Archive | January, 2020

If you know how to build websites – or you’re willing to learn – you can make some extra money doing this. The sites are small – only one page – and they don’t take long to build. Yet you can sell them for $100 – $300 on sites like Flippa.

Sometimes you might even get more money, but let’s be conservative.

Your first step is to locate some kind of service online that’s basically automated. It might be article writing, clicks, video creation, etc. The possibilities are endless. The criteria you’re looking for is; someone goes to that site, chooses what they want and checks out without having contact with the site owner.

Let’s say you find a site that will write one blog post for $5, 10 blog posts for $40 and 25 blogposts for $95.

Now you buy a url like, BlogPostsWrittenForYou.com or something along those lines.

You then build a one page website that describes the service, what they get, the turn around time, etc. You’re selling the service. Make it look professional but don’t spend years creating it – it shouldn’t take longer than one morning or afternoon.

Put your buttons in place for each of the options, but don’t hook them up to anything. And raise the price of each option. You might make it $10 for 1 post, $75 for 10 posts and $150 for 20 posts.

Then you use Flippa or one of the website selling services online to post your site for sale. Of course you’ve done no SEO or anything else hard. You haven’t driven any traffic. You haven’t made any sales. So you’re going to be talking about the potential of what the site might do once it’s unleashed.

The buyer of the site just needs to hook up the buttons to their PayPal, take payments and customer details and then pass the info along to the real service to do the fulfillment.

The site buyer keeps the difference between what they collect and what they pay for the services, much like a store keeps the mark up on products that they sell.

You could do one or two of these a day for a nice side income.

Just be sure to be honest – it’s a new site with tons of potential, not a track record. That’s why you’re only going to get $100 to $300 or so per sale, not thousands of dollars. But you didn’t put much time into it, so it’s still a good return on your own investment.

And once you get good at this, you could outsource the website creation, too.

Regardless of what people might think of the Walmart we know today, there is a lot to be learned from Walmart’s founder Sam Walton. In fact, if Sam were starting in business in 2020, he would almost undoubtedly be starting that business online.

So what can we glean from the guy in the old pickup truck who loved retailing?

Don’t worry about what others say about you. At JC Penney’s, his first full time job out of college, the personnel director told Sam, “Walton, I’d fire you if you weren’t such a good salesman. Maybe you’re just not cut out for retail.” No one remembers that man’s name, but Sam built an empire no one is likely to ever forget.

If people are telling you that you’re not cut out for online marketing, just remember Sam and smile.

Go with your strengths. Sam wasn’t good at accounting, he had poor organizational skills and he was hopelessly disorganized. But one thing he could do really well was build a team of people who could handle these things for him.

Focus on your strengths and outsource the rest.

Build relationships. In college, Same wanted to be student body president, so he discovered a trick that he would use for the rest of his life:

Sam made friends every where he went, and you can do the same thing online. Talk to everyone in your niche because you never know who is going to be your next customer, your ally, your promoter, your affiliate or your next joint venture partner.

Be a learning machine. Sam never stopped reading books and taking courses because he understood that the next great idea could come from anywhere.

Choose 5 or 10 proven online marketers to follow, and then read everything they write. Read a marketing book each week, and develop a curiosity for everything related to your field. Keep an open mind and know that your next great idea is hidden right in front of you – you just have to uncover it and act on it.

Learn from your competition. When Sam bought his first store, he realized the store across the street was doing twice as well. So Sam spent time everyday checking out his competitor to see what he was doing, right and wrong. Later he checked out Kmarts, who were ahead of him at the time. Then he visited the headquarters of other retailers who didn’t consider him to be serious competition. Little did they know…

Carefully watch and analyze what other online marketers are doing right and wrong and learn from them. Make friends with them. Ask questions. Bribe them, buy their courses and do whatever it takes to find out what’s already working.

Continually experiment with your business. Sam was continually applying what he learned elsewhere to his stores. Said Sam:

Learn something and apply it. Make it your mantra: Learn something – innovate. And test, test and test some more to see what is working best. In no other business model in history has it been easier to innovate, test and discover exactly what is working and what needs improving than in online marketing.

Don’t reinvent the wheel – adapt it to your own use. According to Sam, “…most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else…”

There are plenty of proven online marketing business models you can choose from, so don’t think you have to invent the next revolutionary thing. Instead, take what’s already working and make it even better.

Make mistakes and then move on. Sam didn’t understand the terms of his first lease or how to buy a business. He borrowed money and went into debt to overpay for a failed Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas. After 5 long years of grueling work and long hours, he had quadrupled sales and he had the most successful Ben Franklin store in the region. That’s when the landlord booted him out to give the store to his son to run. There was no where else in town to locate Sam’s store, so he drove across four states looking for a new location. He found one in Bentonville, Arkansas and started over.

It’s okay to get it wrong the first time. In fact, you’re probably going to make mistakes and that’s terrific, because it means you’ve started. You’re moving, you’ve got momentum and you’re making progress. Mistakes aren’t roadblocks, they’re bumps in the road to success.

Don’t dwell on your mistakes. Says Sam about being thrown out of his own store, “I’ve never been one to dwell on reverses, and I didn’t do so then…. I know I read my leases a lot more carefully after that, and maybe I became a little more wary of just how tough the world can be …. But I didn’t dwell on my disappointment.”

Every moment is a fresh beginning and an opportunity to take what you’ve learned – good and bad – and use it to your advantage.

Enjoy the process and your victories. In his autobiography, which was written on his deathbed, Sam wrote, “Walmart No. 18 … opened in 1969, and it marked our return to Newport … nineteen years after we had basically been run out of town. By then, I was long over what had happened to us down there, and I didn’t have revenge in mind…. As it happened, we did extraordinarily well with our Newport Walmart, and it wasn’t too long before the old Ben Franklin store I had run on Front Street had to close its doors. You can’t say we ran that guy—the landlord’s son—out of business. His customers were the ones who shut him down. They voted with their feet.”

Sometimes success can be a long time in coming, so remember to enjoy the process and the victories along the way. There were 17 successful stores prior to No. 18 and no doubt Sam enjoyed them all. At first, even your smallest successes should be celebrated, whether it’s your first website, your first sale, or your first $10,000 day.

When it comes to success, Sam Walton may have said it best:

Expect to succeed, act as though you are already successful, do the things you need to do to succeed, and the rest will take care of itself.

Using paid solo ads might be one of the easiest and fastest ways to test out your marketing funnel, to build your list and even to make a quick profit. Yet most new Internet marketers are deathly afraid to try paid solo ads. It’s likely because…

A) They have to set up their funnel first and
B) They have to PAY for the solo ads

It’s scary. What if they don’t get a response? What if they blow it? What if they choose the wrong solo ad provider, or write the wrong email, or create a squeeze page that doesn’t convert, or…

If you try hard enough, you can find a hundred reasons not to use paid solo ads. But if you get over your fear, you might find that there is no better or faster way to build an Internet marketing business.

Since having the knowledge to be successful tends to trump fear, I’m going to give you some tips to help you make your solo ads successful and even profitable as quickly as possible.

Write a solo ad that targets exactly who you want. You’re paying by the click, which means the solo ad seller will continue to mail until you get the number of clicks you pay for. So don’t write just any ad – write one that directly targets the exact people you want to reach. This builds a higher quality list that is more responsive, compared to a less responsive generic list.

Monetize your funnel immediately. Don’t just settle for building a list with your squeeze page – put in a sales page for a related product immediately after the squeeze page. Your goal is to make enough sales to pay for your mailing.

Further monetize your funnel with an upsell and a downsell. They didn’t buy the product on the sales page? Make a smaller offer. They bought the product? Offer them something else to buy, too.

Maximize your conversions by being 100% consistent. If your solo mailing says they get a free video series on the 3 best traffic driving methods, then that’s what your squeeze page should say, too. Don’t change the topic from your solo ad to your squeeze page or you’ll confuse your prospects into leaving without signing up.

Try twice to sign them onto your list. If they don’t sign up on your squeeze page, then use an exit pop to try one more time to capture their email address.

Alternate method: Use your exit splash for your main offer. This way if they don’t join your list, they still see the offer. Consider your priority – is it making money now, or building your list? If it’s making money now, show them the sales page. If it’s building your list, try one last time to capture their email.

Use an effective follow up series. To further monetize your new list, put an autoresponder series in place that contains several offers in addition to all the good info and credibility building stuff you want to add.

Recruit affiliates within your solo ad funnel. Don’t just settle for building your prospect and customer lists – build your affiliate list as well. Send out a request for affiliates within your autoresponder sequence. This can be on the first email you send, or the second. “Welcome to ___. In the coming weeks you’re going to discover (insert benefits.) Affiliates: If you’d like to earn commissions, please visit ___ for all the details and to sign up.” Easy.

Mail new subscribers daily. Yes, daily. You want them to get to know you and become accustomed to receiving, opening and reading your emails.

Track everything. You want to know what people are doing, what they’re buying and when they’re buying it within the funnel and in the autoresponder series. Tweak accordingly to make your funnel as profitable as possible. The more you’re making, the more you can afford to spend on solo ads to build your lists even bigger.

Think about it – if you spend $100 to get 250 clicks, and you have your funnel optimized to convert at 50%, you’re adding 125 people to your list each time. If your funnel is further optimized to clear $150 on offers, upsells and downsells, that’s excellent.

Each time you spend $100, you’re earning $50 profit and building your list. How many times could you do this per day? As many as you want, because you’re in profit.

Best case scenario: You have your own products and thus when sales are made, 100% of the money goes straight into your account. And since you get paid immediately, you can immediately reinvest those funds in additional mailings.

Second best case scenario: You don’t have your own products, but you’re using an affiliate program that pays you immediately. Since you’re not making 100% of the profit, you’ll have to work harder on optimizing your funnel to make it profitable, but it’s still quite doable. And since you get paid immediately, you can immediately reinvest those funds in additional mailings.

Worst case scenario: You’re using an affiliate product from some place like ClickBank, where it takes awhile to get paid. You can still make money this way and still build your list, but the challenge is obvious: You won’t be able to immediately reinvest your profits in additional mailings.

Still, even the worst case scenario is far, far better than doing nothing. And once you are building your list, you can also look into doing ad swaps with reputable marketers – you mail your list for them, they mail their list for you, and it costs you nothing.

Just be sure their products and their reputations make you look good. You don’t want to send your list anything that will bite you in the end.