the lead-in. Probably paid for that lead because they bought your thing. You're able to monetize them for a very long time as an affiliate, and then after that maybe that you bring them back around and you send them to blog posts. All that other stuff and you can sell them something else that you're creating. But in the meantime, you can generate revenue from affiliate marketing.

So it's totally up to you. Personally, with our list, I don't promote a whole lot of affiliate products just because we have so much stuff that you know, especially content in these live streams. Now, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for me to promote other people's offers.

There are other people who after 30 days or 60 days they just run out of offers, like their internal offers, so they send them through and promote affiliate products, whether it's ClickBank, whether it's private affiliate programs, whether it's CPA programs, all that stuff that we talked about yesterday. That's where this starts to come into play. If you have your product, your list, your sequences, your offers, then you can bookend some affiliate offers on the backside of yours and generate revenue passively that way, so it's one strategy.

2. Build an affiliate marketing funnel

Another strategy is you can build an affiliate marketing funnel, a lead generation marketing funnel from the front side with the express intent of driving lead gen through your affiliate offers, so I'm going to show you that today. That's the point of today's presentation.

I'm going to show you some pages that are up and running and live and everything and walk you through visually the process of setting up one of these affiliate marketing lead generation marketing businesses, or revenues.

I don't even like to call them businesses because they're not. I mean literally, it's a landing page with a lead magnet, a confirmation page, and a shit ton of affiliate offers on the backside with maybe some blog posts, and the goal is it's a volume play. You are just driving traffic and leads on the front side and pulling money out of the backside through affiliate programs, and the sooner you can liquidate that ad spend, the better.

It becomes the challenge with like ClickBank is you're carrying that cost for two weeks or three weeks if you're solely promoting through ClickBank, which means that you're throwing that on a credit card. Then it's paying off in three weeks and then you're reinvesting, as opposed to your offers or like a JVZoo offer or a kind of a velvet rope kind of CPA deal, like where you're paid the day after for your offers. You're wired the money and then you can reinvest that back into traffic.

A lot of times it's about just the cashflow stuff of scale, so how quickly can affiliates pay you so that you can turn it back into paid traffic, and then from there you're able to scale the lead gen business that much further. I'm just going to walk through a quick little funnel here, so let me stop sharing this screen. I'm going to start sharing our browser.

Affiliate Lead Generation Marketing Funnel: Radial Method

This is a quick little tiny affiliate lead generation marketing funnel. I call this the radial method. The radial method is this. We generate a lead and a lead comes in. They opt-in for a thing, you know, the lead magnet checklist, whatever video, and then from there you send them to a bunch of other affiliate offers. Basically, they come in one place, and then it's like bing, affiliate offer, bing, affiliate offer, bing, affiliate, so it's like spokes on a wheel. You can think of it that way.

Two-step Opt-in Page

This is a super simple little opt-in page. It's a six-page report that talks about five trick photography tips for creating social media, like jaw-dropping social media photos. Little download button, so it's a two-step opt-in. We found two-step opt-ins to work well. This page layout works better than anything else we've tested for the most part. Every once in a while we get to like a highly visual, you know, and photography's kind of one of those but this page works better. If it's something visual then oftentimes less text, more picture works, like a bigger background image, but this page works well.

When they are opt-in in the lead generation marketing funnel, the next page, the next step is to go download the ebook, so here we have, "You're all set! Please click the buttons below to complete step 1 and step 2." What we found, and you're going to love this, so on confirmation pages, the first thing is nobody is ever, ever, evermore engaged with you than they are the second after they download something, the second after they are opt-in.

You have a captive audience on this page always, and this is the only time you're going to have a captive audience ever. They just opted in for something. They're waiting. They hit the confirmation page, and they are more interested in you than they probably ever will be, until right before they decide to buy something. And that's also a nice little hint for some transition here, but the confirmation page is super, super important.

Step 1, download the ebook.

You can send an ebook through email if you'd like. Oftentimes what we do is we either drop this confirmation page or just straight up hotlink them right to the affiliate offer and kind of cookie in between so that we can grab that conversion pixel.

Step 2, join the photography masterclass.

That's the affiliate product that we're going to promote.  That's always going to be the next step in lead generation marketing.

What is the CPA marketing trick?

What we find is that about 60% of people who do step 1, they're going to do step 2. It's an old CPA marketing trick. When you tell somebody to do two things, about 60% of people do both those things, which is a lot higher than if you just told them to do one thing, so it's just a weird psychology trick. On the confirmation page here, the next step is the download the report and then they go and grab the report. Then they go over to the affiliate offer.

This is the report in the lead generation marketing funnel. As I said, it is 10 pages long. It is nothing crazy. We got a cover photo, introduction, a little bit of table of contents, some pictures. You know, a very simple document to do. Nothing crazy, and the call to action at the very end is also, join the photography masterclass, which mimics this offer.

The photography masterclass is the affiliate product that we are promoting. Now, this particular affiliate product converts well, but it doesn't have any upsells. So it pays a 50% commission. It's like 27 bucks or $28 or whatever, which the commissions aren't fantastic and there's no kind of opportunity for upselling, but at the same time it converts well, and it's exactly what we need for this person. Now I don't know this. I don't know Evan. I've never talked to him. He built the product and the sales page and all of that stuff. I just am paid through ClickBank as an affiliate, so that's all.

Now, this particular offer, it's a blessing and a curse promoting affiliate offers because I have no control over this page. All I have is a link to send traffic there and then get paid as an affiliate. If the page breaks, I can't do anything about it. If the site gets infected, I can't do anything about it. It's a copy that needs to be tested or optimized, or you want to test different headlines or whatever.

I can't do anything about any of that stuff, but what I can do is I can pre-frame them a little bit better on the front side to drive up conversions on the sales page. There's also a way that you can actually replace this page and then use a secret ClickBank kind of shopping cart link to drive your stuff, but that's a much more advanced thing than what we're going to talk about today.

With this kind of lead generation marketing, this offer converts well. Now if we go over to ClickBank, we can see that just some general stats. So the average dollar per sale is $26. It isn't real high because there aren't any upsells, and so it is half of whatever the front-end offer is. The gravity is only two on this product meaning it doesn't sell.

There isn't a whole lot of affiliates who sell this offer. It is a good offer and it's been around for a very long time, like five or six years. We still use it in a lot of our sequences because it is just a good product. There are a lot of other photography products now that are a little newer, so you can take a look at that as it goes. There are photography editing products. There's taking family photos from an iPhone. There are all kinds of photography stuff. Selling stock photography. A lot of different ways you can generate revenue from photography affiliate products.

That's kind of the whole mix, like the lead generation marketing matrix of how it all goes. That makes sense so far? Alright, now if we go, so this is the ClickBank site. Now we're going to drop over to the iPad and I'm going to show you.

How to create an affiliate sequence?

We're going to go into AXIS. I'm going to show you how to create an affiliate sequence that has a bunch of these affiliate offers in there, and then I'm going to show you how it all ends up getting sequenced up.

We're going to go inside AXIS. It is our CRM if you want to learn more about it, so automation. It is at triggers.app. That's where the CRM lives. Now, I can show that to you. Triggers.app is where it lives, is where the front side of it lives, but so basically once you have an account, what AXIS does well is it sets up marketing automation, emails, and text messages and it also writes your email copy for you. What we're going to do is we're just going to jump right over to the email copy piece and I'm going to take you through that and then we'll get into how it all interfaces with the CRM.

If we go down on this ribbon, so once you get started, basically you're going to log in, you're going to go to the marketplace, and you're going to add the email copy app to your installation. Then from there you're going to go down the ribbon and you are going to, basically, you get dropped in this email autoresponder creation wizard. You're going to click "add new." You're going to choose the campaign that you want to run, so we just did photography. Photography affiliate campaign. A photography affiliate campaign. We're going to scroll down to the bottom. You can make it wider if you want so you can get a bunch of them to the side by side, but we're looking for the photography affiliate campaign.

There's a bunch of internal promotions here INSIDE the lead generation marketing funnel, so if you want to run a survey promotional sequence to your list, you can do a survey sequence or a bonding sequence or a waiting list, relaunch, or a flash sale. There are so many of them here. If you go to triggers.app, you can see all the sequences that are in here, but the affiliate sequence that we're looking for is photography. So photography is ... There's men's fitness, men's dating, green energy, weddings. So here's photography, so we're going to go to the photography niche. We're going to hit next.

Now we have our name, so the name is going to be just Jason for me. ClickBank ID is Drohn, and then we're just going to hit next here. So that's all we need to generate this photography sequence, so as you can see, the first offer in this mix is photography masterclass, and this is our affiliate offer so we're just going to open this guy up, and you can see it kicks right over into photography masterclass.

Okay, so you just got your DSLR.

Yeah, the page we were just on, and there's my HopLink there. So if somebody comes, they click the email, then they scroll down to the bottom, and then they ... Where'd it go? Right there. So $59. We're going to add it to the cart and I'm going to show you, this is how you know that this is your checkout.

At the very bottom, you can see right there. Can you see that? Way, way, way down there, so I'm going to make a big. Right there. It says, "Affiliate, Drohn." I need to move this for you. Right there. Down at the bottom right there it says, "Affiliate, Drohn." That means that you will be getting credit, or in this case, it would be me, would be getting credit for that sale. That's how AXIS is built, but so there are a bunch of other offers here.

Trick photography and special effects, how to sell stock photos, a photo editor, digital photography success, and then down here there are all the email sequences.

• 1: to promote photography masterclass
• 2: to promote photography masterclass
• 3: to promote photography masterclass
• 4: to promote photography masterclass
• 5: to promote photography masterclass

Email five goes out on day seven of the affiliate product promotion and the next offer is trick photography and special effects.

Basically how we do it is we mail the same offer for three or four days and then we take a break and then we mail the next offer, and oftentimes we'll put a bonding sequence, or not a bonding sequence but like a blog post in the middle of it, so just to break up the offer so when somebody is opening an email from us, they don't think they're getting an offer every single time. So that's typically how we do it.

You can also download as a text file, and in that text file then all of your offers are here, so we have all of our ClickBank products. Then we have our emails. Down to at the very bottom, you can't see this screen. I thought you could see my whole screen. Down at the very, very bottom of this thing we are ... Where'd it go? Alright, there it is. So at the very end, this is email 26 sent out on day 40, so this is 40 days worth of email copy that's already done for you. All the products are linked up.

Now, there's kind of one caveat to this lead generation marketing funnel. It goes back to us not controlling vendor products. We don't control ClickBank and most of these products in here are from ClickBank. Like twice a year we go through and we pull all of the offers out that ClickBank banned, no longer work or that switched affiliate programs. We pull them all out, we rewrite all the copy, and we are in the middle of one of those kinds of revamps right now.

It's just, if you're going to jump in, which would be awesome if you do, but just know that every once in a while you're going to click on one of these links here and like one of these guys. Boom, boom, boom. So one of these links, and it might not work. So in which case what we do is we just say, alright, just pull this guy out. Just omit this from your email sequence, and then you're off and running.

Now, what to do with this email copy. The reason we built AXIS and the CRM around this is that this lead generation marketing and email creation functionality was Scriptly. This email automation sequence was kind of our bread and butter. What we did was we were like, "Well, why don't we build an email sending suite around it?". That's exactly what AXIS is. Up in the CRM piece, you have your contact records, forms, and message center.

You can actually take these emails. Drop them into your lead generation marketing funnel. Then send them all from within the same piece of software. You can also create campaigns. Inside the campaign, you can just stack up all of the emails that are going out. It says, "Okay, we're doing the delay one, and then we're sending another email, and then we're doing another delay.". Everything is drag and drop, so literally, it's drag and drop.

You just go up here, you hit save automation, and boom. All of your emails are going out as they need to go, and then the form that you're going to be collecting email addresses on are also inside AXIS, so it's a nice, concise, condensed, one-stop-shop for email marketing and automation, and that was always the purpose of putting AXIS together.

Alright, now I'm just going to go through and we're going to jump on the iPad. I'm going to draw out what this radial method is from a 5,000-foot view so you can see the lead gen piece and how everything drips through the landing pages and go from there.

Alright, now we went through this the other day, but I wanted to go through it again because I think this presentation makes it a little bit more clear as to what we're doing. Here's the idea. Basically with this affiliate generation process, what happens is, just watch everyone.

With this affiliate generation process and this lead generation marketing process, what we're doing is we're getting leads from Facebook right here. We're getting leads from retargeting, so somebody who hits the website but then doesn't do anything.

We're retargeting them. We want our banner ads to show up where they are. Then anybody who's on an email list, whether it's a solo ad or it's an email list who hasn't opted in for this offer yet. What we do is we give them the free book, and we walked through the free book piece. This was the photography book that we gave away on the landing page. We sent them to a confirmation page. But we don't always do that, so this went to a confirmation page, and then they went to affiliate offer one. So affiliate offer one was that photography masterclass.

If they don't go, and there's no way to tell, but what we do is we end up sending them into, through emails, back to affiliate offer one. Ideally, it would be nice to be able to know if they purchased. This is because if they purchased then we wouldn't send them any more emails, but with ClickBank or with most affiliate offers, we can't tell whether they purchased or not.

We don't have that ability, so it's hard to pull them out of a sequence. When we don't know whether they bought or not, so we send them the emails to affiliate offer one.  Then emails to an affiliate offer two. Inside AXIS, you saw that affiliate offer one was photography masterclass. Affiliate offers two was to trick photography tips in this particular lead generation marketing funnel.

We send them into another email, and the email then is to a blog post. What we're trying to do is engage them and bond with them a little bit more. Then we send them into the next batch of emails, which is affiliate offer three. Then another email into another blog post, and then emails into the next affiliate offer. What we're doing is we're generating the lead up here. We're trying to generate the lead here and then we're just daisy-chaining these offers to generate revenue. We are trying to provide value as they go too.

Sometimes they make it down to the bottom here, and they see these offers. Other times, they might unsubscribe right here. So they go down to here and then they're done. It depends on how aggressively you promote. It depends on the blog posts that you put in the middle. There are always best practices here too. With lead generation marketing, there always is.

• How often do you mail?
• Do you have blog posts?
• How many emails do you mail?
• How aggressive are the emails?
• Are you trying to establish your brand?

Are you trying to build other people's brands through the affiliate marketing game?

There are lots of things to think about and things to consider.

That, my friends, is how to do lead generation marketing and how to make money with it passively. Does anybody have any questions? Have any questions, let me know over here in the ... Man, this camera. No fun. Okay. Alright, looks like we're good. Cool.

Alright, so tomorrow we're going to talk about some additional ways to generate revenue with a blog. It's not necessarily just going to be affiliate marketing. What I wanted to throw a different mix in because some of it is an affiliate. Some of it isn't, just some general ways if you have traffic and distribution what you can do there.

For Questions and Guide

You have anything at all, anything you would like me to answer in the next couple shows, go to DoneForYou.com/gsd. If you would like me to talk or like to jump on the phone and talk through an action plan, how to build one of these affiliate funnels, how to add affiliate marketing into the back end of your lead generation marketing funnel, your lead-generation marketing, then just go to DoneForYou.com/start and we will get you taken care of.

The post How To Double Your Income In Any Niche appeared first on Done For You.

Welcome to today’s GSDdaily. Today, we’re going to talk about how to productize services!

This is number 10. It is Friday morning and we’ve been up and at ’em already, which has been fantastic. We have a pretty cool topic we’re going to talk about today, which is productizing services so that you can unlink time from money. And here’s what I mean by that. So time is money. Time equals money. When you are working for somebody else, time equals money.

When I was at Pepsi driving a semi-truck around, I made 12 bucks an hour or 13 bucks an hour, whatever, like a jillion years ago. And in order for you to make more money, you had to spend more time doing whatever it is you were doing working. So that’s a challenge if you want to get ahead, if you want to make money. Especially now, we are seeing people, they’re needing to work from home. Businesses are closed, shops are closed, so time doesn’t even equal money anymore. It should, but anyway.

If you want to break out of that, if you want to start generating revenue for your business and unlinking time from money, breaking that connection, then what you need to do is productize service, productize your coaching, productize your consulting, use digital products in a way to package your information and your knowledge to sell more of something.

What that is going to do is it’s basically going to help you generate more revenue and scale online more quickly. So if you are watching this live stream, go to DoneForYou.com and you can actually ask questions there. So I’m just going to go ahead and paste that link here.

Let’s see, in the next couple of days, we’re going to be rolling out two brand-new Facebook groups. One of them is going to be DFY Funnels and the other one is going to be DFY Traffic. And the idea behind both of those is really just to dive into expert tips and build tips and how-tos and all that other stuff around those two things, around traffic and funnels; because there are so many different ways to pull off each, it really just depends on how you want to go about it.

If you want to ask questions … And there’s the Facebook page for Done For You. So I’m dropping out to all of the channels that we are on now. And we’re loosely basing this on this post. And then I also have a building map that we’re going to go through. So we’re going to go through and talk about how to productize your business based on some of the ways through it.

Just to kick this whole thing off: as a freelancer or as a service-based business, you sell something, obviously. And generally, you might work for $200 an hour or $100 an hour or $50 an hour or $30 an hour or $10 an hour, $15 an hour, whatever. When you’re working, when you were trading time for dollars, there’s always a top-end that you’re going to hit.

When I have coaches or consultants who come in and we’ve even worked with some counselors and some psychologists. And when you’re trading like an hour for $35, there is always going to be a ceiling that you’re going to hit. So even when you say, “Okay, I’m charging 100 bucks an hour,” let’s make the math easy, “charging $100 an hour.” Well, if you have 20 clients, you’re making $2,000 a week. $2,000 a week depends on where you are, but it might be awesome, it might not be, whatever. But at the end of the day, you’re going to give 30% for taxes and then you have to pay the insurance and then you have to pay for your office and then your computer and all the software that you buy and your CRM and all that other stuff.

By the time you get right down to it, is it enough? And if you want to scale past that $2,000 mark, then you’re going to have to take on more clients, which means you have to invest more time. If you take 30 or 40 or 50 clients, who each demand an hour a week, then you’re at the point where you’re overworking yourself. You have no downtime, you’re always thinking about client stuff. And are you actually delivering the best productize service to the people who are paying you than not? So, that’s always the issue. It’s always kind of the thought when it comes to trading time for money.

One of the ways to break out of that is very simply to productize service, to productize your business. And one of the best ways of doing it is to put packages together. One of the ways that we end up helping folks is when we build sales funnels, we will go through and figure out.

1. What do we need to do to bring people in?
2. What is your inbound marketing strategy?
3. How do we need to have them apply?
4. What lead magnet and webinar do we need?
5. What sales video do we need?

In terms of the offer itself, there’s one of a number of ways that you can break it up. I mean, you can do a monthly retainer and so it’s $1,000 a month or $2,500 a month or you have to prepay for three months, or however, that ends up looking. But you can put together a block of deliverables and a block of things that you’re going to do for a client and then charge accordingly for those.

It might be weekly, one-hour sessions with a coach, and the coach are going to charge you 2,500 bucks. You’re going to charge your clients 2,500 bucks. Or it could be biweekly and it’s $1,000 a month, or it’s biweekly and you charge for six months at a time, so it might be $4,500 because it’s six months times $1,000 and then you give a $1,500 break when somebody pays in full. So there are lots of ways to package and productize service, your coaching, your consulting, whatever. And typically that is sold through a proposal or it’s sold through some sort of personal one-on-one kind of a sales call.

It’s really difficult to sell a productized service through an order form: go here and buy this. We’ve tried many, many times and sometimes you can pull it off, but mostly you can’t. So oftentimes, the sales call is required in your higher-end productize service.

The process itself: so let’s say if you have a prospect who they started with a phone call, discussed the requirements and the scope of the project, and then they figure out what is going to help them the best. And generally, that falls within the framework of your product-based service. So there might be a little bit of this and a little bit of that or a little bit less of this and more of that, but you can think of it as a Netflix membership in a very, very simple scenario.

Some people paying Netflix the 12 bucks a month or the 15 bucks a month. They pay Netflix and they stream movies every night or they rent DVDs. They’re always renting a DVD and throwing it back in the mail. And so Netflix doesn’t make a whole lot of money on that person; people like me, actually.

Netflix doesn’t make a whole lot of money on me, even though we have the four-screen plan and whatever, and we’ve been with them forever, just because of shipping costs, because of bandwidth streaming, because we have a son who watches shit like crazy all the time. So they don’t do really well when it comes to me. But for every one of me, there are a hundred people that pay Netflix and don’t really use it a whole lot. They might use it here and there. They don’t have kids who binge crazy stuff, like whenever.

So your clients are going to be the same way. You’re going to have some clients who use every single ounce of support that you will provide. And then you can also put stipulations in your proposals and contracts to stipulate that stuff. But then you’re going to have a bunch of clients who use what they need and they’re not a chore to handle. So there’s always that to be managed when you’re putting your productize service packages together, too. So it’s just something you have to play with. There are an ebb and flow to it.

By having productize service, you’re able to, A, communicate the value a lot easier. And B, you’re also able to stand above all of the competition who they’re actually putting entire proposals and quotes and all this other stuff out there that is: oh, it’s going to be such and such for this and such for that, and blah, blah, blah, and it’s going to be $100 for every 15-minute increment over and above any email that you send. So depending on the profession you’re in, I mean if it’s not legal, sometimes it just ends up benefiting you working that way.

The other thing that happens when you productize services, is it eliminates uncertainty. So what happens is you end up removing all of the discovery parts of the initial sales phases. You can create webinars and create sales materials that talk to one specific service as opposed to. What you can do is in your sales copy, you can speak to one type of person or one person, one marketing avatar. So it ends up you cut through all the noise that way.

Somebody can look on your website, look something up, watch a sales video, fill out a form. And they already know what you offer because you’ve got your productize service. They oftentimes already know what the price is. The sales call is kind of like glorified order takers. They know what they need, they know what you offer. A lot of times they know what the price is. They just have to get a couple of questions answered and then say yes. So not every project is then customized to their need. You don’t need to quote it and bicker back and forth and negotiate back and forth.

In fact, when you productize service, there’s almost no negotiation. There might be a little bit, kind of breaking up the payments or whatever, but the price is rarely ever discussed. It’s kind of like when you’re selling a house and it’s owner-financing. I haven’t done this, but a lot of our real estate clients have.

They tell me when you’re selling a house that’s owner-financed, you can charge them pretty much whatever you want because you are the one financing it. And the person never asks … because they’re going to end up paying so much less than if they were to go to a bank anyway. So they never ask about the price because it ends up being a much better deal for them anyway.

Now, some of the benefits of this productize service master plan. One of the things that we really, really like about selling your productize service this way is you can package them together inside of products. And we talked about digital products yesterday. And I’m going to show you a building map that I had meant to go through yesterday, but I totally freaking spaced on it.

I was halfway through the live stream and rather than go get it and dig it out and all that other stuff, I was like, “All right, I’m just going to chill with it, and then maybe tomorrow I’ll bring it up,” but anyway. So when it comes to bundling your productize service structure, digital products, coaching programs, recorded videos and membership training, all of that stuff works out so well because we call it assisted learning.

So you can think of colleges now. And even though everybody’s having such a shitty time right now trying to figure out how to close out the school year, and you have all these traditional universities who are trying to get online right now. This membership world and this online digital product world have been around forever. So somebody like me or some of the other internet marketers are like, “Well yeah, all you got to do is you just record some videos and throw it up in Teachable and then boom, done.” We’ve done it like a million times, but whatever.

But in terms of assisted learning, if you want to have a lot of people go through your classes, I mean, if you want … So you can talk one-on-one with 10 people, 12 people, 15 people. It depends on your capacity to being maxed out. And then that capacity to being maxed out is your ceiling for revenue.

Let’s say you’re charging $500 a month to 10 clients, well, you’re only making 5,000 bucks. So like I said: taxes, office, internet, software, boom, boom, whatever; people, VAs, whatever. Then, you’re going to tap out pretty quickly. You want to make more, you have to sign up more clients.

With a product-based or assisted learning model, basically, you can productize your knowledge. You can put it in a video course and then you can offer memberships to that video course. Or you can sell that video courses as a one-time fee, or you can give it away as a bonus for anybody who signs up to do work with you.

Let’s say right now, I’m going to call you a knowledge commerce professional. We were just talking about colleges and stuff, so we’re just talking about people who … Let’s say what you do is you help people record their digital training. So you can put together a little product, a little video product, that will teach somebody how to set up their camera, how to do their mic, how to set up their lights, the software that they need to have in order to record themselves on screen. You can put together, you can automate all of this low tech stuff; not low tech, but it’s actually pretty high tech, but you know what I mean.

You can teach somebody without necessarily having to verbally teach them or go to their house or jump on a Zoom with them or whatever. And they get the benefit of that immediately, and then you can pick up where it’s left off. So once they have the video training up and running, then you can help them put it where it needs to go, whether it’s Teachable or LearnDash or WishList Member or WordPress or whatever.

You can help them upload all that stuff and organize it into classes, then offer it for sale or offer it to their students, whatever, however it ends up looking. So you have that base work. You have that knowledge base that lets you start selling or that lets you start training immediately when somebody says, “Yes, I want to work with you.” So it ends up working out really nice that way.

That’s the assisted learning approach. It also gives you some sanity because you are not having to reiterate the same thing over and over and over and over again. I mean oftentimes, when I have to answer a question more than a couple times, I create a video like this or a lot of times you’ll see these live streams are sometimes more out of a need because I will have answered a question quite a few times. What I’m doing is I’m creating content that I can then put into a blog post and then just literally link: boom, here’s your answer, here’s your answer.

After a while once you have that knowledge base accumulated, then it becomes a lot easier to do coaching and consulting and training and all that other stuff. So in digital, products are infinitely scalable. That’s the other nice piece about it. I mean, especially if it’s a membership site or something self-fulfilled, then all you got to do is drive traffic to the front side of it after you have your sales funnel figured out and then you can go from there.

With that, I’m going to go through this thing called a bit a digital product build map. And I’m going to switch my screen here. For those of you, so if you want this digital product build map … Let’s see. So let me grab this link here. Open link in new tab. All right, here we go. I’m going to throw this in our comment box here.

This is the digital product build map, and this is going to open up directly into the page, so to the PDF, so you don’t need to opt-in for it or anything, partly because I don’t know where the opt-in page is at the moment because, like I said, I just wanted to do this from a training standpoint. All right, so this is good. I’m going to share this screen, I’m going to share the entire screen. Okay, cool. So you should be able to see this in a minute. So I’m going to share this guy. All right, so now you are looking at my screen, and then we’re going to pull this build map up. Okay. All right.

This is the digital product build map. And I don’t know why this keeps coming up, but anyway, you can check it out. So digital product build map. And I’m going to make this full screen. Let’s just make sure. All right, so that’s full screen. There we go. All right, now we should be good. So digital product build map: this thing is quite intricate. What we’re going to do is we’re going to step through the beginning phases of this. I did these just from a simplicity standpoint, just to help work through some of these more complicated processes.

The first thing, we start up here at the top. We start our digital product. So we know we want to start something, we want to build a product that packages our knowledge, whether it’s a membership site or whatever. So what we do is the first step is we brainstorm ideas. And the brainstorming of ideas really starts with what do people come to you for? What questions do you often get answered? What do you do for work? All of that kind of stuff.

The next phase is: is there money in that space? I know that sounds like a simplistic thing, but there are so many spaces, so many niches online where there isn’t money. And literally right now, money is just being spent differently than it was even a month ago. Is your product idea, productize service plan, whatever, is money being spent there right now? The answer might be yes, the answer might be no.

If you have a landscaping company chances, I mean, you might be fine right now, but in a month will you still be? And if not, you should pivot. And that’s actually the next point, which is: is there money? Yes. Okay, cool. Would you spend money? And if there is not money, no, you move onto the next idea and you bounce back to brainstorm ideas.

The next question is: do people care? Some people don’t care. There might be money in it, but people don’t care. Yes, you layout the product. No, you return to start. You head back to the brainstorming ideas session. Now if people care and there’s money, then we kick down here to we mind map the product. And I think on the first presentation, the first live stream, we actually mind-mapped a product. So you can go back to that; it would have been GSD Daily 001.

We actually went through and mind mapped a product real quick. Once we mind map a product … And for all intents and purposes, a mind map really is you start in the center, so you have a topic in the middle and then you go one, two, three, four, five, six. This ends up being mod one, mod two, mod three, module four. And then from here you go one, two, three, four. And then this is lesson one, lesson two, lesson three, and then so on and so forth. So basically, you start in the middle, you start right here.

Do I have a highlighter? I do. So you start right here and then you kick down into module four or module one or whatever. And then you do lesson one, lesson two, lesson three, and then so on and so forth. That’s the idea of mind mapping the product.

Once the product is mind mapped, what format, what modality does this thing need to live in? So is it going to be a video course, which it should be? I mean, right now, most things need to be video courses, just because that’s how we’re consuming information and that’s how people understand. It’s not how people understand, but all in all …

Oops, I just … There we go. Boom. I just put the iPad down and it got all weird. But anymore, products need to be video. They need to include video because the video is how people are learning and how people are understanding things. So video is kind of crucial and quintessential when it comes to putting everything together. Audio is oftentimes a function of video.

What we do is we actually record the video and then we pull out the audio and then we put all that stuff in a membership site, typically. Text, written: you always need text just because there’s a lot of people who just prefer text, and I am one of those people, or you can do live. Live right now. When I first built this, I meant live as in the live event, but not so much anymore. Live events, for all intents and purposes right now, I mean, there’s not a whole lot going on there. I’m just going to switch up the view here.

All right. Okay, so we’re just going to make that one bigger. So live events, not so much anymore, but basically what you want to do is you want to put all these things together. You can do video and then you can do audio, and all that gets put into a membership site with some text content. And then live, you can actually sell live. You can do live as an upsell, or live coaching or group coaching or whatever, so that ends up working out pretty nice.

Then, so once we figure out what format we’re going to build in, then we have to create the content. So that involves recording it. We use either ScreenFlow for videos where you record your screen, or Camtasia if you’re on a PC. So ScreenFlow is a Mac thing, Camtasia is Mac or PC. But if you’re on a Mac, you’re going to want to use ScreenFlow.

Once the content is recorded, you edit it, you save it, then you produce your box shots. There are all kinds of software out there that you can produce like DVD covers and product labels and all kinds of stuff. Produce your box shots. And we want to create the website.

And this is kind of where my team and I come in when we’re talking about a productize service plan.

We create the website, we write the sales pages, the thank you pages, and actually go through and promote the product. So this where your sales funnel comes in. Your sales funnel is a hell of a lot more intricate than just some of these pieces here. So the website is a lot of steps; sales pages, tons of steps; promoting the product is a ton of steps. But that’s where we come in is the tail end of this. But we will also help with mind mapping the product and then doing the course content, too.

If we scroll down here in this build of the map, we see that there are individual steps for each of the pieces. So here we have started your digital product, brainstorm ideas, and then down below, how do you brainstorm ideas? Well, you can go to ClickBank, you can go to Amazon, you can go to dummies.com which, is the Dummies books, which we like to use from a product research standpoint.

If you have ideas, you want to write them down and then ask yourself: do people spend money, is there traffic? And then as long as people spend money and there’s traffic, then the next thing to do is to go mind map your idea.

When you mind map, we kind of already blew through this a little bit, but you brainstorm your training. Then you either do a blank sheet of paper where you can actually just mind map your stuff here, or there’s a piece of software that we covered in that Get Shit Done Daily episode one, and it was called MindMeister, mindmeister.com.

Then, you can write down any talking points related to your product. You create the categories and then you can reorganize those points. So what I do is it’s literally a brain dump where I just kind of blitz everything and say, “Okay these are” … Actually, this entire spreadsheet or this thing that you’re looking at right now is all the product of a mind map. Basically: okay, what are all the pieces of building a digital product?  You organize those into sub-categories and then you go from there.

What you do after you organize all the points, you want to add context to each point, add content. So these might be personal examples. So we got personal examples, images, notes, things that you’ve saved and put in the past, pictures, videos, examples of your work, that kind of thing. And then you want to go ahead and decide on delivery, video, audio, text, all of that stuff. And then your product brainstorming is done.

Now here, we actually get into the different modalities. If you’re creating a video product or you’re creating an audio product, then we start up top. And you’ll see here that if you’re creating a video product, there’s the scenario, and then you go down and you export the audio and get it transcribed, which gives you the written. So, that works nice.

Now, to productize service, we set up the beginning parts of the sales funnel. So here we register a domain, we set up hosting. This is all pretty generic stuff; install WordPress. We use OptimizePress for all of our builds. So we install that. And then we go through and we create pages and we get the product shots and decide on the sales funnel. So now, this is either going to be a webinar, multi-video or VSL upsell, or VSL full-qualified lead.

It’s going to be one of these four formats. Then we write sales copy, you write the headline: problem solution, introduce the product, add the features and benefits, talk about the price, deliver the guarantee, and then close the offer. You post that thing to the site. This is where you set up your shopping cart. Ultimately, it’s how you promote your product. There are some free traffic strategies and ideas, and then this should be paid: solo ads, AdWords, and Facebook.

That is creating and launching a digital product and also productize service. Because what happens is is once you have this thing up and running, then you add coaching or live or consulting into the mix. And you have just successfully transitioned your productize service to the web as a knowledge product, and it’s an assisted learning product, which works out tremendously well from scaling and building and all of that other stuff. Thank you for the thumbs up. I appreciate that. Did you like this?

If you liked this, let me know. I have a lot of these kinds of build maps and I enjoy putting them together and I enjoy working through these things. And for me, it just helps making sure that everything is as good. And my camera’s all being all weird; anyway. But yeah, these build maps are great, just from keeping your head on straight when things get a little crazy during the day. And it’s what goes next, and so on and so forth.

Download that thing. Jump in and come up with productize service plan. If you have any questions at all, feel free to go to DoneForYou.com. There’s a chat box in the box. Or if you want to schedule an action plan call, go to DoneForYou.com/start, and we will jump on the phone and talk about your digital product, talk about your traffic, talk about your sales funnel and put together an action plan for that.

If there’s anything else that I can do in the meantime, just let me know. Like I said, Monday through Friday, 10:00 AM, I’m here. And then on Monday, we will be back with something different. I don’t quite know what it is. If you have any questions that you want answered, go to DoneForYou.com/GSD and there’s a little form there that you can ask any question, and then we will go from there. So I will talk to you soon. Have fun, have a great day, have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday. All right, thanks. Bye.

The post Best Strategies To Scale Your Business appeared first on Done For You.

Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today’s presentation. What we’re going to talk about today, we’re just going to bust right into it and that is how to sell digital products. There are so many services and many people with expertise and knowledge that right now is sitting at home.

What I wanted to do was kick off this idea, but this thing that I have had a lot of experience in, in the last decade, which is selling digital products, coaching, all of that kind of stuff. Because when you’re talking about how to sell digital products and membership sites and e-books, they give you a way to package your knowledge and sell it at scale.

Whether 100 people download your e-book or 1,000 people download your e-book or join your membership site or go through your digital course, then it doesn’t necessarily matter. Because they’re learning from you, it’s just in a prepackaged way.

I actually wrote an entire book on this called Create. The title of the book is Transform What You Know Into How You Get Paid. It is available on Amazon but I don’t think it will probably get shipped to you for the next month. In today’s presentation, we’re going to go through a little bit of what’s in the book.

We’re also going to talk about, and a lot of it, the hyper condensed form of it is available over on Done For You. If you’re on the Done For You Facebook page or on the YouTube channel, you’re going to be able to see this post here. In the question box, I just dropped a link. But basically, that is how to launch and sell digital products, a very, very condensed form.

My goal with today’s presentation was to go through and talk about packaging your knowledge and experience up into products. The different kinds of products that you can sell, what you can get from those products, as in how much you can charge from those products. And then ultimately, how to sell those products.

This literally is, I think this book is 239 pages. We have a lot to cover in the next 30 minutes or 45 minutes or so. Obviously, we’re not going to get through all of it, but we’re going to do our best to move through the information.

Let me just drop my link in here. This is the blog post that we’re going to be riffing off of. This blog post is the ultimate guide for how to sell digital products. And then we’re going to throw this…

Basically in packaging your knowledge and experience up into something that can be sold online and fulfilled online and fulfilled digitally, you don’t have to fulfill a physical product. You don’t have any costs of goods sold, you don’t have the cost of DVDs or any of this other stuff. That stuff was all super, super popular back when I first got started, 10, 12 years ago, people had these big DVD courses where they basically shipped you a box of stuff. There were DVDs and workbooks and textbooks and all kinds of crazy stuff in there. And that’s how they taught people.

These big-box courses, I know the very, very first one that I bought was Carleton Sheets, which was a real estate one, a no money down real estate guide. And it was the first time I ever saw an information product. I remember I actually have pictures of it, way, way, way back in the day as I unboxed it. Because it was the first information product that I had ever purchased myself.

Interestingly, and this just came to me, when I was younger, when I was like 10, 12, 15, my dad used to go to these seminars and he used to buy these six cassette products on how to negotiate better, how to sell better. And what he used to do was I had this cassette player that you can record these tapes and he would have me tape them and tape a version for myself. But in taping the version for myself, he knew that I was going to sit there and listen to it.

Oddly enough, I was a teenager and learning how to negotiate and I didn’t even know it because I’m listening to these tapes. It’s kind of an interesting thought. That was like the beginning of my digital product days or my information product days, was way, way back then.

Progressed to about 10 years ago and the very first e-book that I created was an e-book called Client Crusher and it was 20 pages and it was like 10 tips on how to work with clients and how to attract clients and sell clients and everything else. That was my first foray into that which is selling digital products.

Based on that product or based on that e-book, we created a video course for it. The video course turned into the next offer and the next offer and the next offer. Since I’ve launched a lot of stuff online and figuring how to sell digital products themselves has been trial by fire…  We’ve helped hundreds of other companies sell digital products and membership sites and all that other stuff.

Where I start when working with a client is just having them figure out what they are interested in or what they continually get asked. Because if somebody asks you again and again and again, what question do they ask? Because if they ask it, then they know that you have the answer for them or at least they think you have the answer for them. Oftentimes it’s a great way to start the conversation for a digital product and then you just continue building out what that product would look like.

Let’s say you are an accountant and you work on a lot of tax accounting. Obviously, some of the questions that I’m sure you get asked a lot from other business owners or whatever are, how do I save money on my taxes? What can I do to lower my tax liability? Especially this time of year, right? Or maybe not like directly this time of year, but you get it, this year, in particular.

But by and large, people are going to be asking you about tax-related accounting strategies. At the end of the day, you can put together a product for business owners on how to lower their tax burden or whatever. I hope that shuts off. There it goes, it turned off.

But the digital product can take one of several different shapes. Actually, I’m going to flip the screen here. I’m going to share a different screen. I hope this one… Oh, there it is. Okay.

I actually just dropped this e-book last week because I thought that folks needed to read it.  We updated it all. It’s called Funnel Factor. Here’s a link. I’m just going to throw the link up here in the Facebook chat, so you can go ahead and download it there. Just doneforyou.com/resources/funnelfactor.

This report, if you scroll down to the table of contents, we’re just going to look at this piece right here. If we look at what to offer, there’s really a lot of things that you can sell online. Of course, you can sell digital products, physical products, you can sell coaching, consulting. There are so many different things.

But when it comes to information products, there are e-books, there are video courses, there are membership sites and there are audio programs. Your e-book is going to end up being a PDF, kind of like the one you’re looking at here, like this Funnel Factor book. This particular book is 274 pages long, but it doesn’t need to be that long. You can have an e-book that’s 60 pages and charge $27 or $19 or whatever if it’s sold from your website.

The other way you can actually work with an e-book is you can upload it to Kindle or Apple iBooks. You can go to kdp.amazon.com and upload it there. I’m going to share my screen again. I’m going to flip around here.

If we go to this, all right, then we’re going to go to kdp.amazon.com. KTD stands for Kindle Digital Publishing. With Kindle Digital Publishing, you can upload your e-book and it gets added to the Kindle marketplace. You can sell on Kindle.

Kindle Digital Publishing also now does paperbacks. Our paperback, this one, was actually created in, it was CreateSpace. Amazon bought CreateSpace, rolled it up into Kindle Digital Publishing.  Now you can create your e-books through Kindle Digital Publishing. They actually also, Kindle, have a piece of software called Kindle Create, which is software for… did you download to your Mac or your PC?

And it’s very much like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, but it downloads, and then you can put your book together and format it inside the software and then upload it to Kindle Digital Publishing. It makes a nice seamless transition when you’re uploading, or when you’re going to list your e-book. If you have a report or an e-book that is 80% done or 60% done or 50% done or whatever, you can upload it to Amazon. Then start generating revenue that way.

One of the ways that a lot of people leverage e-books is they include links to their more expensive services.  When somebody downloads your book, they are a buyer, that’s why you see books for 99 cents on Kindle. Because that person, they have a credit card, they pay 99 cents, they value information to a degree. If they opt into anything after that, they’re already a buyer. They’re going to be worth a lot more to your business than not. That’s one way of leveraging e-books in particular. Kindle Creates as a great way of doing e-books.

Way, way back in the day, we used to just export as a PDF and then list it for sale on the website. And then we would include a video sales letter or a sales page that would sell that PDF and you could charge a little bit more. You could charge like 20 bucks or 27 or 37 or even $47 for a PDF with a couple of bonuses, a couple of bonus PDFs. that has worked out nicely.

But e-books now are synonymous with Kindle, they’re synonymous with tablets. You can still get them, you can still sell them on a website, but if you’re going to sell an e-book you want to make sure to key into the platform.

The nice thing about Amazon is, Amazon is the number three search engine in the world. If you have a book about a topic and its keyword loaded correctly and it gets some reviews and all that other kind of Amazon ranking stuff, then your Kindle book, you can get distribution through Amazon’s buyer network, basically. Amazon is a built-in traffic source, it’s a built-in traffic channel for you. It’s a nice way of reaching out to prospects who don’t know who you are yet. That is a bonus.

As far as kicking back into this idea of how to sell digital products, e-books are a great way of getting started. It’s a great way of starting your digital product empire if you will. It’s not the end-all, be-all. You have to sell a shit load of e-books to make any kind of decent money. Oftentimes the book is meant as a way to raise awareness for the rest of the things you do. And the rest of the things you do are largely important when you sell digital products from your website.

I’m going to share my screen again. We’re going to go back to this Funnel Factory book. Video courses, membership sites, audio programs, coaching, those are all some of your higher-end, in terms of how to sell digital products, information products, video courses, membership sites, and audio programs, things that they can capture your knowledge and then be streamed and then be sold as a product, as a package.

And in terms of what to charge, I’ve seen 20-page e-books literally sell for $1,000 and 20-hour video courses sell for $1. Really a lot of times it depends on the value, the perceived value that that material has. A $1,000 e-book is meant less to sell and more importantly to establish perceived value.

Your physical book is a product. Furthermore, you can package your information up into a physical book and sell it. You can sell it on Amazon through something like CreateSpace. You can charge 19.95, you can charge 12 bucks or 14 bucks or 10 bucks or whatever.

The e-book is the digital form of that. If you’re selling it on your own website, it’s going to usually be like $27 to $37. Unless it is meant as a positioning tool, like a tripwire, where you basically establish a buyer lead, and then march them through a sales funnel, in which case your e-book might be $7 or $9 or $4 or whatever. If it’s on Kindle or iBooks, then you’re probably looking between 2.99 and 7.99. Or 2.99 and 9.99 for an e-book.

Audio products are less important now. They’re less mainstream now than they were even four or five years ago. Four or five years ago, you saw a lot of cassettes, a lot of audio products, CD products, because they were low bandwidth. Now, I’m streaming a video right now, everybody expects video when they purchase a digital product, they expect video. Or like an e-book or a worksheet or a workbook or whatever and oftentimes they expect all of it.

They expect having a video, they expect having an e-book, you need to have both modalities to sell for any decent money anymore. $97, $197 or $497 or $1,000 or whatever. You need to have a video. You need to have e-books and workbooks and supporting material. The audio product is a bonus now. What you do is you create the video product and then you export the audio, you pull out the MP3 and then you add it to the lesson as an MP3 file, that somebody can download and listen to on their phone or their iPad or whatever.

I love the audio piece to it, because personally when I’m going through a product and they have audio, I’ll pull them all down to like my mobile phone and then listen to it when I’m mowing the lawn, so it ends up being nice that way. I can get a refresher of the information as I’m doing some work around the house.

But audio products you still see every once in a while. But if you’re going to go to the trouble of making an audio product, just do a video course. And just do a video course or a membership, go through, create the PowerPoint slides, talk to the PowerPoint slides, record yourself on camera kind of like this, get them transcribed so that you can create e-books and stuff out of it.

The video course should be four to six modules. Have one central underlying idea of what it is you want to cover, and then break it down into four to six modules. And if you don’t know what those modules should be, if you have a list of friends or customers or whatever, ask them, if I was to teach this, what would you want to know? Give me a list of questions that you would ask me so that I can put them together in a digital product. And then you can go through it and I’ll give you access to it for free. That’s a nice way of giving the ideas to create it.

The modules, four to six modules, oftentimes you don’t necessarily want to give them all the modules at once. You want to drip the material out. We’re so ADD that oftentimes a course that is a big box of shit, just, boom, like it’s difficult to get through it. You start and then you’re like, wow, I’ve got so much more to do.

Oftentimes, like a lot of our clients, we drip it out week by week. Week one is module one, week two is module two. It will really help when you purchase the product through a payment plan, like a three payment plan or whatever. Then you can drip the material out. The whole course will be released once they are done paying for it.

But even like a full payment at the beginning, we still try to drip the content out with like workbooks and homework and stuff, so that they still consume the course in very bite-size packages. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a ton of information every week. It might just be 20 minutes or 40 minutes or an hour.

We say typically a week’s worth of content should be about an hour. It can be as little as 20 minutes and then cut up into videos or 20 minutes in a workbook. It really just depends on the material and how dense it is and how much people have to think about it and work at it. And is there a time that somebody needs to spend over and above what is in the course? That kind of thing.

Big box courses we talked about, this is very much like a masterclass. When figuring how to sell digital products, a great way to do this is the packaging.

That Masterclass has a lot of video, workbooks, maybe a software element, a coaching element, some sort of a group chat element. They’re pretty hot for any longer commitment course. If the course is four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks or 12 weeks or whatever, then usually it is based on this assisted learning platform, where you have some videos every week, and then there’s some homework every week. And then there’s some sort of group coaching call or office hours or something like that. That tends to work out really nicely from a big box course standpoint.

Now oftentimes these courses sell between $1,000 and $5,000. They typically have a longer prospect journey, a longer ramp-up time. Somebody becomes aware of you. They sign up for a lead magnet, they’re on their email list for a little while, they jump on a webinar. On that webinar, you make the pitch into the course. They purchase the said course, and then they go through it week by week by week. Every week you can think about it as a college university class.

Every week you have your instructional material. You have your book and might just be worksheets. Also, you have your book and you’re going through your book. You are doing the homework and whatever. And then you have like office hours, so think about, that ends up being how these multi-thousand dollar courses, digital products are sold and packaged.

Oftentimes, you can only do so many students. It might be two students or four students or eight or 10 or 12 or whatever. But they’re pretty high touch. So we’ve, for the most part, like one person can handle about 20, 30 students at the same time, which is important from a revenue standpoint. It’s still great revenue. If you have an eight-week class and you have 20 students, who each paid $5,000, then one of the problems is you don’t get paid again until you run that class again. It’s just something to manage and consider.

Now, this video is very much about how to sell digital products. Coaching, consulting we talked about yesterday or we talked about consulting yesterday. Going through and providing advice and providing strategy and stuff to clients is a function of digital products is an upper-end, higher-ticket function of digital products. It should give you a pretty good idea of the way to sell digital products because of how they are packaged.

Now, let’s kick over here into talking about how they are sold and the pages and the assets that you need to have in place, to actually get it done. So we’re going back to this window.

To Sell Digital Products

We talked about Kindle Create. All right, so in selling digital products, so the first thing you need to do, you got to make sure that you have the product. And if you don’t have the product already, that’s okay. You can actually sell the product and then fulfill the product.

What a lot of people end up doing is they sell the product, they shotgun the product, I should say. They jump on a webinar and I’ve done this before, not anymore. I haven’t lately in a really long time, but they jump on a webinar, they invite their list to a webinar, run paid traffic to a webinar, and then on the webinar, they offer a live course. The live course starts in two weeks or three weeks or whatever. And then they pre-sell seats to this live course. Then they do this live course live, so they go through and fulfill the content.

It works. It’s nice. When you can get enough people buying the course, it makes a lot of sense because you get paid to create the course.

One of the downsides to it is you’re creating the course on-demand. A lot of times, I find that this is probably just me and my skill set and the way I operate. But oftentimes I’ll go and I’ll write all the course material. I’ll do the entire course and write all the material in a couple of days’ chunk. I might write like 600 slides in a two or three-day time span.

Also, I usually wait a week or two weeks or a month and come back. I record after I’ve let the idea in the material sink in. Because what ends up happening inevitably is you end up having realizations about the course material. You do something down the road and you’re like, wait, wait. Actually, I had a PowerPoint slide about that and that’s not how I did it or whatever.

The first run-through is great when you have to create the material on demand. The first run-through, everybody’s jazzed, everybody’s excited, whatever. Then you go to resell that material, and you try to sell it the same way you did the first round and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work as well.

Then people go through the course and you’re not creating anything live. You’re just restreaming the stuff from previous streaming.

Whereas if I take my time and deliver in create and fulfill and record the course the way that I do and give it some time and thought, then the experience ends up being a lot better and the material ends up being a lot better and it’s a lot more thought out. Even these videos where I use some blog posts and some stuff I’ve already created, just to help spur ideas. Because I literally don’t have a script. You can probably tell. But all of these are just winging it and responding to questions and feedback and whatever. That ends up, it’s just in creating courses it’s typically just how I do it.

Now, the offer itself, there’s a couple of different ways you can get paid. We talked about the money that you can make. There’s a couple of different ways you can position the offer. You can do a single one-time payment, like a $67 payment or a $97 payment, or a $5,000 payment one time. You can have multiple payments spread out over a term. Three payments over 90 days or two payments over 60 days or whatever.

Back when I first got into digital marketing and how to sell digital products, there was a really popular way to pay, which was two payments of $97 or three payments of $97. You’ll get to save a little bit of money if you paid in one chunk. It’s a way to spread some of the payment out.

From a procedural standpoint, you don’t always collect all that money. You don’t always collect that third payment, but it’s just something to know. Also, you can do monthly payments, like a normal membership, and for as long as your subscriber remains in the program. You don’t want your stuff just hanging out there.

No matter what you do, you’re probably going to have a membership install for this, just to protect your content. You can also do a front-end down payment with smaller monthly payments or you can do free trials with memberships. A 14-day free trial.

I think I talked about it on a previous live stream. I did just see that Visa said if you’re doing a $0 free trial. Then you need to re-email the person seven days before so that you remind them. You notify them of their next billing. If you don’t do that, then you’re in breach of Visa’s program, but the simple way around it is just to charge a dollar. When there’s a free trial the merchant processes a $1 authorization anyway. The $1 payment hits their credit card and then gets taken off. You might as well just keep the dollar.

Now the sales funnel for you to sell digital products, there’s a lot of different versions. We’ve talked about the webinar sales funnel quite a bit on these live streams. Let me just make this a little bigger for you.

The webinar sales funnel itself is the model that you’re probably going to use for anything above $1,000, and then the video sales letter funnel is going be the one that you use for anything under, usually for anything under like $200, and then in the middle is going to end up being like a multi-video launch sequence. Your webinar sales funnel is Facebook traffic into… Facebook traffic we’re targeting email in your free report and then a webinar, an automated webinar. And then it goes to the call to action, then fulfillment.

The video sales letter is going to go, you have your traffic sources, then it goes to the landing page, and then it goes to the video sales letter, and then it bounces through an upsell sequence. The first product might be that $37 e-book, and then the next product might be a $97 digital video course. And then the one after that might be a $297 mastermind offer, a coaching offer, or something.

Each funnel starts with a landing page. This is the landing page that we use. It’s always R control whenever we start something new. And then there’s a sales page with a sales video. The sales video is a video sales letter.

We have since jazzed these up quite a bit and thrown in some B roll and some live-action stuff, just because the video is easier to create anymore. There is a… Siri activated, lovely. Here’s an automated webinar page that we run.

Every sales funnel has these sales assets and the sales assets or the marketing pages, you have your webinar registration page, your lead magnet landing page, or lead magnet confirmation page. From a sales standpoint, you have your sales copy, your sales videos, your webinars, your lead magnets.

Once you set up all the stuff,  you need to get traffic. And there are so many different ways of getting traffic now. There are Facebook Ads, there are Google Ads, those are the two big, or YouTube ads. Those are big like paid traffic sources, and right now, ad prices are dropping huge because everybody’s pulling their advertising dollars. And it’s all based on supply and demand. And inventory shot up, because Messenger, Google, Facebook, they’re all being used like 50% more. After all, everybody’s at home now. It’s a really, really great time to jump into paid traffic if you want to move your business forward.

To learn more about creating funnels to sell digital products, check out the Funnel Formula Course today!

The other way is organic traffic, so search engine optimization, writing blog posts, content marketing, all of those kinds of things. We are going to do a getting traffic live stream probably next week. We’re going to get that thing kicked off.

In the meantime, are there any questions? In the chatbox, go ahead drop any questions. I’m going to figure out what we’re going to be talking about tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to be the same time, 10:00 a.m. Eastern. Tomorrow we are going to be talking about… let’s see, how to promote a B2B product we covered yesterday. I just have a note list of ideas for stuff to talk about. Automated webinars, we talked about that yesterday. Writing emails that convert, marketing… sales webinars. I don’t know, I don’t know. We’re going to figure something out.

If you have any questions at all, go ahead, let me know. Go to doneforyou.com. If you want an action plan, we can get that setup. If you have any questions, there’s a chat box at the bottom of all of the pages on Done For You. We’re going to be launching something really, really exciting in the next couple of days whenever I can actually get a chance to put it together and get it out. Keep an eye on that and I will talk to you soon.

The post Best Ways To Create And Sell Digital Products Online appeared first on Done For You.

When I started my first blog, I relied 100% on website ad networks.  I needed to find out how to monetize your website with ads because I didn't have products or services to sell...

And it was a challenge trying to find the best ad networks for small publishers - even though I didn't know what a 'small publisher' was then!

I had given up my Pepsi truck driving gig and had no idea about getting traffic or affiliate products, so I did what anyone with a site does...

I posted ads all over the place!  I was trying my damnedest to monetize website traffic, the little bit of website traffic I got at the time, with ad networks.

I only had about two people a day coming to my site, so I surely didn't make too much money...  But the few bucks a day added to my first check from Google!

That was a big day.  I still have a picture of it...  Check out that date!  2006!

Since then, the internet and blogging have grown up a lot.  Rather than a few ad networks that'll pay you on a CPM or CPC basis, there are hundreds of good ones...

There are what are considered the best ad networks for advertisers...  We do a lot of advertising nowadays!

And there are lots of ad networks for publishers that pay well.

As you'll discover in the video, very few of the ad networks will pay you more than if you had your book, course, digital product, or offer!

Now, monetizing your website makes our job of wading through the mess a little more intense, but don't worry.  This post will cover how to make money from your website without affiliate products or selling your stuff!

If you want to learn how to sell your stuff, we wrote an entire book about it.

We're also going to trudge through a bit of the 'process' associated with displaying ads on your site so you know how you will get paid by these networks...

What Are Ad Networks?

Ad networks are the collective watering holes of Internet commerce...  Inside an ad network, you'll have an advertiser and a publisher.

If you're familiar with a lot of our other work, our Axis CRM Project called Triggers, you know that we talk a LOT about being on the advertising side...  You know, getting traffic...

Now, take everything you know about advertising - and flip it.

When you're a 'publisher,' you're offering space on your website or blog that advertisers can use!  That means ads will be in your sidebars and below your blog posts about other people's products.  Some of them might be affiliate products.  Some of them might be retargeted ads.  Others might be ads for digital products or physical products.

We don't care what's being advertised...

Why?  Because we get paid in one of two ways...  CPM or CPC.

CPM vs. CPC

Two terms you've no doubt heard a lot are CPM and CPC.

• CPM - Cost Per Thousand Impressions
• CPC - Cost Per Click

Usually, you get paid one of two ways...   Whenever someone clicks an ad on your website or views an ad.

Nothing needs to be sold.  You don't make a commission or anything like that.  Very simply, you get paid by a click or a view.

Different ad networks have other parameters; some even pay out when either event happens...

Which brings me to my next point - how much traffic do you need?

Unique Visitors Are Crucial

The best ad networks are the ones that cater to big-traffic websites...  Think 500,000 or more visitors a month.  Some may argue that if you're getting that much traffic, generating revenue shouldn't be a problem.  I agree.

There are a handful of website owners out there who buy traffic for 9 cents and then make 15 cents on all the ads that are viewed.

That, my friends, is called Click Arbitrage.

You pull someone into your website, have them go through a slideshow (where they have to click next), show them pictures of "36 Dirty Jokes You Forgot As A Kid," and make a small fortune.

If you're just getting started, though, or only have a few hundred or thousands of visitors a month - that's still cool.  There are plenty of ad networks you can plug into.  Sometimes, the networks that accept anyone don't have the best offers or deliver the best experience for your readers...

It's up to you who you want to work with!

Now, I know you're asking yourself, what's better?  Selling affiliate products or my products OR simply posting content only and showing display ads?

What's Better - Selling Or Showing?

Now that you know about ad networks, how you'll get paid, click arbitrage, and the types of traffic some of the networks expect, we get to the heart of the matter.

Should you be plugging in banner ads or not?

The truth is that running banner ads and giving your traffic and impressions away has a cost to...  Sure, you'll get a check from the ad network, but is it worth it?

If you have a product or service you've created and you're selling on your site, then probably not.  Using that ad space, you would have tied up with an ad network, which is perhaps better served in promoting your stuff!

However, if you're an affiliate marketer (selling other people's products) or currently don't have any revenue model set up, ad networks are a great resource.

Generally, you'll make far MORE money selling your stuff, but there are a lot of things that come into play.  You must concern yourself with sales copy, webinars, merchant processing, email autoresponder copy, and hundreds of other things.

Sometimes, setting aside a portion of your website for banner ads is easier!

Choosing The Right Ad Network

Choosing the right ad network is essentially a matter of personal preference.  When you're getting started and don't have much traffic to offer, you'll find that the networks are a little cumbersome.

Chikita doesn't have great payouts.  Bidvertiser and Clicksor 'feel' weird.  They don't have the best advertisers, so they don't have the best ads...

It would be best to balance what you're going for with your brand and what you give up in allowing ad networks to post ads you don't directly control.

I've worked with many networks across the hundreds of websites I've owned and countless clients I've worked with.  Some are great.  Some, not so much.

Impression Stacking

There's a trick to ads, especially when you aren't trying to build a brand, that works every time.  I refer to it as Impression Stacking.

That is where you post ad groups from different ad networks, stacking payouts from each network.

When you get one new visitor, you're getting credit for that visitor from 4 or 5 different ad networks!  If you were wondering how the Click Arbitrage guys are doing it - that's how!

For each page a visitor hits, the ads reload, and they get another impression in each network!

A simple, genius model lets you stack up some considerable payouts.  A warning, though - not all ad networks work together!  Google doesn't play well with others...

Here Today.  Gone Tomorrow!

Over the years, I've seen many ad networks come and go.  One of my FAVORITE back in the day was Text Link Ads.  An SEO company bought them up, but at one point, they were paying me $1200 a month for a small block of text ads in my sidebar.

When you start your blog, that's big money for letting a company sell a few links on your sidebar!

My point is this: ad networks come and go, so it's always essential to keep your eye out and test diligently.  Try out new networks, and if you get better payouts, make the switch permanent!  It's nothing personal.

So now, let's talk about 7 of my favorite ad networks - ones I've used - that have withstood the test of time and grown through the years.

7 Ad Networks You Should Be Using

Most of these networks have been around for a long time, requiring next to no traffic to get started.

Also, they offer highly competitive payouts, and they've got technology that makes including them in your site less of a pain, both from the implementation standpoint and the 'what ads are you going to be showing my people' perspective.

1: Doubleclick By Google

Owned by Google, Doubleclick is by far the most prominent advertising network. It has access to the world’s largest pool of advertisers paying the highest CPMs.

It’s the premium version of AdSense, but this isn’t one of those dinky little upgrades. Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that works perfectly with Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers.

It’s a platform interconnecting advertisers, publishers, and networks that allows publishers to set the rates at which they want their inventory sold. If it can’t be sold at the premium price you select, it will be auctioned off in Exchange, and the highest-paying ad will be served. Google Ad Exchange has an 80% publisher revenue share.

2: Google Adsense

Adsense is by far the most well-known network, and most agree that their ads tend to perform the best but work better on sites relating to specific niches.  Maybe we'll post an article on the top-paying Adsense places...

You can choose from all sizes, text, or display ads and customize your ads (colors, font, etc.) to a point. They pay once a month via direct deposit or mailed check; you have earned at least $100 to qualify for a payment every month.

3: Buy Sell Ads

I like Buy Sell Ads for many reasons - one of the most prominent being that I remember when they started, and I've watched them grow.  When they started, I was one of their very early entrants with a few of my sites.

When they started, their premise was that they made it easy to sell banner ads on your site while they took only a tiny portion of the proceeds.  Now, they're working with huge and small publishers and advertisers alike.

They pay right to PayPal and are as dependable as the day is long...

4: Media.net

Media.net is the ad network powered by Yahoo! and Bing. Their ads look different because they’re just these little colored keyword blocks. Media.net works to ensure that the keyword blocks blend well with your site — they will often use the same color scheme. These ads complement Adsense ads very well, mainly because they look very different. Media.net pays monthly with PayPal, but like Adsense, you must have met that $100 minimum in a month to get a payment.

5: AdThrive

AdThrive displays family-friendly ads, plus they set up DFP (Double Click For Publishers) on their ads once installed on your blog. These are display ads, and once you sign up, they will analyze your site and tell you where they think their ads will perform best. Then, they go in and do all the setup for you. AdThrive pays monthly with direct deposit.

6: Advertising.com

An AOL platform, Advertising.com, offers you CPM and revenue share ads. Its rates for CPM ads are pretty impressive, but if your website has a high CTR, then its RevShare ads can be the ideal way to monetize your blog and rake in a lot of money.

The platform represents 92 of the top 100 Ad Age-listed advertisers. Getting approved is tricky as AOL only accepts websites with monthly traffic of 500,000 or more.

You can start getting paid as soon as you earn $25, and payments can be withdrawn through a cheque or wire transfer.

7: Criteo

Criteo has quickly gained traction and become a top earner for website owners and bloggers. With over 740 billion ads served in 2014 alone and an impressive 7800+ global advertisers, Criteo is placed perfectly to offer website owners ads with high CPM and excellent conversions.  Plus, they're putting a significant emphasis on machine learning and mobile...

Criteo sees an astonishing 96% renewal of service agreements by advertisers due to its ability to generate more significant revenue for its clients.  This effectively translates into more earnings for publishers who regularly benefit from more significant gains than the competitors.

8: RadiumOne

RadiumOne pioneered social media as an advertising tool and is a viral CPM ad platform that you can use to monetize a wide range of content. It works with texts, images, and video content and is optimized to target desktop and mobile users.

Payments are made every second week; you must earn $100 to be eligible for a payout. Once you start generating revenue through RadiumOne, you can request payment through PayPal, wire transfer, or a check addressed to your name.

9: Technorati Media (Synacor)

Professional bloggers prefer Technorati (just acquired by Synacor), which has a vast network of ad publishers who use the platform. It is also the world's prominent social media ad network and is perfect for websites that get a lot of traction on social networks.

They are a reputed ad platform and offer highly targeted ads, which are also great for increasing clickthrough rates.

When you serve ads through Technorati, you must maintain exclusivity, which may be a deal-breaker for some. If you get a lot of visitors, but AdSense isn’t working for you, then Technorati can be the perfect alternative.

10: Adelaide

AdBlade lets you publish ads for paid content for some top brands on your website. The product's niche makes it a lucrative market to tap into, and you get a high CPM rate for your efforts.  AdBlade also caters to the needs of several, so finding ads your audience will like is more accessible.

With AdBlade, your website should generate a minimum of 500,000 visitors per month to be accepted, which is too exclusive if you're starting...  For those who do qualify, they will be displaying ads on websites like Fox News and Yahoo! and getting paid very well for it.

Payments get credited to your PayPal after 30 days if they are over $100, and you can run AdBlade ads alongside AdSense without any problems.

Video Transcript:

In this video, we're going to talk about ad networks.

More specifically, how to monetize your website without selling affiliate products and your stuff without selling your services, creating content for your website, getting traffic to that content, and then monetizing it through advertisers.

And this was the very, very, very first thing I learned to do when I first started blogging, like in 2006. So basically, what I did was I had a website called JDs blog, and I posted fucking nonsense to it.

Looking back, you know, it's like there was no structure. I just wrote about whatever I want it well; I guess that's blogging, though. So whatever.

But I remember writing about all kinds of crazy stuff. I started a podcast back then. I got like 60,000 downloads because there weren't any podcasts out there. I had no idea what I was doing. If I had known what I was doing, I would have lit the world on fire, but I didn't. So there's that.

But I monetized my little traffic; I started getting into these ad networks, where you posted a banner ad to your website in the sidebar or the pages or the header or whatever.

And whenever somebody clicked that ad, or whenever that ad impression that ad was served, like the page, loaded in the ad was served, then you make a buck or 12 cents, or eight cents, or four cents or whatever, you know, there's some monetary value for that thing. So the very, very, very first check that I got back in 2006 was for $103 and 53 cents. And in the blog post here.

There's a picture of it. But that was a big day because Google bit was paying me, Which was huge, anyway.

So, what are ad networks? Well, ad networks are they work as the middleman. So basically, an ad network has two two sides to two different. It's a platform; they have two sides to their business: the advertisers on one and the publishers on another.

So advertisers get to come in and pay the network money to get traffic to their websites, then, you know, their pages and everything else. And everybody has their secret sauce.

You know, some of them are banner ads, other ones are retargeting of ads, and other ones are in-text links and whatever. So, if you're an advertiser, you understand the advertising side of this coin.

The publishers are the people who have a website and have traffic and content, and they're looking to monetize that traffic. They don't necessarily have anything to sell. They are 100% lead, pleased to have somebody on their website, clicking an ad, and then going off to an advertiser.

So they're happy with that because they usually make some form of money, whether a couple of cents or a couple of dollars. So, these ad networks bring together the advertisers and the publishers. And that is their business model. They keep the money in the middle. So, as you can expect, the largest ad network is Google. I mean, Google has a couple of different variations of, you know, their ad network. So there's a double click, and then there's Google AdSense.

So Google AdSense is the version where a publisher can go in and sign up, you know, with Google AdSense being approved, and then put a block of ads on their website. And those ads are served based on the keyword phrases in those blog posts. The other side of AdSense for us advertisers is AdWords.

So AdWords Well, it's Google Ads now. But it won't ever be Google ads to AdWords to me. Um, Google AdWords is for advertisers, and AdSense is for publishers. If you want to go and pay money for traffic, you go to AdWords; if you want to go and put banner ads on your website and get paid for those, you go to AdSense, two sides to the ad network. There's another one called buy-sell ads; they were really in their infancy, you know, years and years ago.

When I first got started online, I remember when they, you know, it used to be, you know, $5 a month, and you could get a banner ad on a website, which was super awesome, you know, so then there's some other there are all kinds of different networks, and they tend to change hands every once in a while.

You know, so in the blog advertising.com is one of them criteo Radio One, there's lots ad blade, you know, every once in a while they merge, there are new ones that come out.

But by and large, they serve the same purpose. And that purpose is to, you know, to marry up advertisers and publishers and make money in the middle.

There are so many Dunphy blog posts that there are many ad networks you can click through and look at and check out and see which one works for you. But there are a couple of things that I want to talk about when it comes to ad networks.

That is important. So, the first is CPM versus CPC. CPM is your cost per thousand impressions. So that's you make, you know, $1 per thousand times that that page loads that ad loads. So it's a lot of traffic and not a lot of money. There's also cost per click, like what Google AdSense is.

So, the cost per click is that you don't get paid every time the ad loads, but you get paid every time somebody clicks the ad. So it depends on how much traffic you're getting, what kind of quality of traffic it is, you know what is going to end up paying you out the best, but you unique visitors, unique visitors are crucial.

So, the best ad networks cater to websites that get a lot of traffic, like half a million monthly visitors. So the best and the best payouts, the best ad networks are going to, you know, hop on board. Suppose you get a lot of traffic. If you don't, then they're still, I mean, you can still run Google AdSense, but you're just not going to get that top-tier placement, you know, from ads.

And really, the age-old question is, Do you want to create your own products and services and sell your own thing? Or do you want to put ad blocks up and sell somebody else's or get paid to advertise somebody else's thing? I 100% wholeheartedly think that you're going to, you're going to go, you're going to make a whole lot more money if you use the impressions and the eyeballs and the traffic that you get daily to promote your products, your services, you know, whether that is an ebook or a digital course or, you know, a coaching offer consulting offer, or, you know, just having five clients that you do, you know, kind of distance remote coaching with, you know, you're going to make a lot more money that way, serving a relatively few amounts of people.

Then you're going to get publishing content blog posts, after blog posts, you know, day after day, and, you know, hoping the banner ads will pay the bills. I mean, you're going. It would be best if you had a lot of traffic. You can make five and six figures a month with 10,000, 10,000, 12,000, 5,000, and 6,000 visitors monthly. If you're selling your products and services with banner ads, you will be lucky to make 100 bucks a month with that kind of traffic.

So it's just something to think about, you know, with affiliate products, it's even much easier to make more considerable money not as high you're not going to make as much Won't you will you could. Still, you're probably not going to make as much as if you had your products and services, but affiliate Commission, you know, will still pay about under the banner networks, you know, your ad networks.

So it's just something to think about how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go. You know, if you have your products and services, you got to fill those, you know, you're going to have customers and clients and support and, you know, sales and all that other stuff. If you sell affiliate products, you don't have fulfillment and support and all that stuff, but you do need traffic and marketing and all of that, you know?

Whereas if you have a website that you sure you can, you know, hope for a viral video that gets you, you know, half a million or a million visitors a month or whatever, is it going to happen? Probably not. But it could, you know, so it just depends on what level you want to play it. I hope you like this video; subscribe to future videos and click the like button. That would be awesome.

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The post Unlocking the Potential of Top Ad Networks for Online Income appeared first on Done For You.

A few searches will tell you that there are hundreds of ways to monetize a blog...  But very few of them will generate tremendous, life-changing revenue...  In fact, you'll find out that most people recommend using ads in 99% of the cases.

Yes, ads are probably the easiest way to monetize your website but if you do, you're missing out on a tremendous amount of money by utilizing some of these other methods...

There are several reasons why you wouldn't be able to use ads to monetize a blog and you should be prepared to apply alternative tactics if you still want to get income from that website.

Why wouldn't you be able to use ads for blog monetization?

• Your niche doesn't allow it. This doesn't mean it's illegal but some ad networks don't allow ads on all niches. For example, you can see where Google forbids the display of ads.
• You're recovering from a mistake. You did something wrong and got banned from an ad network. These things happen, not being able to display an ad doesn't mean you should stop trying to monetize your website.
• You don't want to use ads. There are several reasons why you'd want this for your website. Many website owners don't use ads because they want to control the content displayed on their projects. Maybe they're working on a website for parents and kids and don't want intrusive ads or maybe you just want to keep the UX to the highest level and have a clean template.

There probably are other reasons as well but we're not here to talk about why people can't use ads on their website but how they can monetize a blog without having the ad option.

5 Trending Ways To Monetize a Blog Without Using Ads

Whatever your reason may be, if you still want to monetize a blog without using ads, you should try one of these trending methods. You've probably read about some of them so why not try them out. Not all alternatives will work for your blog so make sure you're going to apply the right tactic.

1. Make money with your blog by reviewing products.

Product reviews are a trending way to monetize a blog but don't work on all websites. To be successful at making money through product reviews you need to have a big audience. Even more, you'll need to target a specific niche to get the best results for your blog.

It's probably better to mix your product review strategy with affiliate marketing, but we'll talk about this later down the line.

2. Offer certain services on your blog.

This would a great way to work on your skills and monetize your blog. Most people start a blog because they're really good at something and want to share their expertise with others. Why not offers the services you're talking about as a way of monetization?

You'll keep writing for an audience who's interested in your field of work and you'll promote yourself to offer your expertise & time to others.

3. Write eBooks or provide other resources.

Are you really passionate about your field of work and want to get more out of it? Writing eBooks and creating digital products is an easy way to get some income from your blog if you're smart about it. You'll need a strong audience and to build a good online presence. Developing your personal brand should be your primary goal while writing on your blog.

After you built a good community around your blog and people see you as an expert in your domain, take some time each day and start writing eBooks you can sell on your website.

You can also choose to provide other paid content for your readers such as podcasts or videos.

4. Give affiliate marketing a try.

If your blog isn't big enough to make money by simply reviewing products, you should try affiliate marketing. There are so many affiliate networks you can choose these days so you're sure you'll find something relevant to your blog's niche. You can use links, banners and other ways to redirect possible customers to the online stores and get a big commission from this.

The key to successful affiliate marketing is to find a good niche with a high number of people interested. Use your skills to bring traffic to your blog and increase conversion rates.

5. Become a consultant.

If you're really good at something, you may try to become a business consultant. Freelancing is something people are turning to way often than you'd think so why not give it a try. But if you're going to be good as a consultant you'll have to invest a lot of time in your personal brand and the services you can offer to others.

Start writing really targeted content for your line of work and mix that content with personal opinion, tutorials, and free resources. This should be a good starting point for you to become a well-known consultant.

What are some ways to monetize a blog that you've tried until now? Did you find them to be what you've looked for? If not, what was wrong? You're not obligated to use ads on your website if you want to monetize it. There are other options out there that will help you monetize a blog but as always, you'll need to work hard since there is no easy way to get income from online businesses.

The post 5 Profitable Ways To Monetize a Blog Without Using Ads appeared first on Done For You.

As a course creator, you need to know how to pick the right price for your premium content. But, in your gut, are you charging for your courses what you’re worth? We would bet that this is the toughest part, especially if you are about to launch your first online course.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you feel you are charging too much?
• Do you feel your price point is too low?
• Are you afraid to ask your audience for what you’re really worth?
• Are you prepared to deliver 5x the value of the price your students are paying?
• Does your price tag attract the sort of students or clients that you want?

In this article, we wish to help you answer these course pricing questions. We also hope to help you hit the “sweet spot” of pricing perfection that will maximize your online course revenue.

Online course pricing – 5 tips to determine the right price

Most edupreneurs and course creators understand that the price point of your offerings is one of the most fundamental factors that determine your sales, revenue and business success.

Pricing has to do with market factors, such as:

• Supply and demand.
• What your competition is doing.
• What is the perceived value of your offering? – and you can directly influence this part.

Typically, the higher you can price the less you will sell. But, there is a point up to which you can increase your online course price without causing a significant drop in sales volume. If you find that “sweet spot”, that is the balance between price and demand, then you will maximize your total revenue.

Keep in mind that branding plays a major role in influencing the perceived value of your online course. You need to create a high perceived value because your client knows they are buying an intangible product, and sometimes, it’s more difficult to grasp the real value of an intangible good. It’s much easier to feel the value you’re getting from a new smart TV set than an online course. That is why branding (and providing quality training inside the program) will determine the perceived value.

It’s important for every online program creator to understand that, since courses are digital products, your marginal cost (the cost of selling one more product unit) is nearly zero. This means that every extra unit you sell – after you have matched your costs – is pure profit.

1. Think expansively

Your intuition might push you in the wrong direction. You might feel controlled by what your competitors do, and choose to price your online course low to “beat the competition”. However, thinking expansively will help you sell more programs and make more money.

What do we mean by expansive thinking in this case? Instead of finding ways to lower your online course price point, you should be thinking “What more can I add to my course bundle to increase the value that the student will get?”

A lot of course sellers think of creative ways to add value. Some examples are bonuses, online consultation, online coaching groups, Facebook groups, implementation support, live webinars and so on.

You are able to set a higher price for your online course when you deliver more value.

2. Valuate your online course “objectively”

Every one of us carries a different level of experience and skills. You need to think your course as a two-sided coin: One side is the value people get from it. The other side is what level of experience and expertise you pack in your training. So, you shouldn’t price your course only in terms of the value you bring but also the resources you have invested in acquiring the knowledge in it.

Never underestimate the time you spent studying, learning from mentors, making mistakes, serving clients, trying to find solutions, optimizing your processes etc. All these situations have a value assigned to them. And they all took time. Time is money. Calculate that money into the price of your online course.

The trick here is not to charge thousands of dollars for one course but instead price the course in a way that if you sell X number of units, you will feel that you are rewarded.

3. Create income goals

As in any business and before anything else, it is advised that you come up with revenue goals for your online course. But why do you need goals anyway? Well, with an income goal you simply know where you’re headed. If you don’t work in the right direction you will lose your way.

Different edupreneurs have different motivations. Is your goal to make enough money to quit your day job? Or perhaps you’ like to make enough to retire early? Or maybe you need more money to pay for your kid’s college?

Whatever you’re hoping to achieve you need to determine the right price to meet your pre-set income goal.

Pricing your online course the correct way is the simplest way to make cash and get your learners better results. By valuing yourself, your online program and the effort you put into creating your content the right way you’ll be able to decide on a fair price that your clients will be willing to pay.

Here’s a simple formula that will help you set an online course income goal:

Revenue goal = (total number of subscribers X conversion rate) X Price for your course

Teachable reports that the standard conversion rate of people who will buy (convert) from each sales email is 0.02.

So, if your list size is 5,000 and you multiply this number by 0.02 then you should expect about 100 people to buy your course. Now you can play with the other factors in the equation. If you set a price for $97 you should expect to earn about $9,700 from course sales. Or, the other way around, if you want to make nearly $10K you’ll need to sell your online program for at least $97 to meet your goal.

4. Offer a free course

Yes, you read right. Not all of your courses need to be paid. Giving away free training can have a lot of benefits.

Free courses will help you generate leads that you can then use to sell premium online courses. A free course can be the entry point for your a webinar sales funnel or a course sales funnel.

Need help to optimize your existing funnels? Get free access to our webinar!

Look at free courses as a way to showcase your teaching style and your expertise. They will help create trust and rapport. Only few people will buy an expensive course without having heard of you before. If they are enrolled on a free course that you offer and receive your newsletter, they are more likely to be enticed to pay for a premium course or request coaching or other services.

5. Create a “blue ocean”

Think of it like this. When you create a new market space, i.e. a new course category, you are able to generate demand for something unique. And when you offer something unique, you are then able to price it uniquely, without even looking at the competition – because there is NO competition.

This completely new category of online courses is what we call “blue ocean” in this article.

Put time into finding what is unique about you and what you do and how you can differentiate. How could you repackage, rebrand, reframe, reconfigure or otherwise radically modify your strategy and approach to make competition irrelevant?

If you sell a never-seen-before way to absorb knowledge, then you’ll be able to price your online course with a premium, because no one will think that “online courses on this topic cost anywhere from X to Y”. They will not compare your training with anything else.

Conclusion – Resist the temptation to charge a low price for your online course

When you first start as an online course seller, it can be difficult to resist the temptation to offer your course for a low price. Maybe you think no one will buy because you have a small email list. Or, they won’t buy because they can find the same sort of information on YouTube. What’s more, maybe you don’t have the confidence to set a high price tag. Or, you might feel that you lack content to include in your program. Whatever the case is, all of these thoughts are within reason and we totally get your fears.

Thinking like that, you’re probably wondering why someone would gladly pay a high price for your online course when there are so many other inexpensive resources created by experienced trainers that the prospective students can use instead.

Yes, it’s true there are people out there who are freebie seekers. They don’t mind spending hours to find free information on the internet. But these people are not your target market since they rarely spend money to buy a digital product.

The good news is that there is an enormous group of people who will willingly take their credit card out of their pocket to enroll in your online course.

They need high-quality information, when they want it, that is organized and presented in a format that is suitable for them. These prospective buyers are captivated by having access to an expert and their unique knowledge. They want to invest in that privilege. These people will also be the best students. Not only will they pay the right price for your online course, and complete the lessons, but they will also implement what they learn. Does this group of people sound like your target market?

The online education market is booming. It is projected to witness a compound annual growth rate of 10.26% to reach a total market size of $286.62 billion by 2023, increasing from $159.52 billion in 2017.

Jump on the bandwagon right now with the right content for your online course and a high-conversion sales funnel, all done for you!

The post How To Price Your Online Course – 5 Tips For New Course Sellers appeared first on Done For You.

While it might seem easy to create profitable Facebook campaigns , it’s not.

Facebook’s ad interface is complex with tons of options for advertisers. Of all the options available, Facebook Lead ad campaigns are one of the most promising ones that help advertisers generate leads and nurture them till they become customers.

While Facebook Lead Ads (now used with Instant Forms) might seem all easy to set up, there are a few practical considerations and a few strategic practices for you to think.

Here’s how you run Facebook Lead ads properly:

Profitable Facebook Lead Ad campaigns: Be sure to set up & test the Pixel

The Facebook Pixel is the all-powerful piece of code that you need to add to your website and landing pages. The Pixel comes in two parts:

• The base pixel, and
• The event code (for leads, conversions, page view, purchases, initiate checkout, etc.) — choose the event code that makes sense for your campaign.

While the base pixel has to fire on absolutely every page of your website, the event code part of the pixel should only fire on pages that show up when a conversion event happens. Examples of these pages are a thank-you page that loads after a lead signs up or a purchase-confirmation page which comes after a purchase has been made.

Additionally, there are several other events you could track, such as “initiate checkout”, “pageview” and “content view” if you want to better understand how your Facebook Ads perform.

Be sure to place the pixel properly on your website and/or landing pages. You can use the free Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension to test your Pixel placement.

Think of an offer to make

No one is going to click through and sign up on your Facebook Lead generation Ad forms (Instant forms) if you don’t make an offer.

If you don’t make an offer, there’s no incentive for your target audience to sign up. You want people to click through the ad and sign up for something you are giving away for free (just like a traditional opt-in offer).

Here’s what HubSpot does to generate leads for their business:

If you notice, HubSpot targets very specific audiences of startup founders and co-founders, marketing managers, agency owners, and other similar audiences to make a very specific offer — an Email Marketing Kit.

For Facebook Lead generation ads, it’s absolutely important to make an offer of some sort — a free eBook, a set of free videos, a whitepaper, a free online course, a free online membership, a free demo, etc.

You get the drift.

One form, two ads

For each campaign, you will essentially have one instant form created for that campaign and two ads (in pairs, so that you can test one ad against the other). You could also split test forms if you’d like but we suggest you only test forms after you already generate several leads with the one you first created.

Ads, however, are easier to test within each Ad set. So, start with ads A & B within the same ad set and test ad images or videos, ad copy, etc.

Be sure to add a “privacy policy” link to your Lead Instant forms, check for grammatical errors, and let it roll.

Note: You can add Instant forms or lead gen forms for your regular image or video campaigns too so that you can generate leads, just in case.

Bidding strategy for profitable Facebook Lead Ad campaigns

When you first launch your campaigns, Facebook will put your campaign through a “learning phase” where it’s trying to determine the best possible and most responsive audiences for the exact objective you’ve chosen (such as link clicks, conversions, landing page views, or leads).

Normally, Facebook needs about 50 “conversions” — depending on what you’ve set as conversions here — to make a learned decision about your campaign and then use their massive data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to show your ads to the exact audience you seek.

For Facebook to do this, it needs data.

According to Facebook,

“A good time to check to see if an adjustment is necessary is after your ad set has got about 50 optimization events. At that point, its delivery should be relatively stable, so you can get a pretty accurate sense of its performance.”

Most businesses and marketers start with their Lead generation ad campaigns optimizing for leads (obvious enough) but for “lowest cost” possible.

While it might seem like the sensible thing to do with Facebook Lead generation ads, it really isn’t.

Opting for the “lowest cost” makes your costs of acquisition go up over time. In short, you’ll let Facebook determine what the best cost of acquisition is. This is fine for the initial stages of your campaign but it gets more and more expensive as time goes by.

A better way to use the “lowest cost” bidding option is to set a cap — a price point which is near or equal to the actual cost of acquiring a lead for your business.

You can also use the “target cost” method if you know the cost of acquisition of a lead.

So, once you set up a lead generation campaign:

• Think of an offer and create two ads based on your offers.
• Double-check your ads, copy (and also for grammatical or design errors).
• Your Facebook lead generation campaign will be optimized for leads.
• Determine your daily budget (stay at a comfortable amount — not too high, not too low), a schedule, and launch your campaign.
• Instead of choosing “lowest cost”, choose the lowest cost with a bid cap or a target cost.
• Wait for Facebook’s learning phase to complete (usually around 50 conversions).
• Make significant edits (such as changing ads, copy, or bidding strategies) only after the learning phase. Note: Making significant edits will reset the learning phase thereby extending the time you need to run the campaign.

Connect your lead form with a CRM

On clicking the ad, an instant form pops up collecting basic information (or pre-set questions used for lead qualification and is set by advertisers).

The form is pre-filled with customer data (Facebook automatically inserts some basic information like names, phone numbers, and email addresses).

Your potential leads will fill up any other questions you might have included in your Instant forms.

All of this data is captured by facebook (and you can later download this data as a .CSV file). Thankfully, Facebook also integrates with several CRM providers and this helps you to avoid the manual work of downloading and uploading data.

If you are lucky enough to work with a CRM that Facebook already integrates with, the data is automatically synced with your CRM or email service provider such as MailChimp.

Depending on your setup, you can immediately trigger email autoresponders, marketing automation, and other email sequences after your leads submit the instant form.

Use email autoresponders to welcome your leads, or deliver what you promised (free coupon or free eBook?).

Manage your audiences

If you remember, you’ve already set up the Facebook Pixel on your website. One of the wonderful things you could do with your Facebook pixel is to create audiences.

The types of custom audiences that you create depends on your business (things are different for a service-based business compared to e-commerce business, for instance).

Sticking to lead ads campaigns for regular businesses and integrating with an email service provider like MailChimp are not enough. There are a few more things you must do:

• Create custom audiences for all website visitors or visitors to specific pages that are important to your business (such as pricing pages)
• Upload your existing email subscribers list to Facebook and name it as another audience.
• If you have a list of customers, make a separate list and create another audience for them on Facebook (you can also use the special LTV (Lifetime Value) based audience on Facebook for this.
• If your email marketing automation system allows for direct integration with Facebook, you can also automate things in a way that after each lead signs up through your campaigns, you could automatically add them or remove them from one of your custom audiences.

You could then include or exclude custom audiences depending on how you structure your campaigns.

An example of a simple use case might be that you don’t want to include your existing email subscribers for your Facebook lead generation campaign since they’ve already signed up for your offer. You might also want to exclude your customer list from these campaigns.

Managing your audiences by including or excluding them is essential for running targeted Facebook lead ad campaigns, to stay relevant, and to keep your costs low.

If you need help with your Facebook Lead Ad Campaigns, please feel free to fill out this form and we’d love to discuss your strategy with you.

The post 6 Steps To Profitable Facebook Lead Ad Campaigns appeared first on Done For You.

Some people have even quit their day jobs to have a full-time online career. The benefits are big, the risk is low, and the time freedom and flexibility are awesome – these are just a few of the various reasons why working online is all the rage these days.

The internet offers countless business opportunities for earning an income.

Is affiliate marketing the way to go?

Affiliate marketing is one of the best popular strategies for earning money online. This refers to the type of marketing in which an affiliate promotes a certain product or service and earns a commission for each sale successfully made.

Online entrepreneurs, affiliate marketers and online marketers are a new breed of successful business founders who are based solely on the internet to make money.

In this article, we want to touch on affiliate marketing as a great way to start online and generate unlimited income. But, bells and whistles aside, we also want to talk about the reality of affiliate marketing: Who makes money, how long does it take to establish a profitable affiliate marketing business and what are the pitfalls?

Many people prefer this kind of earning opportunity not only due to the fact that it gives them flexibility and enables them to work at their own pace, but also because this is highly worthwhile. Of course, it’s not without difficulties and drawbacks.

Reality check: Is affiliate marketing for everyone?

Before you start with affiliate marketing, it’s essential that you know the pros and cons. This way, you can manage your expectations, and get yourself ready for the challenges that you will face. This will help increase your chances for success.

Reality check #1 – Affiliate marketing depends a lot on who you are as a person, your personality and your skills. Do you have what it takes?

If you’re planning to become an affiliate, you cannot detach your personality and character from it. Most of the processes required in an online business have something to do with you, your thoughts and your behavior.

For example, working consistently and have structure in the way you manage your projects are crucial when you don’t have a boss. You need to be self-motivated and be able to make decisions fast. Be your own boss, without compromising productivity and steady income flows.

Also, it is your credibility and reputation. Before people will believe your endorsements and purchase the products you’re recommending, they will decide first if you are a person they can trust.

Apart from your reputation, people will also look at your expertise in the field. How much do you know about the products or services you’re promoting as an affiliate? Are you an expert in this niche? Have you ever tried this product yourself? What were your results or experience from using the product? All these questions will be on the minds of your audience

This renders it important for you to choose products that are related to your interests, passion, hobbies, and expertise. This is an often overlooked secret to success in affiliate marketing. It is important to love what you do, but it’s not only that. Look for the intersection of passion, market demand and skills.

Reality check #2 – You and your aunt and your cousin can become an affiliate marketer but this doesn’t make affiliate marketing suitable for everyone.

Yes, anyone can join any affiliate marketing network or program. As long as you have an internet connection and know basic stuff about the online worlds, then you can potentially work as an affiliate marketer. However, it’s important to realize that this earning opportunity is not ideal for everyone who wants to work online.

This business model is only suitable for people who have certain qualities. To find success, you need to be:

• Enthusiastic, passionate and self-driven.
• An expert about a certain niche.
• Patient and determined to succeed.
• Willing to invest long hours in working online.
• Willing to share your personal experiences and ideas with other people.
• Open to lifelong learning and leaving your preconceptions behind.

If you don’t have all these traits, there’s a good chance that you won’t manage to succeed as an online business owner and affiliate marketer.

Freebie alert: Find out more about our 8 done-for-you email marketing campaigns for affiliates.

Reality check #3 – Affiliate marketing is a business that takes time and hard work, sweat and tears too.

The very first thing that you need to realize about affiliate marketing is that it is a real business. To take it seriously you need to look at it as a business. And just like any business, online or brick-and-mortar, it requires time and effort.

Some people believe that affiliate marketers just sit in front of their laptop and they cash in on some system that works for them automatically. The fact is, an affiliate marketer needs to put in long hours of work every day to build a business, that can then work largely on autopilot. To do that you need to work on the following:

• Build a website for your business.
• Create valuable content for the site consistently.
• Apply for affiliate programs that are a good fit for your business.
• Re-apply for more partner programs when you get rejected.
• Grow a mailing list and a following.
• Create trust and establish a good reputation among your people.
• Continue to polish and grow your online brand.

A lot of affiliate marketers don’t give up their corporate jobs immediately; they first work on their online business as a side hustle, and then, when they get it to a point that it generates some steady income, they quit their day job to be full-time online entrepreneurs.

You will soon see that it’s a must to see this as a thing that you need to do hands-on and full-time. If you don’t, you won’t be able to enjoy the level of success that you desire.

Reality check #4 – It takes time to earn really good money from affiliate marketing and to fully replace your day job. Success is a marathon, not a sprint.

The fact is that most affiliates will never make it. They will never make any considerable money, even after months of work.

Do you know the 80/20 rule?

Well, when it comes to affiliate marketing, the 80/20 is more like 95/5.

This means that 95% of affiliates will only generate 5% of the income. On the flip side, it’s the top 5% of affiliate marketers that will feast on 95% of the money being paid out by vendors to affiliates. As we said, it takes hard work to be part of that top 5% of super affiliates.

The steps involved to rise to the top and be part of the super affiliate clan cannot be accomplished in one or two months. You really need to spend at least three to six months to set up your affiliate website, create compelling content, establish yourself as an expert in the niche, build your credibility and a good online brand and so on and so forth. You need to build your brand, marketing processes and start growing your audience before you can see measurable and consistent results.

Reality check #5 – You’ll need to invest in people, technology and marketing if you want to speed up the process of building a successful affiliate business.

By now you should know that affiliate marketing has a lot of benefits. Here are some:

• Low cost to get started. Most affiliate schemes and partners programs are free to join. Your costs have to do with your referral/marketing methods.
• You don’t need to create a product or service, or maintain a stock, or even ship anything.
• Work anytime that suits you and from any place around the world, as long as you have internet access.
• There is huge passive income potential when you do the right things and have patience.
• Can be added on to your current home or freelance business to create an additional stream of income. Bloggers, coaches, infopreneurs who already have an audience can capitalize on affiliate opportunities faster.

Now, these are the most important benefits but, although getting started can cost practically nothing, in reality, and if you take this business seriously you’ll need to put money in it upfront.

You’ll need to:

• design a good brand and marketing collateral,
• build a functional website,
• pay for fast hosting,
• pay for tools like an email marketing automation platform,
• have some budget for advertising campaigns,
• consult with a couple of experienced marketers and so on.

Depending on how fast you want to grow, you might need to spend money on copywriting, training, coaching or other services too.

How to move forward

If you’re looking to partner with an experienced team of online marketing experts who have designed, built and optimized high-converting sales funnels and profitable advertising campaigns, we’d be happy to help. At DoneForYou.com we help entrepreneurs, affiliate marketers and agencies to create and grow profitable online ventures. Fill out this form so we can get back to you to discuss your project.

To conclude, if you were looking for the truth about affiliate marketing, this article was your reality check. All the factors that we discussed are necessary for you to build a successful affiliate business. Although there’s no definite blueprint to success, time and constant effort are key. So, affiliate marketing isn’t the path for you if you’re dreaming of quick riches and no work.

The post The Truth About Making Money With Affiliate Marketing: The Who, How And When appeared first on Done For You.

Each of those companies grew into huge businesses thanks to referral marketing.

Given that we live in the age of digital media, think of referral marketing as word-of-mouth on steroids.

Sadly, not many businesses pay any attention to it.

A 2016 Neilson Study revealed that over 82% of people consult family, friends, and even acquaintances before making purchases (even online purchases). If you disregard impulse buying, most other transactions are influenced by referrals.

Here’s proof:

As Apostle Mengoulis of Viral Loops writes,

“More people seek out a referral than drink water daily”

Assuming you did everything you could do to boost your e-commerce conversions, only 58% of your customers will ever let other people know (however they choose to do it).

That’s why you need referral marketing. You’ll do better to incentivize your visitors, existing customers, and potential customers to “refer others” to get discounts, exclusive bundles, VIP access, or to push them into preferred or loyal customers just based on how many referrals they can make.

Since your online customers just have to drop in a few emails or share links on social media, there’s virtually no resistance for them while they get to not only share what they just bought off your store but also get incentivized for doing it.

See how Dropbox does it:

Want to apply referral marketing to your own business?

Here’s what you should know about the power of referral marketing, why it matters, and how you are losing money on the table (if you are not using it for your business):

Everyone can (& must) use referral marketing

Customers trust word of mouth at least 10 times more than they’d ever trust advertising in general.

Referral marketing works for every business, individual, and even freelancers or self-employed professionals. It works for small, medium, and large businesses. And it works for doctors, dentists, and attorneys.

It works for everyone and every business. Period.

A National Harris Poll Survey  only confirms this:

• Word-of-mouth isn’t limited to specific industries (i.e., it’s not just for eCommerce brands) or demographics, but certain age groups and income levels do rely more on referrals.
• The vast majority (more than 80%) of Americans seek recommendations when making a purchase of any kind.
• When someone shares or talks about a brand on social media, there’s a significant correlation to purchasing behavior.
• Incentive structure plays a big role in increasing and scaling referral activity.

Setup a system (use referral marketing tools) to enable referrals, incentivize your customers to do so, and let the word spread on its own.

Referral marketing is inexpensive & amplifies your promotional efforts

The lifetime value of a referral customer is 16% higher than non-referrals. At least 84% of B2B customers start their buying process with a referral.

Now, add your usual mix of Inbound marketing tactics such as blogging, social media, email marketing, paid advertising (using Facebook Ads or Google Ads), and your sales funnels.

What do you get?

Cheaper and amplified form of marketing.

Your budgets reduce overall while you get more leads given that you put in the same effort. The online word-of-mouth engine (referral marketing) pushes your sales, revenue, and profit upwards.

You do know that it’s easier to do business with your existing customers than it is to get new customers all the time.

Most businesses are aware of it. Few businesses actually do something about it and use this to their advantage.

As soon as your customer makes a purchase, they are happy-as-a-clam. They are primed to let the world know about their new purchase. If you do this right, they can even shout off the top of their rooftops.

All you need to do is to put a system in place to make it easy for them to share their new purchase with friends or to invite others to get an incentive (like getting a product for free).

Referral marketing compounds over time

While everyone knows and understands referral marketing, not everyone puts it into practice.

Companies with formalized referral marketing programs experience a whopping 86% growth in revenue compared to those that don’t use referral marketing. Yet, only 30% of companies surveyed actually have a referral program in place.

For businesses with formal referral marketing programs in place, the best part is that these numbers aren’t absolute.

If the efforts are consistent, there’s a “compounding effect” that kicks in driving growth for each of these businesses over a period of time.

Give your referral marketing program enough time and chances are that you’d never have to spend a dime on paid marketing again.

Referral marketing tools are in, excuses are out

If an effective referral marketing tool helps make it easy for a customer to make a referral (during or after a purchase), more than 14% of customers would take action.

There are several tools you could use right away to put an effective referral marketing program in place. Here are some of them:

Viral Loops 
Referral Candy
Invite box
WooBox
Referral SaasSquatch
RewardStream (Now Buyapowa)
Ambassador
AnnexCloud

Are you using Referral marketing for your business? Are you letting your customers spread the word to amplify your marketing?

Need help with your marketing strategy? Paid marketing campaigns? Sales funnels or landing pages? Get on a scheduled call with us and change the way you do marketing.

The post Referral Marketing: Pay Attention To This $$$ Making Machine appeared first on Done For You.

Most Software As A Service (SaaS) providers are unable to convert more than 20% of their free users to paying customers. On average, most companies only convert 20 to 30 percent of the free users to paying ones. However, with the right strategies, you can get a SaaS conversion rate of up to 80% of all the free users. See this list of typical SaaS conversion benchmarks and compare your SaaS conversion rate against industry standards.

When thinking of how to convert SaaS free trials into customers, you should have the main problems at the back of your mind. For most customers, the problem is usually starting to pay for something they are used to having free of charge. It is, therefore, important to think of ways of making it seem less of a burden.

Here are the top 5 ways used to convert free trial users into paying customers.

1. Offer premium promotions

While you may not be able to provide a free trial for a long period, you can give your customers promotional offers that will attract them to paying for the product.

For example, Spotify offers its customers up to 90% off on the first three months subscription. For most customers, paying $0.99 per month is not a big deal as compared to paying $9.99. Such offers work in two ways; first, they help you know the customers who are truly interested in your product.

After the promotional months, you can follow up on such customers with retargeting email campaigns to get them to keep on using the product. Secondly, it is a strategy that is used to get your customers used to your product. Once the customer is used to your product, they will be unable to continue doing their work without your software. In the end, they are forced to subscribe to premium options at the set price.

Download our done-for-you flash sale email sequence which you can plug into your autoresponder to boost your next sales campaign fast.

2. Use impact messaging

There is a difference between optimizing your message and creating an impact message. It is important for your customers to know exactly what they are getting into before they start their journey.

The mistake most marketers do is to market the software as “free”. In this case, you will get enough traffic but no conversion. Your message should be displayed clearly on your landing page. Let the potential customer know how long the free trial period is and how much the cost will be after the trial.

There are many companies that have been forced to remove the words “free” from their website. For example, SumoMe changed its marketing message from “Free tools to grow your business” to “Tools to grow your business-Try for free”. This clearly indicates that the free option is a trial version and not the full product.

3. Collect payment information upfront

This may seem unorthodox to some people but is the best way of separating the chaff from the grains. There is no need to get very many people to sign up yet they are not interested in buying the product.

Collecting payment information upfront lets those who wish to continue paying for the product to sign up. This does not mean that they do not get to enjoy the free trial period. The customers simply set the payment information and billing dates in place when they start the free trial. Once the free trial period is done, they can either cancel their subscription or move on to the premium version.

4. Make the transition process easy

It is a fact that getting people to pay for a service they are used to for free is a big task. Therefore, you need to make the process easier by removing any obstacles in the way. You need to ask yourself what would be the biggest problem that anyone would face when they want to upgrade to premium. Get rid of such obstacles that the process can be seamless.

One of the ways of ensuring the process is simple is providing multiple checkout options. Ensure that those who wish to pay can pay in as many ways as possible. Other options include providing offers that make the package too attractive. Provide effective support systems and different payment packages so that the customer can choose the best-suited option.

5. Implement email drip campaigns

Most people forget that they will need to start paying for the service at the end of the trial period. As we all know, ambushing anyone to give you money for any reason does not work.

To ensure that your customers keep the need to pay for the service at the back of their mind, you need to find ways of reminding them. One of the best ways is to use drip email campaigns. Such emails are constant reminders to the customer that the trial period is running out.

You need to start with a welcome or a thank you message as soon as the customer signs up for the trial period. Throughout the course of time, keep them engaged with follow up emails. You can use this opportunity to showcase your brand as a leader in service delivery.

You can also use the follow-up emails to give the users some tips. Send them the deadline reminder just a few days to the end of the free trial period.

Grab this free re-engagement email sequence and start re-activating your idle subscribers fast.

Keep converting more

It is always an uphill task to convert SaaS trial users into customers. However, with a few tricks here and there, you can convert up to 80 percent of all trial customers.

The key factors to consider in SaaS onboarding include…

• the messaging,
• follow up,
• payment methods and
• purchase obstacles among others.

You need to entice your potential customers to want to purchase your services.

Whichever way you chose to go, make sure you make your product very attractive. Trial periods are meant to showcase the benefits of your product.

Make sure the customer is at the point when he/she needs your product the most before you start asking for money. You should also divide payment into options that are easily payable. Create offers for first-time subscribers to motivate them.

The post 5 Ways To Convert SaaS Free Trial Users Into Paying Customers appeared first on Done For You.

As such, Facebook Ads aren’t as easy to run as it might seem at first glance. Although we must give credit to Facebook for trying to make it easier for advertisers to flourish on the network, it’s just in the nature of the beast that the more powerful it gets, the more complicated it’s going to be for advertisers to make good use of Facebook Ads.

As a business owner or a marketer, your only real goal with c is to inch towards a positive ROI. You want your ads to work. You want to pack in a punch.

Forget trying to waste time, money, and precious opportunities with needless split testing (when you don’t have to).

Here are a few tips to make that happen:

Give, don’t ask

There are way too many businesses out there just “asking” for the sale.

Asking people to part with their cash in the fleeting moment they see your ad is a huge ask. Yet, every business that we know of is doing just that.

Doing what doesn’t work really.

No one is about to buy from you. It’s not like they wake up every morning, credit card in hand, waiting to swipe.

It’s time to stand out from the crowd. Don’t make ads that say “Buy now”. Instead, give away something.

No offer. No ad

If you don’t have an irresistible offer to make, you shouldn’t even be creating an ad, launching a campaign, or building a sales funnel. Your customers have choices and for them to consider buying your products or services, you have to make an offer.

It’s for no reason that books like The Irresistible Offer by Mark Joyner are popular.

Download the book for free in PDF format, thanks to Hubspot.

The idea is to give stuff away (not ask), and then nurture your leads, grow trust, and then make sales on a continuous — and almost predictable — basis.

Use videos instead of images

Consider this: 57% of customers watch product videos while in store. Retailers report a 40% increase in sales because of video.

Plus, potential customers who view video ads are 1.81X more like to purchase than those who only check out text or text plus image combinations, according to Adobe.

Videos work like a charm. They pour life into your ads (and also into your potential customers’ newsfeeds). Plus, videos just convert (there’s no need to split test this, trust us).

Make ads more human

The problem with “corporate style” writing is that it’s too stiff. Companies convey messages (in ads or otherwise) with some sort of pseudo superiority complex. It almost feels as if they talk down to the customer.

Either that, or the ads lack any character, style, or attitude. No one likes to see an ad with nothing but a company logo on it.

Make your ads more human. Your copy should talk on a person-to-person level. Write your ads like you write to a friend.

Split test like you mean it

Don’t do split testing for the sake of doing it or because you always keep reading about it. You want to split test because you want to find your champions among ads, sales funnels, email copy, and more; not because you thought it’d be great to do it or just because you can.

Andrew Tate of AdEspresso has clear, succinct, and easy to follow advice:

• Wait a few days before evaluating your results.
• Wait to confirm your results until you have at least 95% statistical significance.
• Stick to testing one variable at a time.

To make any decisions that mean something for your campaigns, play the “waiting” game. Ensure that you have enough data before you make any decisions about your ads, landing pages, or sales funnels.

How do your Facebook Ads (…or LinkedIn Ads or Google Ads) look like? Are you packing a punch in your ads? Get on a scheduled call with us if you’d like to take your paid advertising campaigns to the next level.

The post How to Make Your Facebook Ads Pack More Punch appeared first on Done For You.

It’s not to say that social media isn’t worth your time or that you shouldn’t bother with email broadcast campaigns; it’s just that you can’t overlook a particular digital marketing channel over another — because of inertia, lack of resources or knowledge, or just because you never thought about it.

What is a transactional email?

Transactional emails consist of:

• order notifications,
• reminders,
• service emails,
• shipping notifications,
• and several others.

According to MailJet, open rates for transactional emails range from 30% to 40% (as compared to only 15 to 25% open rates for regular marketing emails).

How you can profit from transactional emails

Transactional emails are almost always overlooked as a particular email marketing campaign type that can bring in extra sales.

For most businesses, transactional emails are an afterthought.  The get opened and read though…  And that keeps email deliverability up.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are a few ways to make transactional emails work to bring in sales and profit, without you really doing much (except making a few changes to your strategy):

Make reminders ring the cash register

Take a look at what Evernote does when they send you a reminder that your annual subscription has ended, when they notice that you are getting close to your subscription date, or when you remove some of the devices you use from auto syncing.

Transactional email example #1: Evernote

This could have been just a reminder or a notification that you’ve successfully removed two of your devices from syncing.

But with simple messaging, on brand, and a simple offer to help you save on your next subscription (for a full year), Evernote is throwing its gates open for existing subscribers to continue with their subscriptions.

Could you do something like this for your business?

Order notifications for upsells

Every email that goes out to welcome your customers thanking them for their order is an opportunity for you to upsell.

You don’t have to overdo it but you can use notifications during a specific month or based on the number of times a single customer placed an order (regular customers?) and send out ultra-specific offers to those customers or during specific months.

Transactional email example #2: Moo

Moo has always been awesome when it comes to using emails to their benefit. Here’s a simple (but really long and loaded) order notification email that they use (upselling included):

Shopping cart abandonment emails can increase your profit

The average rate at which shopping carts are abandoned is anywhere from 60 to 75%, according to Baynard Research.

Shopping cart abandonment is killing e-commerce. If you are selling products or services online, chances are that you are already suffering from it. Shopping cart abandonment drains money right off your shop pages and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Or can you?

You can, if you are aware of the problem and that you are willing to do something about it. Sending out timely shopping cart emails is a powerful strategy if you do it right.

Transactional email example #3: ASICS

See how ASICS does it:

Image Source: Reallygoodemails.com

Winback emails

Remember the marketing mantra which goes something like, “It’s easier to sell to existing customers than try to target new ones”?

Winback emails or re-engagement emails help you do just that.

For every business, there are customers who bought once but never again. SaaS businesses, membership sites, subscription-based businesses have inactive customers (those who were customers once but aren’t active now), and several other use cases. Winback emails make for terrific ways to get your inactive customers back.

Transactional email example #4: Skillshare

Image Source: Reallygoodemails.com

Out of stock emails

As if Shopping cart abandonment wasn’t a major issue, you run the risk of suddenly running out of stock with a few popular items on your eCommerce store.

Customer comes to your store, selects a product (s), and sees the “Out of stock message”. Worse still, she goes all the way to checkout page places an order and then receives a notification that the product is out of stock.

What happens then? Most eCommerce stores don’t have anything more than “We are sorry, but the product you ordered is out of stock” message.

Transactional email example #5: Dr. Axe

You could do better than that, like Dr. Axe does:

Image Source: Reallygoodemails.com

Transactional emails don’t just have to do the heavy-lifting like to send out a message, a notification, or a reminder. They can actually do just as well in helping you increase revenue and profit compared to your regular email campaigns.

The question is: Are YOU using transactional emails to increase your profit?

Check out our Attract. Engage. Profit Webinar, get access to our email marketing handbook or get on a scheduled call with us to discuss your marketing strategy.

The post Simple Ways To Profit From Transactional Emails (With Examples) appeared first on Done For You.

Go to any e-commerce store and the store owners expect you to take action in this sequence (might not be in this order):

• Visit site
• Browse products
• Make a purchase

Bad news: You’ll make some sales, but it’s not a predictable occurrence and you’d never be able to tell just how much you’d make in sales or revenue in any given month (unless you are Jeff Bezos or his team reading this).

We see e-commerce stores making this mistake over and over where there’s just a store and products available for potential customers to browse.

We get it. You want to make sales. You want your e-commerce store’s revenue to soar. And, you want to profit from your business.

E-commerce store mistakes

You won’t make anything happen with the predictability and sustainability in revenue if you take that “show up expecting to sell” approach.

Here’s a simple fact:

People don’t sit with their credit cards in hand looking for something to buy. Even if they did, it’s not going to be your e-commerce store that they’ll be coming to.

You need a sales funnel for your e-commerce store

But why bother with a funnel for your e-commerce store?

Your customers go through this pattern before they actually buy:

• Visit store
• Browse products
• Read blog
• Follow you on Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest or Instagram
• Wait
• Wait some more – for the right time to buy or until they really have a need.
• One fine day, they buy

You don’t know when they’ll make a purchase and you have simple ways to be ready for them when they are ready. This process, from visiting the store for the first time till the customers buy, is called a pipeline or buyer’s journey or sales funnel.

That’s why you need sales, even for an e-commerce site. Here’s a simple, three-step process to get a sales funnel up and running for your e-commerce store:

Prepare to make an offer

You’ll need to make an offer to your potential customers when they visit your e-commerce store to make a purchase. Your customers need a compelling offer to consider a purchase. They have options so they need to be sure that they are likely to get a bargain (or much more value) if they purchase your products.

When we say “offer,” we don’t always suggest giving away “discounts.” We don’t even suggest coupon codes, deep discounting, or cutting costs as a way to do business or promotions.

But you can consider coupons if you have to.

Other kinds of offers could be a handy guide on how to use your product better, or a guide for your customers so they can solve a particular problem with the help of your product.

Deliver on your promise

For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that you are giving a discount coupon for the visitors of your e-commerce store. Using popups, links, or slide-ins on your e-commerce site, you’ll make that offer.

Some of your potential customers will sign up for these offers through one of the many opt-in forms.

At this point, you’ll need a way to deliver this coupon code to your leads and the easiest way to do that is with email.

Use an autoresponder sequence to send out the coupon immediately on sign up, and you can choose to have a complete onboarding series (email messages) to nurture your e-commerce store leads later on (see below).

Following a lead sign up on your e-commerce site, you can choose to take multiple routes in addition to your autoresponder sequence.

One example of that is a flash sale email sequence.

Follow up and nurture e-commerce store leads

Even after your potential e-commerce store customers express interest by signing up for a coupon code, there’s no guarantee that they’ll buy right away (some will, most won’t).

That’s why you need to grow your email list — a full list of potential customers who signed up for your offers on your e-commerce store. The longer the list, the more predictable the sales figures of your e-commerce business are going to be.

How well you make this happen depends on:

• The way you generate leads
• How your autoresponder sequences are setup and how you do email marketing
• The strategies you use to attract, engage, and profit by using sales funnels, email nurturing sequences, etc.
• How you re-engage non-responsive subscribers, non-responsive previous customers, etc.

What’s your focus on your e-commerce store, right now? To generate sales right away or to generate leads for more predictable sales and revenue?

The post E-commerce Stores: You Can’t Sell By Just Showing Up appeared first on Done For You.

You see websites full of content. Some of them are designed beautifully. Heck, check out any website featured on Awwwards, and we guarantee that you’ll love the designs.

The problem is this: “Likeability” and “pretty-looking” isn’t anywhere close to what a business really wants: profitability. Of course, high-performance websites need to come with a beautiful design, but that’s not what will make them profitable.

So you have the most beautiful website in the world but that’s not enough. Good design is important for branding and grabbing the user’s interest. What’s more important though is high performance. Here’s what that means:

• How many leads do you generate from your website every month?
• What volume of annual sales can you attribute to your website?
• Do you have at least one sales funnel in place working for you 24/7?
• Does your website load fast, ideally within 3 seconds or less?

Funny thing is that most businesses don’t have answers to these questions at all. If they do, the answers are vague. All that is because the entire approach to website design and set up has been wrong from the start.

Businesses focus on design, structure and content but they neglect elements and systems that would make a website perform best in turning traffic into buyers.

The right way to go about creating high-performance websites is this:

High-performance websites are built to convert

It doesn’t matter if you use a pure HTML/CSS or if you use WordPress to build your website. When you launch an e-commerce site, it won’t matter if you use Shopify or Magento. What really matters is whether or not your website gets you the results you seek.

For common types of business websites, the sought after results can look like this:

• Blog or online publication? Number of regular readers and email subscribers.
• Company blog? Number of leads generated and then sales attributed to those leads.
• SaaS application website: Number of free trials leading to monthly paid users with MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).

It’s possible to generate results for any level of traffic that’s coming to your website. Even if you’re attracting only a couple of hundreds of visitors per month, you should be able to convert at least a small number of them into customers.

When you develop a website, develop it from a marketing angle. If not, don’t even bother building a website, only to have a web presence.

No matter the type of website, you need to have at least one sales funnel in place. In other words, you need to push random incoming visitors towards a path of actions, that you have planned in advance, with the ultimate goal of turning some of those random visitors into paying customers.

See the difference? Instead of just counting on luck, wishing website visitors would buy more of your product, you come prepared; You create a well-thought sales strategy, and all of the pages, elements and systems behind it, to facilitate sales on auto-pilot. This is just another way to describe a digital sales funnel.

Use lead-generation elements on web pages

In the short time that you have to make that good first impression to your visitors, it’s hard to get your visitors to give you a vote of confidence, to build trust, or to convince them to buy.

To enable sales you need more time. The only way to have more time with your web visitors is to get them to engage with your brand long-term. The best way to achieve that is to use email marketing. Using one or several sets of well-written autoresponder messages, you can nurture leads and convert them into sales.

But how do you even get email subscribers in the first place? You do that by creating lead-generation elements such as pop-ups, slide-ins, welcome gates, in-line opt-in forms, or opt-in forms on your blog’s sidebar. The purpose of these lead-generation elements is to grab the user’s email address, so you can contact them again.

How do you attract more email subscribers? Make a valuable offer. Give away something of value to help your visitors go one level up on your relationship, and further convince them that you have the solution to their problems.

Websites are hubs; Landing pages are for focused lead generation

Your website is a central hub with oodles of information to keep your visitors informed, engaged, and to help them make well-informed decisions. Websites can work as knowledge hubs where you offer content, blogs, resources, tools, and access to your primary products and services.

Make a sitewide, all-purpose offer on your website for all your visitors to see. This offer is usually your flagship offer and also an evergreen one so that you don’t have to keep making changes to that offer.

However, you need to use landing pages to present specific offers based on different criteria, such as:

• a person’s location or country,
• important referral sources, like Facebook, or
• topic-specific or interest-based offers for particular audiences.

Landing pages are focused and specific, and visitors dig that sort of relevance.

High-performance websites: Use analytics, for everything

Use Google Analytics to ensure that you have a way to track visitors to your website (and every single page within, including each of your blog posts).

When you track visitors, you also get a glimpse of their behavior, along with several other data points such as locations, devices, countries, bounce rates, time spent on your site, and website page loading time, etc.

Click here to register for an upcoming webinar where we’ll learn:

• how you can track visitor behavior and visualize web paths with the click of a button,
• what metrics you need to analyze and how you can get instant access to them, and
• how you can learn how to fix and optimize sales funnels using one dashboard.

One of the most popular tools, Google Analytics, gives you a wealth of data to let you know what digital marketing efforts contribute to acquiring leads and ultimately to generating sales. If you need more handy features, consider using Statly for bringing in very specific numbers pertaining to your sales funnels. Statly allows you to visualize complete sales funnels, and find funnel pages or elements that facilitate conversions.

Plus, you can use Hotjar or Mouseflow to also get access to video sessions of users, heatmaps, form analytics, and click behavior on your website and landing pages.

While you are at it, be sure to keep track of the right metrics, the ones that help reach informed business decisions.

Your website should be built for a reason. Whatever your reasons are, it’s certainly not for “looking good” or for satiating your ego. Make your website work!

If you need help setting up the right strategy for high-performance websites, if you need to get on a profitable path to digital marketing, sales funnels, and lead generation, get on a scheduled strategy session with us.

The post 4 Requirements For High-performance Websites appeared first on Done For You.

Or mауbе уоu dоn’t remember bесаuѕе you аrеn’t a total nеrd like me me. In any case, уоu get the idea, press button and fооd арреаrѕ. Like “the food replicator”, digital downloads аrе almost instant. You рау, рrеѕѕ a button tо download, and instantly gеt what you want. Easy.

Today we hаvе ѕо muсh information readily available to us. With the click of a buttоn, we have ассеѕѕ tо books, music, lessons, tutorials, grарhiсѕ, рhоtоgrарhу, blogs, themes and more. Pretty much anything you want can be bought digitally.

Pеорlе аrе embracing the entrepreneurial spirit. Einstein оnсе said, “Everybody iѕ a genius. But if you judge a fish bу its ability tо climb a trее it will live itѕ whole life believing it is stupid.” Nоt еvеrуоnе iѕ cut out fоr or iѕ bеѕt suited fоr a 9-5 jоb.

Mаnу are turning to selling their expertise online. Whether it bе writing аn ebook оr tеасhing guitar lеѕѕоnѕ. Thе problem many реорlе encounter is nоt knоwing if their product will bе profitable. Wе аrе hеrе to hеlр you.

Here are the 5 most profitable digital products that you can sell on your own e-commerce store.

1. Ebooks

Thе most рорulаr digital dоwnlоаd gоеѕ to thе eBook and with gооd reason. Duе tо thе еmеrgеnсе оf devices likе the Kindlе аnd Kobo, the рорulаritу of еBооkѕ has skyrocketed. Bесаuѕе of thiѕ nеw era of ebooks, ѕеlf-рubliѕhеd authors are now getting the recognition they dеѕеrvе. Authоrѕ, if they dесidе tо gо thiѕ rоutе, no lоngеr have tо go thrоugh the hаѕѕlе of finding a рubliѕhеr.

Tаkе a look at thеѕе remarkable ѕtаtѕ frоm рubliѕhеrѕ wееklу:

Thе Big Fivе trаditiоnаl publishers now ассоunt for only 16% of thе е-bооkѕ оn Amаzоn’ѕ bestseller lists.

Self-published bооkѕ now represent 31% of e-book sales оn Amаzоn’ѕ Kindle Stоrе.

Indiе аuthоrѕ аrе еаrning nearly 40% оf the е-bооk dollars going to authors.

Sеlf-рubliѕhеd аuthоrѕ аrе “dоminаting trаditiоnаllу рubliѕhеd аuthоrѕ” in ѕсi-fi/fаntаѕу, mуѕtеrу/thrillеr and romance genres, and аrе taking ѕignifiсаnt market ѕhаrе in all gеnrеѕ.

Self-published bооkѕ аrе dominating as thеу аrе starting to gаthеr a сult-likе fоllоwing. Many реорlе аrе tirеd оf ѕееing thе ѕаmе bооkѕ рubliѕhеd bу thе ѕаmе аuthоrѕ аnd are lооking for some vаriеtу.

Setting uр a ѕitе for уоur ebooks iѕ еxtrеmеlу ѕimрlе, уоu get tо keep 100% оf уоur рrоfitѕ and 100% of the attention is оn уоu. Nоbоdу hаѕ tо ѕоrt through hundrеdѕ оf thousands оf оthеr titlеѕ tо еvеntuаllу lаnd оn уоur bооk.

2. Photography

Millions оf рhоtоѕ, vесtоrѕ, and illustrations currently bеing ѕоld оn Shutterstock every month. Nоt to mеntiоn over 750,000 active mеmbеrѕ in оvеr 150 countries. And thаt’ѕ just Shuttеrѕtосk. There’s also Phоtосrаti, SmugMug, Zеnfоliо, DigiLabs, Shuttеrflу, Zаzzlе, iStосk.

All thiѕ рrоbаblу ѕоundѕ рrеttу gооd, right? Thеrе’ѕ a ton оf rеаllу big numbеrѕ, but thе fасt iѕ, if you want уоur imаgеѕ tо ѕtаnd оut, thеу won’t. Thеу bесоmе a nееdlе in a hауѕtасk аnd thе соmреtitiоn is fiеrсе. Yоu mау think уоur рhоtо iѕ wоrth a сеrtаin аmоunt, but mоnеу tаlkѕ and уоu’ll nееd tо price уоur рhоtоѕ соmреtitivеlу in order tо ѕtау rеlеvаnt.

A рhоtо iѕ wоrth a thousand wоrdѕ. Mаnу timеѕ рhоtоgrарhеrѕ hаvе a compelling ѕtоrу to gо along with thеir рhоtо. Likе a mеrсhаnt ѕеlling a product, the dеѕсriрtiоn of your photo gives you a сhаnсе tо rеаllу ѕеll someone оn it.

Thеn thеrе’ѕ thе fact thаt thеѕе third раrtiеѕ are gоing tо tаkе a major сut оf your profit. Nоt сооl. With уоur own ѕtоrе, уоu keep ALL of уоur рrоfitѕ and make ѕurе уоur photos gеt thе аttеntiоn thеу dеѕеrvе.

3. Music

iTunes, аѕ we аll know, iѕ mаѕѕivе. Likе billiоnѕ-оf-dоllаrѕ-in-rеvеnuе-еvеrу-уеаr massive. But did уоu know thаt iTunеѕ takes 30% of уоur muѕiс ѕаlеѕ? Surе, you gеt exposure оn it, but unless уоu are Tауlоr Swift, сhаnсеѕ аrе you аrеn’t going tо bе making a ton оf mоnеу. Thе scenario iѕ wоrѕе when уоu lооk at оthеr services like Sроtifу.

4. Videos and courses

With еvеrуthing being ѕо readily available and free, it would ѕееm that videos and online courses would be obsolete. Nоt the case.

Online video and course marketplaces like Udemy have become extremely popular. Udemy shared that it now hаѕ mоrе than 8,000 courses being taught tо 800,000 students. The problem iѕ, Udemy and other similar wеbѕitеѕ take 50% of your sales! On tор of that, they regularly run discount promotions that further diminish your income.

From healthy living tо learning hоw to code, you nаmе it, people аrе lооking tо learn and actually pay for the information!

Thе рrоblеm with selling on third party ѕitеѕ iѕ that it’ѕ hard tо stand out. Having your own site will allow you to tell your story and really position yourself as an expert in your field. This will give уоu a lеg up оn your competition.

5. Web elements

If уоu’rе a grарhiс designer, уоu’rе in luck. Pеорlе аrе paying a lоt оf саѕh fоr themes, patterns, brushes, wallpapers, logos, pretty muсh аnуthing web rеlаtеd уоu саn think оf.

Themes аrе еxtrеmеlу popular. Sоmе оf the thеmеѕ оn Thеmеfоrеѕt are being dоwnlоаdеd thousands оf timеѕ with thе рriсе rаngе bеtwееn 14-30 dоllаrѕ. Thеrе are over 11,000 WordPress thеmеѕ аlоnе. Sоmе other incredible numbеrѕ frоm Thеmе Fоrеѕt inсludе:

Highеѕt ѕеlling theme: $200,000 sales tо dаtе

Fаѕtеѕt selling thеmе оf аll timе: $160,000 in 7 mоnthѕ, аnd counting

Highest author earning in a single month: $40,000 (tаkе home earnings)

Then there are sites like Grарhiс Rivеr that sell just about anything you can think of, frоm social media packs to banner ads to textures. Thеrе are оvеr 150,000 vесtоrѕ аlоnе to choose from. The possibilities of web elements that a graphic designer could sell online are endless.

Start selling

Digitаl downloads is a billiоn dоllаr induѕtrу. Stаnding оut аnd mаking rеаl money iѕ possible but it wоn’t bе dоnе ѕеlling оn third party wеbѕitеѕ. Surе, there аrе thе luсkу fеw thаt dо еnd uр mаking ѕоmе decent соin, but they ѕtill hаvе tо givе uр a реrсеnt оf thеir earnings.

Stаrting your own оnlinе ѕtоrе аllоwѕ you tо brаnd уоurѕеlf, mаrkеt уоurѕеlf аnd ѕеll your digitаl downloads оn уоur tеrmѕ, without paying those hеftу marketplace fееѕ.

Thе best раrt iѕ, it’s rеаllу ѕimрlе tо get ѕtаrtеd. You dоn’t nееd manufacturers, suppliers, расkаgеrѕ, ѕhiрреrѕ and all thе other ореrаtiоnаl раinѕ that соmе with рhуѕiсаl рrоduсtѕ. Piсk оnе of thе above digital рrоduсt types, ѕеt uр your e-commerce ѕtоrе, аnd start selling!

If you’d like to jump on the phone and chat about your product, traffic sources or sales process; please click here to set up a call with us!

Also, click the links for more information on Scriptly’s Page Builder and Email Autoresponder Engine, the Create Book, and the Convert book.

The post The 5 Most Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online appeared first on Done For You.

First, people are drowning in a tidal wave of emails. Radicati Group’s study published in February 2017 revealed that a staggering 269 billion emails are sent each day globally. The same study estimated that there are over 3.7 billion email users around the globe.

These findings mean that the average user receives more than 72 emails a day. Also, a previous study reported that an average office employee receives 121 emails a day.

Second, a lot of times marketers send emails to lists that they scrape from the web or otherwise acquire without the consent of the users. This practice will most probably make the majority of the messages land in the spam folder.

Third, open rates are low not only because of spam filters but also for the reason that numerous email marketers compete for attention. And if you add so many other online distractions, like social media, the chance of a person actually noticing your email is pretty low.

According to recent email performance benchmarks published by Mailerlite, open rates could range anywhere from 11.23% to 33.71% depending on the industry.

So, it’s definitely hard work to get your reader’s attention, but when you do get it, you don’t want them to skim through your content without caring; you want to get them do something about it, follow your call to action (CTA) and, eventually, become customers.

How to convert email subscribers into customers

With half the population of earth reading email every day it only makes sense to consider email marketing an opportunity for making money.

Email is the one most important element of a person’s online id. Each email address is unique. You use your email for all things online and particularly to sign up for services and applications.

Email is the connective tissue between the user and any type of online business. Cracking the code of engagement and conversion via email is the way to go if you want to make money online.

Is lead conversion puzzling you? Join the free workshop that will demystify the process of attracting, engaging and profiting from new email subscribers by systematically giving them what they want!

In a previous article, we talked about how to write emails that get clicks. We gave you 6 tips for high-converting email content. We’ve also explained why good email copy is important and how to score well, even if you’re not a copywriter. We also talked about the best alternative to a copywriter, i.e. a tool to write the emails for you – that tool is Scriptly.

Now, in this guide, we’ll look at the best ways you can convert email subscribers into paying customers. Let’s get started!

Tip #1 – Focus on a single niche

You need to be very specific with your target market. You can’t kill two birds with one stone; Heck, you can’t be successful at approaching many target markets with different products at the same time, at least not if you are a small business.

The mix of niche and product you choose can either make you or break you. Health, wealth and relationships are the broader areas that you should consider. Start from any of these and narrow down to define your ideal sub-niche.

Tip #2 – Create an offer

It might sound crazy but a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t know exactly what they’re offering. What we mean by that is they haven’t defined their products and they haven’t created specific types of offers. Let’s assume you are a career coach. It’s not enough to market your career coaching services.

You need to create an irresistible offer by productizing and positioning your offer in the marketplace. Know exactly what your product is, how much it costs and how you will deliver it to the client. Use email to communicate the value of your offer and watch subscribers convert into paying clients.

Tip #3 – Offer subscribers real value

Chances are new people coming onto your list don’t know you. You need to give them time to get to know you, trust you and realize that you can provide real value.

To accomplish that, you need to consider marketing tactics that can convert free email subscribers into paying customers.

• Educate your audience and provide tips and tricks via email.
• Offer subscribers a free trial or a free product, to get to see the real work that you do. Periodically, stress the premium features or benefits they’ll get if they decide to become paying customers.
• Provide free trials, training sessions or customer onboarding sessions which will give you the opportunity to pitch your premium plans and services.
• All in all, a proven route to converting email subscribers into customers is to invite subscribers to a free discovery call, otherwise known as consultation call or strategy session.

The strategy session method

The strategy session method will have you bringing in more high-ticket clients, as well as clients who are more aligned with your style and what you have to offer.

During a strategy session, you can screen out people who aren’t suitable for your program and at the same time pitch your offer. We, at DFY, are using Timeslots to schedule strategy sessions online.

Many entrepreneurs have found the strategy session model to be the best way to sell their high-ticket offers and, at the end of the day, convert email subscribers into customers. That is because it’s easier to sell premium services when you speak directly to a person compared to throwing a sales letter at them.

Tip #4 – Tell a good story

If you want people to listen to you and build a deep connection you need to speak to their hearts not their minds. Purchase decisions rely heavily on emotions, and you need to address that in your email marketing conversion strategy.

Purchase decisions are not only the result of thoughtful evaluation of alternatives through some type of cost-benefit analysis. Purchase decisions can appear as an impulse purchase or be instinctively made satisfy basic human needs, like the sense of security.

The tool you need to utilize as an email marketer is storytelling. People connect emotionally with stories. Stories can contribute to converting free email subscribers to paying customers.

The modern consumer wants to buy without being pushed or sold on directly.

Being able to tell a good story in your email is very important if you want to convert email subscribers into customers.

See this infographic that explains how storytelling affects our brain. At the end of the day, good stories can help you create a thriving email list.

Persuasive storytelling

The keyword for successful stories, ones that convert email subscribers into customers, is “persuasive.” The story should compel subscribers to want to read more, ideally through the end of your message. So what are the basic components of a compelling story? Incorporate some or all of the following elements.

• A relatable character – You should be composing your story as if writing to one recipient – to your ideal customer avatar.
• A problem – Use a story, your own if possible, to paint the picture of a problem that you (your character) went through.
• Empathy – This is the “I’ve been there too“ part of the story. The aim is to make them feel emotional and realize that their situation is one that others could be facing.
• Connect the dots – Relate the story to the problem, so your reader can understand there is a solution to their problem.
• The vision – Create a vision of how the character in your short story finally managed to overcome the predicament and how it transformed their life.
• The solution – It is the part of your email where you introduce your subscriber to your unique product. This is the solution to the character’s problem, the route to transformation.
• Re-iterate – Bring your email subscriber back from “Once upon a time…“ into reality and challenge them to change their situation.
• Call to action – Place a button or link with a strong CTA. This is the action they need to take to solve their problems. That action is to buy your product.

Tip #5 – Convert more with lower price tags

For some companies, the aim might be to first convert a big percentage of free subscribers into low-end customers and then into repeat customers. For example, there might be a front-end offer for $7 that will essentially prove that the subscriber is ready to trust your brand and use their credit card.

Even with $7 only the mission is accomplished; You now you have a confirmed buyer! You may see this type of affordable products referred to as tripwire offers. The tripwire offer is a low-cost, risk-free offer that is easy for your business lead to buy into.

However, other types of businesses might intend to build more sophisticated funnels, like the one we described above that starts with a strategy session. This sort of funnel may convert fewer subscribers into customers but still, generate a higher revenue.

So, that’s it! With the above tips, along with consistency and quality, you should be able to convert more email subscribers into customers.

The post Email Subscribers Not Converting Into Customers? Here’s What You Need To Do… appeared first on Done For You.

Making money is an art and working is art and good business is the best art. – Andy Warhol

If you are running a business you will easily relate to the quote mentioned above. As a business owner, you must always be on the lookout for ways to make your business bigger and better.

Now the question is where are you going to find those opportunities? That’s what we will talk about in this post.

So without further ado let us discuss how to find better growth opportunities for your business.

Be where your customers are

Your business is all about your customers. Therefore, you need to make your presence felt where your customers are. Do thorough research and find out where your audience is most active.

It could be an online channel like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even YouTube. It could be offline marketplaces like shopping malls, wholesale markets, or somewhere else.

You never know where your next customer hub could be. So try to find a place where your customers are the most active and then make your presence felt in a professional and helpful way.

Follow them on their journey

It is not just about finding the reservoir where your customers are present; it is also about following them throughout their buyer’s journey as they discover and fall in love with your product. This is how you build a credible brand following.

Connecting with the customers at the right time, paying heed to their problems, and then letting them know you are working towards solving them is something that can keep your customers interested in your current and future business plans.

In order to achieve this, you have to follow your customers throughout their buyer’s journey!

Have an action plan for business growth

Once you identify the potential source of business, the next step is to implement your plan. But what is the plan?

This is where you need to have your best people around, people who understand your business and have been with you throughout the growing process. Rather than going haywire with your strategies, figure out a way to entice the customers and get them into your sales funnel.

As they say, failing to plan is like planning to fail. Don’t even bother to dream of achieving success in your business and finding the best growth opportunities unless you have an actionable plan for it. Plan for everything, but understand that these plans need to be flexible.

Make wise use of technology

Technology can be your best friend or your worst foe; it depends entirely on how you utilize it.

There are plenty of marketing tools available out there which can help automate things for your business. Based on what your requirements are and how much money and time you can spend on them, you can easily find tools that can help skyrocket the growth of your business.

A growing business needs to react to the market quickly, and technology is the only way to fulfill that need. It is your responsibility to find that technology to achieve your business’s need for speed!

Set your priorities

Every business runs either by enticing new customers or retaining repeat customers. New customers are great, but the real gold mine is your existing customer base. You would be amazed to know that it takes almost five times the effort to attract new customers and convert them as compared to reselling to your existing customers.

Accordingly, a smart strategy is to target existing customers while you are planning to rope in new ones. This will reduce stress on finances since you will have a stream of continuous flowing revenue, which you can also grow further.

All you need to do is prioritize your business strategies correctly.

Analyze the effort

Another important thing you need to do in order to ensure that you find the best business opportunities is to analyze where you are putting the efforts.

Without analysis, you will never be able to find out the true impact of your marketing efforts. It would be like swinging the hammer, but never knowing if the nail is being driven into the board or not.

You need to keep a close eye on the results of your business efforts. If they are not bringing the desired results it is time to look for something new.

Plan, experiment and then plan again. That’s how successful businesses grow! This process is exactly what you need to follow in order to take your business to the next level.

Be quick, agile and adaptive

Most important of all, you cannot afford to be rigid in your approach. Flexibility is the name of the game when it comes to finding the right business opportunities for growth.

But are you agile? Is your business strategy agile enough to adapt according to the changing times? Are you up to date on the newest trends that concern your business?

If not, you need to start working from the ground level to develop a business strategy that’s agile and can adapt according to the changing needs of your customer.

Whether it is your product development methods or marketing endeavors you need to be able to implement changes quickly, and let actions and success do more talking than heavy-handed email marketing campaigns.

Sincere, well-planned efforts

Last, but not the least is sincerity in the efforts you are pouring into your business. You cannot expect to have a win-win business situation by handling things halfheartedly, your product will reflect when your heart isn’t in it.

It requires sincere meticulous efforts and consistency in your approach. Without these two factors, you will never grow past being a mediocre business like thousands of others out there.

The choice has to be yours. No matter the industry you target, if you aren’t fully committed with your efforts you are never going to succeed.

Finding the right growth opportunities requires not only skill, but also the willingness to understand your customers and figure out what will bring a smile to their face.

A company that is able to solve this puzzle can easily win in the game of business.

So, are you ready for the challenge? If yes, then begin by implementing these key steps as part of your business growth strategy, and see where they may take you in a matter of months.

After all, you cannot afford to wait too long for the right business growth opportunities… Can you?

Way to fast growth

You might be wondering, “Is there a real-life strategy to rapid business growth?” Now there is!

Deploying a high-converting, automated online sales funnel will allow you to build a thriving business fast by attracting targeted leads and converting them into customers on autopilot. Click here to learn more.

Here at DoneForYou.com, we have helped dozens of businesses achieve their target growth rates within months. With our innovative software and our online marketing expertise, we are able to work with businesses like yours to create and implement growth strategies for rapid business growth.

Do you want to know how? Book a complimentary call with one of our experts now!

The post How To Find Business Growth Opportunities appeared first on Done For You.

After all, you cannot consider thousands of people visiting your website as a success for your online business unless a big chunk of them gets converted into paying customers.

Now, the problem is that in order to get the conversions out of customers visiting your website you need to create a website optimized for this same purpose. How to do it?

Well, here are some simple steps that are going to help you with conversion rate optimization for your eshop, not just in 2018 but forever. So, without wasting any time let us have a look at those steps.

1. A powerful homepage

Almost all your conversions are decided by your homepage. A website homepage too cluttered with random information is never going to help you in conversion.

In order to give your conversions a boost, you need to smartly craft your homepage into a killer one. Some of the basic things to consider when finalizing the homepage design are:

• Don’t overstuff it with information.
• Place your most successful products on it.
• Use the right CTAs and callouts.

No matter how small they might seem, these actionable steps could eventually boost your conversion rate and take it higher without causing you too much stress.

Pro Tip: Use your CTAs carefully – be specific with their placement, and do A/B test them.

2. Easy navigation

Have you ever visited a website and felt out of place? Have you ever been to a website where you felt lost during the order taking process? The navigation of a website plays a massive role in getting the users to convert.

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer and think – will you ever purchase stuff from a website that has complicated navigation? Chances are the answer is going to be a “No!” nine out of ten times.

Therefore, one of the first steps to creating a powerful website that can have great conversions is to make navigation easy and streamlined so that the customer does not have to face any hiccups while ordering. Remember, the easier the navigation the better conversion.

Pro Tip: Learn from ecommerce giants like Amazon on how to do it.

3. Craft content that sells

In face to face marketing you have the opportunity to interact with the customer, but when it comes to ecommerce you don’t have this advantage. This is the reason your content has to be powerful enough to win over the customer. Copywriting skills, therefore, become the key to a successful and high-conversion ecommerce website.

Starting from the content to be listed on the homepage to product descriptions, banners and logos, you need to be really specific with what you want to show the customer. Content on an ecommerce website has to be exciting, useful and knowledgeable. But at the same time, it should also encourage the customer to take action and buy stuff. Therefore, you need people who know what it takes to create such content.

Pro Tip: Hire an expert copywriter who can help you create web copies that help you with ecommerce conversions.

4. Visual content

It’s not just the written form of content that’s going to be displayed on your website. When you are dealing with ecommerce, you need to have powerful visual content as well. WIn essence, whether you talk about product imagery or graphic designs that are going to be placed on the website – everything has to be enticing enough for the user to make a purchase.

Remember, almost two-thirds of the customers think that visual content i.e. images are a decisive factor when making a purchase online.Use the power of pictures to give your ecommerce sales the boost it deserves. After all, there’s a reason they say – a picture is worth more than a thousand words.

Pro Tip: rather than using stock images, hire a professional to capture your product images and publish them on your website.

5. Strong support

Whether you talk about online commerce or a physical store, having a team of support staff is the key to successful business. As already mentioned, you don’t have the luxury to deal with people face to face in e-commerce; you need to find out ways people could reach you.

This is where having more than just one channel for customer support becomes important. A big chunk of people leaves products in the cart because they are unable to get in touch with the customer support team to figure out transaction details. So, you have to be really careful when setting up the ecommerce business to make sure that customers can reach you easily.

Pro Tip: Utilize as many channels as possible – email, call, social media, live chat and what not.

The key to high ecommerce conversion rates lies in being smart 

Succeeding in ecommerce is all about figuring out what is going to make the customer happy and what is not. While creating a user-friendly website is the most important aspect of getting the customer to buy stuff, it is not the only thing. As already stated above, successful conversion rate optimization requires a blend of many steps that keep the customer hooked up throughout the entire journey.

Now, it is up to you to decide which path to higher ecommerce conversion rates you want to follow. Understanding the customer’s journey by putting yourself in his shoes becomes really important when we talk about succeeding in ecommerce.

Moreover, the steps to mentioned above can prove to be the guiding light if you have been trying hard to get the best out of your ecommerce venture. Start implementing these steps one after the other to see how they work out for you.

Remember, in the end, it is always about keeping the customer happy.

Are you doing that with your ecommerce website? If not, then it is time to do some serious thinking because you might be missing out on the potential for higher ecommerce conversion rates!

The post 5 Ways To Increase Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates In 2018 appeared first on Done For You.

You already know the revenue opportunity when you grow a service business. Output in the US service sector is projected to increase 5.4 percent annually to nearly $2.3 trillion, up from about $1.2 trillion in 2008. There is no faster way to start making money today than providing services.

A service business model describes how you create and deliver value to your clients by offering a service for your target audience. A service business can provide any B2C or B2B service, from wedding photography to large software development projects.

In this article, we will focus on what types of revenue or income models you can use in your service business to help grow your revenue to six figures and beyond.

Five service business models

There are five service business models:

1. The hourly model – get paid by the hour
2. The retainer model – offer packages of hours
3. The monthly model – receive a monthly fee
4. The performance model – your rate depends on the results
5. The project model – work per project or deliverable

Sometimes, a service business operates under just one revenue model, and sometimes, it offers a mixture of different options. Choosing the right service business model can make or break your path to success.

But before discussing how to choose the suitable service business model, let’s briefly describe each of these models. A significant difference among all of them is how revenue is generated. So, let’s break it down.

1. The hourly business model

The hourly model is pretty self-explanatory. Your income is generated when you charge clients an hourly rate for your service. Many service businesses charge their clients by the hour when there’s a low monthly work volume.

The hourly business model is not easy to scale without increasing your fixed costs. On top of that, it’s possible that you will reach capacity soon. For instance, if you are a health coach, there’s a limit to the number of clients you can serve each week. If you have a consulting business, you’d need to hire an additional consultant as your business grows.

Another problem with the hourly rate is that you must track the hours worked before you bill your client. But sometimes, the client might expect to pay less or be unable to see how time-consuming a task is.

Also, the speed of completing tasks depends, among other factors, on the service provider’s experience levels. So, a junior designer might need three hours to design one log concept, while an expert designer can do it in less than an hour. In most cases, the hourly rate will reflect your experience levels.

Pros (+)

• Flexibility
• Applicable to most service businesses
• Popular
• The best way for a new client to get to know you

Cons (-)

• Difficult to scale
• It would be best if you tracked the time
• Sometimes, you need to demonstrate the value
• You work first and get paid after

2. The retainer model

The retainer model involves signing a contract for a certain number of hours. When the hours run out, you bill your client for another package of hours. When a client hires you on retainer, it’s like topping up their account with credits.

The retainer model, similar to the hourly model, can work for nearly any service provider who charges an hourly rate and provides an ongoing service.

A significant difference between the two models is that with the hourly model, you invoice the client after you’ve done the work, while with the retainer model, you get paid in advance for a package of hours.

The retainer model is time-bound instead of value-based. You get paid for the time you devote to your client. It’s also limited because there are only so many hours a day.

As with the hourly model, you need to track billable hours and display the result of your work. But it’s better than the hourly model because you have already sold part of your total work capacity, so you can now focus on acquiring clients to fill up your schedule.

Pros (+)

• Applicable to most service businesses
• Predictable income (to a certain degree)
• A good option for ongoing services
• Better value than the hourly pricing

Cons (-)

• Limited scalability
• Like with the hourly model, you need to track time and
• Need to demonstrate the value, sometimes

3. The monthly model

The monthly model involves charging clients a monthly rate for ongoing work. Accountants or SEO experts frequently work every month. This income formula is best when repeatable tasks need to be done every month, e.g., creating backlinks and doing on-page SEO for a particular keyword.

Service businesses, like career coaches or consultants or practically any kind of service provider, can help clients for a monthly fee when a relatively large volume of work is repeated.

The monthly model is a good model for most service businesses. The benefits are that both the freelancer and the client know exactly what to expect regarding invoice value and deliverables. It also helps the client get into a habit mode and get used to paying you monthly.

Now, the monthly model can be one of the best options for your business because it allows you to estimate your monthly income as accurately as possible. It’s like having paying subscribers. With that in mind, it’s easier to manage your cash flow and strategize what you need to do to grow your service business even faster. In other words, the monthly model creates a safety net for you. You know that no matter what, you’ll be paid at least an X amount.

The monthly model is also perfect for companies that sell software and services. For example, a design and development company might work with clients for website updates and offer them a monthly subscription to a server or an email marketing platform.

Pros (+)

• Suitable for any service provider, basically
• Best for ongoing work
• Best for steady streams of income
• Builds up trust and a sense of security
• Can work together with other service business models

Cons (-)

• There are not any top-of-mind arguments against it

4. The performance-based revenue model

The performance model involves agreeing with your client on a specific fee structure or percentage according to the results you get. So, you either bill them based on a scale of dollar fees or commission percentages.

Suppose you’re a PPC advertiser running Facebook ads for a client. With the performance model, your compensation will vary depending on the revenue you generate for your client through those ads.

The performance model can be used by lead generation experts, SEO professionals, debt collectors, and direct sales businesses.

The performance model can be tricky, and you must be careful if you want to work on a commission instead of charging a flat or an hourly rate for your service. With this model, the freelancer takes some risk for several reasons.

First, you need to wait for results—and results take time. So, you write sales copy for a landing page, and your fees are calculated as a percentage of sales. But the sales cycle for that particular company might be three months.

Second, you do not control other factors that affect the results. Using the same example, the revenue generated from a sales page depends on several factors. One major factor is the level of incoming traffic. So, if your client runs short on budget, they could pause paid advertising channels. This will result in you receiving much lower compensation—unless, of course, you’re an insurance or real estate agent or an affiliate marketer, in which case you’re doing direct sales.

Third, your client business might not be optimized for results in other areas unrelated to your service. For example, the landing page designer might not have done good work, or the page’s loading speed might be deficient.

To combat the risk in the performance model, you can also charge an upfront flat fee on top of any royalties you earn. Now, you can cover your costs and eliminate the risk of not being paid at all. If the results are good, you will make a significant profit, probably larger than with the other business models.

You might want to pursue that route if you’re just getting started and want to make your service accessible to people who cannot afford a high flat fee. You’ll also want to pursue this model if you’re sure you can consistently meet your goals. However, remember that the performance model is probably the riskiest of the five service business models.

Pros (+)

• It can yield much, much more than the other models
• You can mitigate the risk if you receive an upfront fee
• It is best for expert service providers who know they can hit the results

Cons (-)

• It takes time to bear fruit
• You’re not in control of other forces that might affect the results
• You might not be aware of the client’s business situation
• Risk not to get paid at all

5. The project-based model

With the project model, you estimate the hours needed beforehand but bill the client for the whole project. Usually, businesses that work on a project basis get a portion of the total fee in advance and then bill the client per milestone or with the end deliverable when the project is complete.

The project model works great when you can define the scope of a job before it starts and estimate the number of billable hours it would take to complete.

If you can bundle your services together, as an architect, construction company, or website developer would, then the project model can work for your business.

The project model can also refer to per-piece work. For example, a copywriter might be paid per article delivered.

With the project model, you can generate more revenue by combining services into a premium package. Also, working on a project allows you to offer an upsell to your client more easily than when charging by the hour.

This revenue model for service businesses also allows you to schedule your time better and organize your resources. If you’re working by the hour instead, a client might need something on short notice and expect you to adjust your schedule accordingly to deliver their urgent task.

On the other hand, there’s always the risk of underestimating the amount of work involved. If this happens, you’ll work more hours and be paid less than your service is worth. The monthly model may be a much safer alternative if you don’t want to risk being in that spot.

Pros (+)

• Suitable for premium services that you can package together
• Can create a higher revenue compared to the hourly model
• You can get part of the payment in advance
• Better allocation of resources

Cons (-)

• It is easy to underestimate the workload
• Big projects can stall

How to choose the perfect business model

Choosing a suitable service business model can pave the way to a six-figure business.

There’s no one-size-fits-all business model. So, how do you choose which one is the best fit for you, your team, and your customers? Which service business model will increase your bottom line faster?

Well, it depends. It depends on how you want to work with your clients and what type of work you do. It also depends on how risk-averse you are and how much you trust that your client has reasonable processes and systems.

Finally, it depends on your business’s stage. Are you just starting out, or are you an established business?

For example, if you’re a new freelancer, you might want to try the hourly model to gain experience and more easily reach potential clients.

On the other hand, if you’re an experienced service provider who works on a project basis, you might want to consider creating monthly packages for ongoing support, updates, or coaching. Not all of your clients will need those monthly services, but some will, and this way, you can increase your monthly income more easily than if you went out there seeking new clients.

It’s important to know your clients’ needs well to create complete packages of services that work best for them and your business.

Each model has certain benefits and risks. Consider these when structuring your pricing plans.

All these service business models can work standalone or combined for almost all industries and anyone who provides service to clients who want to outsource part of their ongoing work.

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The post How the Right Service Business Model Can Elevate Your Business to 6 Figures appeared first on Done For You.