Archive | March, 2022

Let’s talk about real life real estate for just a moment…

How do you make money in real estate?

You buy a property, rent it out, and use the rent money to pay off the property.

Or, you use the rent money from your first property to buy your next property. You rent out the second property and buy your third, and so forth.

So yes, you’re coming out of pocket on that first property, or you’re taking out a loan. But in the long run, you wind up with several rental properties that eventually pay themselves off, and you’re a millionaire.

But the problem with buying properties are numerous: Real estate loans are a hassle to get. Renters are problematic. You’ve got to pay property taxes and all upkeep. You get calls in the middle of the night saying a pipe broke, or whatever. There’s always more added expense and headaches than you expect.

But what if we do something similar on the internet, so that we get all the benefits without all the hassle? It would look something like this:

(And by the way, many millionaires made their money using this exact method.)

Let’s say you go to Flippa and you find a website that’s making $800 a month. The owner is willing to sell that website for a minimum of $3,000. You bid on the site, others bid on the site, and you manage to buy it for $4,000.

Now you might wonder why someone would sell a $800 a month website for just $4,000. Frankly, their reasons don’t matter. What does matter is you did your due diligence and confirmed that they are in fact making $800 a month with the site, and you are getting everything needed to continue earning that $800 a month. That may include a list, or a product, etc. As long as you can continue to make that kind of money, you’re golden.

Let’s say you make no improvements to the site other than upkeep and maintenance, and you continue to earn $800 a month. In a year’s time you will have more than doubled your money. The following year everything is profit, and so forth.

But you don’t stop there, because you take your profits from the first website and buy a second website. You take the profits from the second website and buy a third website, and so forth.

You’ll notice that you can pay for a website a whole lot faster than you can pay for a piece of real estate.

In addition, it’s much easier to make improvements to your websites than to your properties.

For example, if you want to upgrade the kitchen on a rental home, you’ve got to get bids, hire a contractor, let the house sit idle without a renter for two months, and pay a hefty fee for the privilege of not collecting rent while the kitchen is being redone.

But with your website, you can hire an outsourcer for a few hundred dollars to make whatever changes you need.
Which brings us to the next point… oftentimes there are small things you can do to a website to create big changes in revenue. And as an experienced marketer, you’re in prime position to see those things and act on them.

For example, have they been using the site to build a mailing list? If not, this one step alone can often double and triple revenue within just a month or two.

If they are building a mailing list, are they mailing to it on a frequent basis and selling products through their emails? You’d be surprised how often they’re not.

Is the website getting good SEO? If not, hire an SEO person to help you out, because it can be money well spent.

There’s almost always going to be something you can do to increase the revenue you get from the site.

Imagine if, in a year’s time, you buy 6 websites that each earn $500 a month when you buy them. Imagine you tweak them just a little and get them up to $1,000 a month. That means you could have a $6,000 a month income without much work.

I know a fellow who bought a site for $5,000 that was earning $600 a month. He saw a lot of potential in the site, as well as things that could easily be improved.

He made a few tweaks (took him a week) and now the website earns $3,000 a month.

I don’t know where else you can invest $5,000 for an asset, spend about $900 upgrading that asset, and earn $36,000 a year. In my opinion it beats the stock market and real estate combined.

And if you ever decide you’re tired of a particular site or you just need some fast cash, you can always sell the site on Flippa again.

Now you might be wondering what sorts of changes you might make to a website to increase the revenue.

Broadly speaking, your changes will fall into one of these categories:

1: Increase the amount of traffic that’s coming to the website. If your website is already earning good money from advertising or product sales, you might just need to send more of the same traffic it’s already getting.

2: Increase the quality of traffic that’s coming to the website. If the original site owner wasn’t targeting just the right people, then changing your ads or methods of driving traffic may greatly increase sales without increasing traffic.

3: Get more of your visitors to become customers. Tweak the site to convert more prospects into customers. Also work on turning those prospects into list members so you can continue to sell to them, even if they don’t return to your website.

4: Sell more to your customers, meaning either sell them higher priced products, or sell to them more often, or both. For example, add an upsell to the sales funnel, as well as an autoresponder sequence that sells them on more products.

It will take some nerve to make that first website purchase. Learn how to appraise sites and verify traffic and sales before you do, and you’ll be alright. Remember, you can always sell the site later if you want to.

I think once you try this, you might just get hooked. It’s a lot of fun to have an entire stable of websites, all making you money like clockwork. And should one of them ever stop producing, it won’t matter. You’ll have already made your money back, and you’ll still have all of your other revenue streams from your other websites.

As you can see, the internet can be a great place to develop your ‘real estate’ fortune.

What about HUGE Niches and MASSIVE Profits?

There is a ton of marketing advice online about niching things down until you get to a small, fanatical group of people who will buy anything and everything in that niche.

And this is great advice – I offer it myself and follow it all the time.

But… you know how I like to be contrary. Sort of like, if everyone is selling stock, I’m buying. If they’re buying, I’m selling.

And if they’re niching things down to the ridiculous, I try going after HUGE niches that have a TON of people in them.

For example… How many people like to eat good food? Or see movies? Or drive cars? LOTS of people.

So I got to thinking… What if you made an offer that appealed to a ton of people?

For example, how to take vacations for free.

This isn’t anything sketchy – it really is possible to take free vacations. In fact, there are several different methods of doing it.

So I advertise this free offer: “How to take vacations for free.”

And then I bill myself to my new subscribers (using a pen name) as the guy that will hook them up with really great free stuff, like the free vacations info.

In fact, if they liked that one, they will LOVE what I have coming up, so watch your email…

…you get the idea.

Then I send them free offers.

For example, a free report or video on how to get all the dates they want.

They opt-in to a new list to get that report or video, and now I have a targeted list of people who want dating info.

Or I offer a freebie on how to save tons of money on groceries, or how to make more money, or how to lose weight, or whatever.

Generally every offer I make is going to be directly tied into an affiliate product such as a ClickBank product.

They get the free report or video, and at the end of it I make a soft sell for the ClickBank product.

I also offer a free bonus if they buy the product. All they have to do is email me their ClickBank receipt, and I send the bonus. This way I can also separate my buyers from my prospects.

As I get these segmented lists, I continue to send them free offers that lead to paid offers.

And I make bank, all because I start out attracting as many people as possible and then segmented them down by interest.

Now then, you might be wondering how this is better than simply targeting a small niche in the first place.

Frankly, I don’t know if it’s better, but it is different and it does work. And it allows me to build several lists simultaneously from the same main traffic source.

One person can be on several of my segmented lists, after all. For example, they’re interested in vacations, dating and dieting – three different lists, three opportunities to sell them products.

Using this method, it’s very easy to build a large list quickly. And if I want to immediately profit, I offer a one-time offer after they get the initial freebie.

The real payoff is when I start segmenting into smaller, more targeted lists. And of course it’s nice to have (for example) 10 lists in 10 different niches, because now I have 10 different profit centers, all coming from the same initial source.

The key is to bill yourself as the go-to person for great free stuff, and then be that person. When you offer a free video or report or whatever, it’s got to be chock full of dynamite info they can use immediately.

Tell them what to do, for example, but not how to do it. The “how to” is in the paid product.

Or tell them the difficult method to accomplish something, and then offer the easy method as a paid product.

And you don’t have to create any products yourself – just use the ones on ClickBank. But you might be creating short free reports or videos, which of course you can always outsource.

One last shortcut: A lot of affiliate offers will start out with a free report or video. Make a deal with the product owner to get that report or video in the hands of your readers yourself. That way you’re using their freebie to segment your list, and the affiliate product owner is still making sales.

There might be a life lesson in this – when others are all doing the same thing, think about how you might do the opposite. Sometimes it can really pay off in a big way.

A friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous has agreed to tell you one of his money-making methods. And while he might be leaving some minor details out, I think there is more than enough here to set you on a very similar path if you choose.

This is what he told me…

“Here’s an example of how I made over $17,600 in five days by investing $297 and a few hours of my time.

Okay, I didn’t really invest my time – I actually paid a freelancer to do the work for me. But this is something you can easily do yourself if you’re willing to put in a little time.

I found some dynamite high-quality PLR on free traffic generation. It was good stuff, and even contained some things I didn’t know.

It included a massive manual, several written bonuses and a sales page.

And at this price point, I knew that there wouldn’t be a ton of competition, either.

Frankly, I would have gladly paid a freelancer $1,000 to write this exact same material for me, but in this case it was a simple matter of plunking down the $297 and having it in hand.

I discarded the sales page because I didn’t want anyone to know this wasn’t my own original stuff.

Then I had my freelancer go through the written material and put more personality into it, so it sounds like it’s coming from me. He already knows my style so this was easy for him and just took a few hours.

Next, he broke it up into 24 PDFs. Each PDF detailed one or two free traffic methods.

Basically, we were building a course on how to generate free, targeted traffic. And who doesn’t need that?

Finally, I wrote a new sales letter for it in my own style.

And I offered two options – they could either make 3 payments of $47 a month, and receive 2 pdfs each week, or…

…they could pay $137 up front and get everything at once, plus email support for six weeks.

Really, I thought the $137 was a no-brainer, since it was cheaper and included email support and they didn’t have to wait to get the entire course.

Then I sent the offer out to my list, and in 5 days I made over $17,600.

As to the email support, I hired someone to handle that for me. And I paid them after the money started rolling in so I wasn’t out of pocket on that, either.

Nice, right?

But I wasn’t done yet.

I then made a new offer for $47 a month for 3 months, or $97 one time and everything up front, but NO email support this time.

And I let affiliates take a crack at selling it.

I made over $10,000 from that as well, after affiliate commissions were paid.

Okay, frankly I made a good bit more than $10,000, but I’m not going to say just how much because sometimes it feels like bragging, you know what I mean?

And here’s the kicker – I’ve done very similar things several times over the past 18 months.

The numbers are always different, but what never changes is I make a good bit of money with very little work.

I mean VERY LITTLE WORK.

I outsource just about anything that needs to be done except the sales copy because I like doing that myself.

And when I let affiliates sell it, I get a whole new list of buyers, too.”

As you can see, he does quite well with this method. And most impressive of all is how little time he invests into each product.

Some things to consider:

If you don’t have a list, then you’ll need to advertise to make sales or build your list. Even if you want affiliates to promote, you’ll need to get some initial sales yourself to prove that it does indeed sell.

You’ll have to hunt around for great quality PLR. It’s not easy to find, and when you do find it, it generally costs a good deal more than the usual ten bucks or so. But as you can see, if you use it then it’s an excellent investment.

The first time you do this, I suggest you make any changes yourself unless you can afford to hire a professional to do it.

One thing he didn’t mention was the product name – you’ll want to change it to make it sound unique to you.

And I suggest adding your own introduction to the material as well, again to make it your own.

One last thing – there’s no reason why you can’t place some strategic affiliates links in the material. For example, if your course encourages the use of an autoresponder, then give an affiliate link to the service you recommend, and so forth.

And one crazy idea for the road… what if you did all of this, but then you gave away 75% or more of your commissions to affiliates?

If you’re fairly new to marketing, then paying high commissions is an excellent way to attract new affiliates.

You’ll get more of them on board, you’ll sell more products, you’ll build your list of buyers faster, and these same affiliates will be far more interested in promoting your future courses if they already had success promoting your first one.

Just a thought…