Archive | August, 2022

Here’s an interesting case study from a guy in the US. It seems he’s something of a big name in his day job, so he wanted a way to make extra money online without ever revealing his real name.

He’s found a twist on the marketing method we all know and love – list building – that gives him multiple streams of income in several different markets without ever creating a product of his own, blogging, dealing with affiliates or creating a big name in any of his niches.

Here’s how it works: ‘Mark’ targets all of the usual niches – make money online, dating and romance, embarrassing problems, losing weight, golfing, stop smoking and so forth.

If there is a niche with good money, he goes after it.

His goal is to build lists in each of these niches, but he doesn’t do it in the usual manner.

He finds his prospects in both the offline and online world, with the goal of collecting as much data on each one as possible.

As you know, when you offer a free download in exchange for an email address, that’s about all you’re going to get – the email address.

But instead of ebooks or reports as his lead magnets, he offers printed ‘books’ in exchange for the prospect’s information. He mails these books to his new subscribers, so of course he has to collect their mailing address and full name.

And being the clever guy he is, he often collects a lot more info than just that.

He also collects things like the phone number, income bracket, gender, interests and so forth by using quizzes and surveys. It’s amazing what people will answer in a quiz, survey or test if they want to find out something about themselves, such as what they should be doing for a living, what kind of personality they have and so forth.

Of course, he makes each survey or quiz up himself, so it’s much more for fun than being scientific. The goal is always to collect the info.

And because he physically mails out the books, he only targets people in the US so that it remains financially viable for him to run this.

Once someone answers the survey or quiz or fills out the form to get the free book, he then tries to upsell them on related affiliate products, so that’s one income stream.

Then he continues to email these prospects offers in their niches. He has an autoresponder series set up for each niche, and in each series he promotes a lot of different products.

All of his emails and books are basically PLR info, or info he’s gleaned from the sales pages of the products he’s promoting. He doesn’t write much of anything himself. As mentioned, he also has a full time job he enjoys and he doesn’t want to quit; so time is at a premium for him.

Now then, when he mails out the books, he also encloses offers. Some of these offers are his, and he makes a commission on them if they buy. Other offers are from partners who pay him to send these out, so there’s another income stream.

Then, and this is perhaps where he makes about 50% of his money – he rents out the information he’s collected to other businesses. Every business is in search of new customers, and many like to find those customers through the mail.

For example, someone who is trying to lose weight will try a lot of different ways to do it.

One of the ways will be the free book he sends, and perhaps the upsell after the book, and perhaps an affiliate product or two through email.

Then other companies send the same person weight loss offers through the mail – often diet type supplements or an entire diet program – and the customer might try that as well.

This is how one customer can wind up making a dozen or more purchases in one niche within a fairly short amount of time.

And as you can see, Mark likes to get a piece of as many of these sales as possible.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it isn’t really. Initially he comes up with a book that’s really a report made from quality PLR materials.

Then he creates an email series promoting evergreen products in that niche – products that will be around for a while, usually from ClickBank but also from JVZoo and other places.

And then he’s got his contacts as to who wants to buy what type of lead.

He was a little cagey when I asked him about this part, but he did say that he simply contacts a few likely businesses and let’s them know what he’s doing – sort of a copy and paste email he sends out.

Some don’t reply and some do, and once he’s got a new client he’ll even ask specifically what they’re looking for in a lead. Then he’ll tailor a survey or quiz to find those answers.

He buys traffic, uses some basic SEO, places ads on blogs and uses other techniques to get people to his pages. Basically, he drives traffic any way he can, as long as it’s not time intensive.

His favorite method is buying traffic from Facebook, since he can do some heavy duty targeting there.

He also sells solo ads and even sells individual leads to lawyers. These might be people about to get divorced or who had an accident, and he rents these leads out for several dollars apiece to multiple lawyers at the same time. He gets these leads online and also buys advertising in small local papers – yes, it’s a very old school method, but it still works.

He also employs a virtual assistant to do much of the work for him, so basically he spends maybe 5 hours a week actually working the business now.

Initially, of course, he invested a lot more time, but now that he has his assistant trained, she does most of it for him.

Remember, he doesn’t blog, create actual products of his own or try to build up a reputation in any one niche.

When he does need to use a name, it’s always a pen name – he has a different one for each niche.

And his coworkers have no idea he does this on the side, nor will they ever know unless he tells them.

This shows you just how important data is, and why companies like Facebook and Google are all about tracking what we do.

The more info and intel you can gather on prospects, the more they are worth.

This is a good business model for someone who wants to make a mint with their mailing lists, while entering any niche you choose and remaining completely anonymous.

I’ve got a friend who has used this business model for years as a ‘side’ business.

Funny thing is, his side business earns more than many full time businesses – about $10,000 per piece of software per year.

And yes, he doesn’t own any of this software himself, which means he never has to deal with programmers or customer complaints that the software isn’t doing whatever it should be doing.

Here’s how it works:

Find free software that people use – for example, cloud storage, help desk software, popular WordPress plugins, membership software and so forth. You might want to concentrate just on software that is used in the online marketing world, or you could branch out into other niches.

You’re looking for software that is somewhat popular, but ideally it’s not all that simple to use.

Anything come to mind? Forums are a good place to search. Look for a number of posts from people all looking for help with the same software, and you’ve found a winner.

Now then, you can either do the next step yourself, or outsource it to someone who knows a lot about the software. If you’re doing it yourself, you’ll need to get really good at using the software before you proceed.

You’re going to put together a tutorial that shows people how to use the software. Your tutorial is going to assume they know next to nothing about it, so that anyone and everyone can benefit from it.

Take them through all the steps of installing and using the software, along with all the features they might not even know about. The point is to make it super simple for almost anyone to use the software, once they have your tutorial.

Charge a modest amount for your tutorial – nothing over the top.

You might want to add a “done for you” option or upsell in which the software is installed and set up for the customer. You can do this work yourself, or outsource it to someone else.

And inside your tutorial, place links to the paid version of the software, along with anything else that will help the reader to make the best use of the software.

All of these income streams add up.

And buyers are easy to come by, because many times people are desperate for answers. They’ve already wasted time trying to get the software to work, and they’ve wasted more time on forums and help desks trying to get the help they need.

By the time they find your tutorial, they are more than happy to hand over several dollars to get the job done, or even more money to have the job done for them.

As you can see, we’re targeting people already familiar with the software who need help.

But that’s only half of your customer base.

The other half is people looking for a particular solution.

For example, they want to know how to set up a membership site without paying a monthly fee for software. You can recommend the solution they need, and the software only has a one-time payment.

Better still, you’ll show them exactly how to install and use it.

Of course, you won’t name the software on that sales page.

And yes, you will need two different sales pages. The first one targets the group who is having trouble with the software, and the second one targets the group looking for the solution the software provides.

Want to make even more money?

You can sell private label rights or resell rights to your tutorials.

And you can also get affiliates on board as well.

This can be a great product to sell via paid advertising – both in the ‘fix a problem’ format and the ‘here’s the solution you need’ format.

The work involved in doing this is small versus the money that can be made. It won’t make you rich, but if you put out just one of these a month, you might hit six figures.

And the shelf life of each tutorial will vary according to how popular the software is. You’ll be able to sell some for only a few months, while others might be good for a year or two before you need to update them.

It’s a perfect little side business that doesn’t require much startup cash – just the ability to find software that’s confusing people or solving a real problem, and creating the tutorials for your customers.

And don’t forget – you can also sell more solutions to your new customers after they purchase the tutorial. In fact, this alone can double your profits.

Get busy, and go make some more money by helping other people solve their problems!

I’ve seen this time and again.

Someone builds a nice little site, or product, or some sort of residual income stream.

Then they spend their time tweaking it and trying to increase the income from it. They’re good at SEO and so they tweak and tweak and tweak to make the most money possible from that asset. 

Good so far, right?

But there comes a point of diminishing returns. The site or product or whatever is making $1,000 a month. 

And after hours and days and weeks of tweaking, the site is now making $1,100.

But here come the monthly bills (mortgage, car, insurance, etc.) and the bills are far more than $1,100. So, what’s a marketer to do?

Sell the asset, of course. You might get $3,000 to $5,000 for this asset, depending on what it is and so forth.

Now they have the bills paid and maybe go on a bit of a spending spree, but no asset and no residual monthly income.

Of course now they have to do it all again – build an asset, tweak it and wind up having to sell it to pay bills.

Did you spot the mistake? It’s hard to miss.

If the marketer had spent just enough time testing and tweaking…

…And then moved on and REPLICATED the process…

S/he would then have TWO assets each creating $1,000 a month in residual income.

Then rinse and repeat. Building one asset a month, that’s $6,000 a month in residual income after six months, along with assets totaling maybe $18,000 or a lot more.

As you’ve already guessed, the point is that while you do want to test and tweak whatever it is that you’re doing online, you don’t want to make a career out of it. 

Optimize it the best you can as quickly as you can, and then replicate the process and build another one, and another one, and another one…

In the above example, our marketer could have started selling one asset (product, site, etc.) per month after six months or a year, to again greatly increase their monthly income. 

Selling these assets before their life cycle ends can be a great idea. After all, it’s hard to sell a product or site once it’s no longer making money.

Do what you need to do, but don’t make a career out of making a few extra dollars while leaving loads of money on the table.