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… often times 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.

This month we’re continuing our series on how to build your own business using a lead magnet, a squeeze page and Facebook.

First we started with creating the perfect lead magnet that targets your audience and makes them sign up for your list.

Next we covered exactly how to build a squeeze page or landing page that gets those visitors to say, “YES! Add me to your list NOW!”

Today in our third installment, we’re going to cover how to get as much traffic as you want from Facebook. And of course you’re going to send this traffic to your squeeze page to build your targeted list big and fast.

Once you have learned all three of these skills, you can literally go into any market and create a list building machine in just days.

Better still, you can take it one step further and build a complete product funnel behind your lead magnet, offering a tripwire (low ticket) offer, followed by your main offer, followed by a big ticket item.

In fact we are going to cover all of that in our final installment of the series coming next month.

This way your lead generation will completely pay for itself.

And once that happens, you can generate as much traffic on demand as you like without having to come out of pocket financially.

This also means you can build your list as FAST as you like, too.

Do you want a list of 1,000 new subscribers this week?

Or 10,000 subscribers this month? It’s possible when you follow all four steps in this series.

So let’s get started on bringing you as much super-targeted Facebook traffic as you can possibly handle…

If you’ve been following along with the series, you should now have a lead magnet created and a squeeze page in place to capture your new leads.

The next step is traffic.

Of course, there are many ‘free’ methods of traffic generation that actually cost you a great deal of time and effort.

Which is why we like Facebook so much – you can drive as much traffic as you like, whenever you like, once you know what you’re doing.

Facebook Ad Campaign Basics:

Your ad needs to look and feel like something your audience will resonate with. Don’t put a bottle of fingernail polish in your ad if you’re targeting construction workers. Think of who you are targeting as real people, and consider what they WANT.

Things to consider:

1: Your lead magnet should be the perfect ‘present’ to your target audience.

2: Your ad copy is your invitation to get the free lead magnet. Use language that will resonate with your target market. Call out their pain points, talk about the big benefit of your free gift and really entice them with your copy.

3: Your ad image or video (your visual representation) should speak to your audience. You want to convey just how awesome your offer is in every aspect of your ad.

4: Your ad should be consistent with your squeeze page. You want to use similar visuals, similar copy and have nearly the same title as your lead magnet. If things change from the ad to the squeeze page, it will confuse people and they will click away rather than put in their email address.

5: Targeting is crucial – you’ve got to get your campaign in front of the right people. Many marketers target too broadly, or they target the wrong audience, and because of that they don’t get the results they should.

Now we’re going to go more in-depth on each of the above 5…

The Lead Magnet, which is your gift

Just briefly reviewing what we already covered in the previous section on lead magnets – your lead magnet or free offer has to be something your target market WANTS. I know this is super obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times I see the wrong lead magnet offered to the right audience or vice-a-versa.

If your target market is overweight women over 40 years old who want to lose weight, don’t offer a lead magnet on 10 delicious chocolate cake recipes. Yes, you’re probably going to get a lot of overweight women of all ages, but who says they want to lose weight?

Instead, offer a lead magnet called, “Ladies: 5 Surprising Tips To Lose Weight Over The Age Of 40” or something along those lines. This way you are targeting your exact audience, as well as offering them exactly what they want.

Another thing to consider is this: You’re not really giving your lead magnet away. Not really. You are instead selling your lead magnet for the price of an email address. When you view it like this, you realize you need to step up your offer and make it a really good one that your prime prospects are willing to ‘buy’ with their email address.

Your ad copy

Your copy should speak to YOUR market, hit their pain points and talk about the benefit of your offer. And you’ve got to do all of this while sounding like a REAL person.

Remember that this is a SOCIAL platform where people are looking to connect with family and friends, and not to be sold to. So make sure that your copy is personal and written to speak to your market.

There is no template we can give you, because every single market is different, and every lead magnet is different. But we can tell you what all successful ads have in common:

Speak in terms of benefits and pain points. For example,
• “Lose the weight forever without going hungry.”
• “Transform your career without disrupting your life.”
• “Find the love of your life and never be lonely again.”

When appropriate, call your target audience out by name. For example, “Attention Programmers…” or “Turning 50?” or “For Single Ladies Only.”

And when you’re a local business, call out your location as well. “Learn to skydive in Southern California,” or “New Yorkers, let us walk your dog.”

Use specific numbers when appropriate. For example, “94% of ABC Graduates are employed within 6 months and have an average starting salary of $64,590.”

Use the bottom section of your ad to help your prospect overcome any doubts they might have. For example, you can use short, to-the-point testimonials to drive your point home. Example: “Using this guide I saved $54,395 in six months!” -Joe Smith

Have a call to action. Tell them what to do without yelling or hitting them over the head. “Grab your copy here.”

Research plenty of ads for similar products to get ideas. Write as though you are talking to your prospect right there in the room. Don’t waste words. When in doubt, get a copywriter to help you.

And test. Do plenty of testing to see which copy works the best for your lead magnet to hit just the right target audience.

Your ad image or video, also known as the ‘creative’

You can use an image or a video on Facebook, so you’ve got choices.

Your image is what most people see first, before they even read your copy. That’s why it needs to be the most interesting thing in your ad.

Pick something that really represents your offer and the message you’re trying to put out with your copy.

Images can be photos, cartoons, diagrams, etc. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, but it really should help to convey your message.

It’s a literal representation of the message you’re trying to relay to your audience.

You can place a line of copy on your image to very clearly show and say your message.

For example, if your line is, “Don’t bottle up your feelings” for a counseling company, then the image could be bottles that look unhappy (I’ve actually seen this one.)

If the line on your image is, “Turn your subscribers into raving fans,” then the image itself would be a group of raving fans.

You might need to hire a graphic artist to get just the right image, but it will be well worth it.

When looking for images, go to Google, type in your keyword and click images. This will show you which images are clicked on the most for the keyword, and it will give you lots of ideas.

As with the copy, be sure to test your images to see which one works best.

Consistency and congruency

Is your ad congruent with your squeeze page? Imagine your ad is red and purple and talks about going back to college.

But when people click the ad, they are taken to a squeeze page that is green and orange, and talks about making money.

This isn’t congruent but it sure is confusing, which is why people will leave without filling out the squeeze page form.

Maintain consistency throughout your funnel until the person takes the action you’re seeking, which in this case is filling out that squeeze page.

And when you place an offer behind your squeeze page to monetize your entire funnel, you’ll want that to be consistent as well. (We’ll cover monetizing your squeeze funnel next month.)

Three things that must be congruent from your ad to your squeeze page are the design and imagery, the benefits you talk about, and the offer itself.

For the design, you want the same color scheme, layout, imagery and font selection/size/color. This isn’t to say the ad and squeeze page should look exactly the same, but they should look consistent. For example, two different photos of the same woman, the same or very similar colors and the same font.

Make sure you talk about the same benefit(s) and use the same language between the ad and the squeeze page. And maintain the same offer as well. A good way to do this is to use an almost identical headline in the ad and the squeeze page.

Be consistent or you will lose people. It’s that simple. And it makes your job easier, too.

Targeting

Invite the RIGHT people to get your lead magnet. The best campaign placed in front of the wrong people will fail.

Targeting broad keywords does not work well. Instead, target specifics. For example, if you type in a keyword into the Facebook ad platform and it tells you that your potential reach is 20 million people just in the United States, then you’re being far too broad. You need to get more specific and you will get much better results.

Facebook makes targeting fairly easy because they have more interest based data than anyone in the world. Facebook knows exactly what people like because it monitors everything everyone does on the platform.

Facebook not only knows what we’re doing on Facebook, but they also track what we’re doing all over the web.

And all of this is great news for us as marketers, because we can target the very best people – the ones most likely to buy – for our offers.

Facebook has 1.6 BILLION users – guaranteed, many of your future customers are on Facebook.

When you set up your Facebook campaign, you’ll get to a screen that says, “Who do you want your adverts to reach?” This is where you can target based on:

• Location – target areas where people can buy your products or are already buying your products.
• Age – don’t assume you know how old your best customers are. If possible, take a survey of the customers you have now – you might be surprised.
• Gender – again, don’t assume. You might think your best prospects are male, yet it could be you can get a better response from females because no one else in your niche is targeting them.
• Detailed targeting – this is where the power of Facebook advertising comes from, and we’ll go into more detail below.

Detailed targeting

There are four different categories under detailed targeting:

“Interests” – This is the most powerful option when entering a new market and the place where you should start. You can choose to target people based on their interests, which may include things people share on their timelines, apps they use, pages they like and other activities on and off of Facebook.

“Behaviors and Demographics” – In some cases, depending on your market, they can be very useful. Most of this is based on third party data, and Facebook is trying to match their users with this third party data. This is why it’s not going to be as accurate as targeting interests.

“Custom Audiences” – These are people you’ve already been in touch with. For example, you have their email addresses and you’ve uploaded the data to Facebook, or it’s a list of people who visited your website, or people who interacted with your app, etc. This is useful for retargeting people you’ve already been in touch with, which is why you won’t be using this when you first get started.

“Lookalike Audiences” – This is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your current customers. You can base your lookalike audience on things like data custom audience, conversion tracking pixel, website custom audience and so forth.

In the beginning, you’ll want to just focus on “Interests” and save the other three for later.

Research

When it comes to targeting, research is your best friend and it’s worth your time and effort.

If you don’t learn about your target market, then you’ll never know where to find them. And that’s what your mission is going to be, is to find out where they’re ‘hiding’ within the Facebook platform.

It all comes down to specificity and being able to find the avid members of your market – the people who don’t just like your niche but LOVE it and spend money in it.

“But no one else would”

So how do you find the avid members of a market? By using the “But no one else would” trick.

For example, let’s say your niche is tennis. There are some very famous tennis players that everyone has heard of. There are tennis players that some people have heard of, and others haven’t. But only an AVID tennis fan would have heard about the more obscure players.

If you’re targeting avid tennis fans, then targeting by using the name of an obscure tennis pro will get you only avid tennis fans.

Crazy but true. This trick works so well, you can use it in almost any niche.

Everyone has heard of yoga.

Some people have heard of certain well-known types of yoga.

But if you target an obscure form of yoga that only avid yogi’s would have heard of, then you’ll have the market you’re looking for, and so on.

Think about the ‘who’ or the ‘what’ of your market, that only the most enthusiastic people in your market would know about. That’s a great interest to target. And each market can have several of these, too, not just one.

Questions to ask

Here are a list of questions that you can ask yourself concerning your campaign that I got from Digital Marketer Lab.

Keep in mind that you are asking these questions not for your business in general, but specifically for this one campaign that you are doing, this one lead magnet that you are giving away, and this one audience you are targeting.

Questions:

• Who are the authority figures, leaders or big brands in your niche?
• What books or magazines or newspapers does your ideal customer read?
• What websites do they frequent?
• Where do they live?
• What events do they attend?
• What tools do they use?
• What is specifically unique about this group?

Make a list for each one, focusing on the areas most specific to your group. In other words, if your market is fly fishing, then general sporting goods stores are far too broad, while a fly fishing magazine could be perfect.

You can do a Google search for each one, such as “Top fly fishers,” “Top fly fishing websites” “Top fly fishing organizations” and so forth.

Other research ideas:

• Audience insights from Facebook – This lets you find other pages related to your interest, gives demographic data and so forth.
• Forums – See what people are asking, their reading level and how they talk. You’ll learn how they speak, the keywords and slang they use and more.
• Buzzsumo – Enter keywords and find out what articles have been shared the most.
• Amazon – Research books and products in your market, read the reviews and find out how they speak and what they think.

As you can see, research is really important for finding the right people for your audience. If you get this wrong, then the rest of it doesn’t matter.

But if you get it right, you can create a campaign that will pay you for months, years and maybe even as long as you care to run it.

So now you know who to target, you’ve got your ad, your lead magnet and your squeeze page.

Now it’s just a matter of starting your first campaign, monitoring your results and making any changes along the way that you might need.

To set up your campaign, go to Facebook’s Business Manager. Or if you don’t know how to set it up, Facebook will show you exactly what to do here: https://business.facebook.com/

From there you can click on Ads Manager or Power Editor, and again Facebook is very good about showing you exactly what to do to start and run your campaigns.

If you run into anything that doesn’t immediately make sense to you (and it’s possible, the first time you run a campaign) then Google it.

Millions of people and businesses have run Facebook ad campaigns, so I can guarantee you it’s not rocket science.

You may or may not be successful the first time out. It’s entirely possible you’ll mess up and only get a handful of subscribers.

If this happens, don’t panic because it’s all part of the learning process. Remember, every niche and every lead magnet is going to be different. Figure out what went wrong and try again. The secret – as in so many things in life – is to get up one more time than you fall down, and you will be successful.

And by the way, plenty of people have literally made MILLIONS using Facebook ad campaigns. The trick is they learned all they could and then they dove in and made it work for them, just as you will.

Next month we’re going to cover how to make these campaigns self-liquidating, in that you are earning as much or more money than you are spending to build your list.

Once you’ve got this down, there is no limit to how fast you can build your lists of prospects AND buyers. And there’s no reason why you can’t be well on your way to a solid 5 or 6 figure income, either.

See you then!