It's All About The Leads: Publishing to Capture Profits

It's All About The Leads: Publishing to Capture Profits

by: Jack Humphrey

Copyright 2010 Jack Humphrey All online businesses are nothing more than lead capturing machines. They capture traffic from search engines and links from other sources and turn that traffic into leads which turn into sales of products and services being sold on their sites. But there is another booming industry surfacing that utilizes specific niche content to attract leads for 3rd parties to convert into sales for banks, realtors, lawyers, and many other groups. And in many cases these leads sell for a lot more than you can make from the same people clicking on your Adsense ads. A LOT more. This is partially what is meant by going “beyond Adsense.” You are simply getting into the lead generation business. Which is the same as Adsense publishing, but with Adsense you are selling your leads for pennies instead of dollars. You can certainly create sites that sell affiliate products to the leads they generate. Most people are operating under this business model in some fashion. But you can also capture the leads and sell them to people who are willing to pay anywhere from $1-$25 per qualified lead. What is a “qualified” lead? This depends on the deal you set up with the person you are collecting them for. Sometimes it means a lead has filled out an information request form. Other times it simply means they have signed up for an autoresponder sequence that guides them to a purchase or other action. In all cases I have studied, the income per lead is far higher than having the same traffic come through your site and clicking on pay per click links. It takes more work to find buyers and set up deals with them for the leads you can supply them, but once it is in motion, you are promoting your site with a greater return in mind than even selling a product on the site can produce per 1000 visitors. How you find the niches and create the sites to attract these leads is a topic for another day. The people doing this most successfully are groups of publishers like those at Content Desk. http://contentdesk.com/csb But today we are talking about selling the leads generated by your sites to people interested in paying anywhere from $3-$25 per lead. To get into the higher paying lead sales you generally have to set up deals directly with lenders, lawyers, real estate companies and the like. And by directly, I mean visiting offices and doing face to face meets to show what you can deliver and come to an agreement on what that’s worth. There’s really big money being made this way. I know people making over $200,000.00 per month with this very system of attract-capture-deliver and working deals face-to-face with the people willing to pay very well for the leads. One of my partners has a client who went to a local real estate company selling condos in a very lively, large metropolitan area. He made a deal to get 10% of resulting condo sales in exchange for providing leads to the company. He set up a simple content site on the area, relocation information, and other relevant, attractive content that people looking to move to the area would be interested in. He now gets $10,000.00 every time a condo is sold to one of his generated leads. He set up the deal face-to-face and the company is happy to pay him for helping them sell out their inventory faster than just relying on old fashioned offline lead generation. There are people in your local area, most likely, willing to do the same kind of deal and who are totally unaware of how easy it is for us pubshers to generate leads for them. They are mystified by the web and think you are a “geek genius” who they are happy to simply pay to do your magic! This business sure beats going to the same places and trying to teach them to do it themselves as a consultant. First of all, they don’t WANT to or they would already have started the long arduous process of learning and investing in an online presence for this purpose. They want you to do it FOR them and will pay you to take the pressure off of them to learn how to generate e-leads. Food for thought. This industry is growing in all directions and if you know how to build content sites that rank well in the engines and get a lot of traffic, you can make a killing selling leads instead of just peddling “clicks.”

Concentrate on what's important...

Concentrate on what's important...

by: Phil Wiley

This is only my second letter in seven or eight weeks. Sorry about that, but at first I had no Internet connection when things went wrong with my satellite service (I'm now on wireless broadband) and then I developed a quite serious illness which I'm slowly getting over. If you want to, you can read more on my forum I reckon you should go there anyway, it's a great community. Incidentally the forum posts are being indexed by Google, which makes it a good place to get links to your websites - as long as you've got something useful/interesting to say that is :) Ok, I'll keep this relatively short because I'm still not feeling too good. But I hope that normal "service" has now resumed. 1. Concentrate on what's important... First of all, it looks like I'm missed seeing a lot of new products since I've been offline. When I visited my forum I saw a number of programs/software being talked about that I'd never even heard of. And, do you know what? I didn't really care that I'd missed the products being announced. There's probably nothing wrong with them. They're most likely useful. They're probably worth investigating. But... remember this. It's IMPORTANT to not get distracted with new things all the time. You could spend all your limited web time learning how to use new tools, when really you should be focusing on improving your sites and your skills and your own business. I remember David Garfinkel and Mark Joyner saying to me in Vegas that I should focus on what I'm good at (in my case writing). And that's what you should be doing too. Play to your strengths. Work out what you're good at/what your main interests are and give them most of your attention and time. Don't get sidetracked by everything new that comes along. Write down your "online business" plan, even if it's only on one piece of paper. And work out the steps you need to take to achieve success with it. Doing this will help you focus on what matters, and it will clear your head so that you know where you should be spending your time. Once you've mapped out your action steps you need to follow them. Don't make a plan and then not stick to it. Don't let anyone or anything put you off. Go for it. Don't sign up for every crappy new scheme that comes along. Don't buy every new piece of software or every ebook. Do what works for YOU and use the tools that works for YOU. And just go for it. 2. One of the smartest brains around... I'm not sure if you've heard of him, but James Maduk is one of the smartest business brains around. He's been working online since 1995, writes monthly articles for Entrepreneur Magazine, and he's an expert at online selling. Plus he's got more products on the market than anyone I know, even beating the prolific Marlon Sanders. So why he's not amazingly well known in this field I'll never know. I'm a big fan, especially of his member only site If you'd like an introduction to his style and knowledge have a look at one of his free weekly webcasts, where he uses "internet whiteboard" technology to get his messages across. And when you've finished watching and listening you might fancy signing up for his affiliate program which is looks like turning into one of the best around. 3. Free Amazon Tools... If you're promoting Amazon's affiliate program here are a couple of useful sites which help you automate the process. http://www.associatesshop.com/ and http://www.addassociate.com/add_register.php Associatesshop lets you add an Amazon store to your site and sell products of your choice, while Addassociates provides you with code which works much the same way as Google Adsense - meaning it "reads" the content of your webpage and displays context related products. Of the two I prefer Addassociate, but you can't use it on pages where you're running Google Adsense ads. Anyway, they're both free and could be a useful addition to your sites. 4. Beginners Bit... I get heaps of letters about how difficult it is to build a good looking website. But I get even more letters about the complexities of getting a webhost and uploading pages to it. One simple way around this is to use Site Build It! (SBI) because it offers an all-in-one solution. The mastermind behind SBI, Ken Evoy, has been really busy with SBI over the past few months, constantly adding new features and making it easier to use. I've owned SBI for a few years now and it's now a far, far better site building tool than when I started using it. And it was good then. One thing SBI is ideal for is displaying Google Adsense ads. To really make big profits from Adsense you need a lot of content pages. Using SBI for these sites makes sense because once you've got over the learning curve it leaves you totally free to concentrate on providing that content. So you can quickly put out a lot more pages. Plus the in-built tools help you keep that content on topic, which means that Adsense can read that your pages correctly and display relevant ads. In fact Ken has put together a very good info site about using SBI with Adsense. You should spend a bit of time reading through it. http://salesnow.sitesell.com/adsense/ 5. Stuck for ideas what to build a site about? Try reading Michael Holland's Strike it Niche. It's a great place to begin. Michael's done a great research job, giving you ideas for 70 different sites, and explaining just what you need to do to profit from each of them. Reading this ebook should leave you dancing with enthusiasm. 6. As a follow on to the stuff higher up... Do you ever feel like you're drowning in a sea of data? Well you're not the only one. I just checked out the online edition of The Guardian, one of the best UK daily papers, and found this report: "There's a lot of data on our hard disks, and there's more accumulating by the day. The University of Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems has just updated its "How Much Information?" study. In 2002 we created over five exabytes of data, in the form of video, print, magnetic and optical media — an increase of over 30% a year since 1999. That's equivalent to half a million new collections the size of the US Library of Congress — 92% of which was on magnetic media, and most of that was on hard disk."

Gaga over Google Adsense

Gaga over Google Adsense

by: Dustin Hemmerling

Gaga over Google Google Adsense has taken the world by storm. Now the small guy can get a slice of big profits. But exactly how should one go about generating revenue from it? This article is designed to help you to decide what sort of web-page to make – one that will realize the largest profits. First you should pick a theme where there is at least some competition. That is to say, if you choose a family history web page, you may only get genealogy ads in your Adsense boxes. These may be very low paying ads and hardly worth your while. Before building a web page you should check and see how much people are paying for a certain type of ad. To that end – PC Bidbrowser will give you an idea how much advertisers are paying at Overture, and you can extrapolate or take an educated guess at Adsense. But is finding the highest paying keyword the best way to build a page around? Consider the point that there may be so much competition that your web-page may never see the light of day. If no-one ever reads your site, you have no clicks, hence no revenue. No, the money-making truth lies somewhere in the middle. You need a topic that has low enough competition that people will actually find it on search engines, but also high enough competition that you will receive some cash from advertisers. A neat program called ‘keyword sleuth’ allows you to find alternate keywords that are still highly searched yet low in competition. Other programs do similar functions. Find 6 or so topics that you find a nice balance between competition and reward. Now how do you build a web-page that will give some new slant on the topic? Does your web-page really need to be unique? Perhaps you could write an interesting page or two about the subject along with some links. For instance, perhaps you want to write a site on stock market trading. If you’ve ever been in the stock market you could write a real life trading experience. Make it exciting, while keeping it truthful. What led you to invest? What stocks did you trade and why? Did you make money or lose some? Do you have any advice to give to new investors? Could you find a couple of links for free screeners or some other tool that would be useful? Did you employ any special techniques – humorous or not? You see, it doesn’t have to be about making millions with your trading system, it can be a funny life experience which we all can learn from. Thanks for reading and I hope you start your profitable business soon.

6 more free steps to making money online

6 more free steps to making money online

by: Darren Power

Copyright 2004 Darren Power If you read my previous article you will know that the goal of these articles is to teach you ways to get started making money online without having to spend any money. This is the second in the series and this time we deal with having your own blog. There are endless ways of making money once you have traffic, and your blog will get you traffic. The income we will be looking at today will come from Google Adsense. There are multiple benefits to having a blog including the low cost (or no cost), the resources that will help you get traffic to your blog and the fact that you can provide your blog as an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow readers to automatically receive your updates into their RSS reader. Let's get started with our 6 steps. 1. Set up your blog. You will need to decide what you are going to blog about. You should decide on a theme and name your blog appropriately. There are a number of free ways to set up a blog & to have it hosted for free. We will go with Blogger.com for our first blog. Blogger will allow you to set up a blog for free they will host it for free and they will ping search engines every time you update, meaning you will get spidered & found. Visit blogger.com & click the button on the front page labelled 'create your blog now' then follow the step by step instructions that Blogger provide. Some key settings you will want to get right are: I) 'Host your blog at Blogger' = Yes II) 'Add your blog to our listings' = Yes III) 'Ping Weblogs.com' = Yes IV) 'Publish Site Feed' = Yes 2. Write some content. Before we move any further there has to be some information on the site & that means that you have to make some entries. You can write some of these entries yourself & some can be quotes from sites of interest to your reader that you can post using the Google Toolbar. You can download the Google toolbar for free at toolbar.google.com. The toolbar includes a Blogger button. When you visit a site that has something of interest to your readers you can highlight the appropriate text & click the Blogger button. The content will then be added to your blog along with a link back to the site. 3. Once you have some content eg a weeks worth of blogging with 1 or 2 entries for everyday, you can apply for an adsense account. When you sign in to Blogger you will see an invitation to join Adsense. Use this link and apply for an account. You can find out all about Adsense on the Adsense page but basically you get Google ads on your site & get paid if your visitor clicks them. Google will decide what adverts show on your site based on the content it finds within. You need to be aware that Google will decline your application if your site is not considered to have content. Nobody outside of Google knows the precise rules on this. Once you have been accepted you can get some javascript from Google to add to you site. Copy this & then log in to Blogger. Once you have logged into your blog you will see that one of the tabs across the top of the screen is labelled 'Template'. Click this. You will need to know a little bit of HTML to help find the right location to paste your Google code. But with a little experimentation you will find the right place for you. See the resource box at the end of this article for more help. I would suggest that the ads need to be seen when the site loads but should not be too obvious or dominate your site. 4. Write some more content. Try and keep your content coming at regular intervals as a number of directories will check on your site at regular intervals & the smarter ones will visit on a schedule based on your update schedule. They will probably determine this in the hours after you first submit to them. Which is what we will do next. 5. Submit your site to Blog & RSS directories. Because you are hosting at Blogger, Weblogs.com will already be notified when you update your blog. (That means that every time you make a new entry they are automatically notified) You will need to manually submit to the various other directories some of which will require a link on your site to theirs. You can add these links to your template below your Blogger logo. For a list of directories to get you started visit www.themoneyseed.com/rss 6. Keep writing interesting content. Ideally you want people to come back again and again. As with customers its harder to get a new visitor than to keep existing visitors. So make it interesting, in fact make it so interesting that they can't help but tell all their friends about it also. As with most free ways to make money this will take time to get going, but if you can build a following you will make money.

A Niche Marketing Model In Three Easy Steps: Keyword Storage Sheds

A Niche Marketing Model In Three Easy Steps: Keyword Storage Sheds

by: James Jackson

In this article we will review how you can put together a powerful three step an action plan to attack a niche market. Step I. - You Must Research A Niche Market. First and most importantly you will have to research a market. I have already done this and below the keyword example is - Storage Sheds Here are the top four keyword phrases on this list for this niche topic. The full keyword list for this example was provided from this website - http://www.findhotniches.com NOTE: The full keyword list for contains over 250 phrases. KEYWORD PHRASE 24 Hr Count 24 Hr Prediction ------------- ------------ --------------- storage sheds 1345 1151 storage shed 631 540 outdoor storage sheds 445 381 storage shed plans 409 350 Now that we know that there is an actual demand for storage sheds we can move on to step two. Step II. - You Must Determine What The Surfer Really Wants. This one is glaringly obvious that the surfer is looking for storage sheds which is a physical product. They obviously need or want to have extra storage space on their property or nearby. More than likely the surfer wants to find the cheapest and easiest way to get the best and most suitable storage shed for their needs. So we need to move to step three. Step III. - Put Together Your Profit Strategy. You have several options to profits from niche this niche market but here are just a few: 1. Create A Review Website. You could create a website reviewing different types of storage sheds that includes information such as: - What sizes and models do different storage sheds come in? - What type of material different storage sheds are made of? - How long will your storage shed last before you have to buy a new one? - What kind of storage shed you should buy based on your areas climate? - What is required to put together a storage shed and how long does it take? - Which brand of storage sheds are easiest to construct? Do you get the picture that I am trying to paint here? This will give your surfer a real reason to stay on your site and come back often. You could easily get this information by interviewing different storage shed manufacturers or suppliers by giving them a call or emailing them. Many times product manufacturers already have this type of information already created to better sell their product. If they do ask them if you can you use the information to add content to your website. Also, you can ask them if they have an affiliate program for their storage sheds. If not ask them if you could set up one for them and negotiate a percentage of the sales for your self. 2. You Could Create An E-book or Physical Product. How To Easily Build A Rock-Solid Long Lasting Storage Shed Perfect For Your Specific Needs With Just $50 Worth Of Materials. If you cannot write e-book yourself you can outsource this writing project to a professional writer at the following sites: http://www.elance.com http://www.freelance.com http://www.guru.com 3. Generate Extra Revenue By Joining the Google Adsense program. This is pretty simple. Jus sign up for the Adsense revenue sharing program at http://www.google.com/adsense. Each time someone clicks on one of the ads on you website you will get paid a percentage of what the advertiser pays to Google. It is really easy to get set up with Adsense and the ads are automatically targeted to be relevant your visitors interest. All you have to do is log into your Adsense account and copy/paste a special code into your web pages. Always remember, marketing your website is a game of numbers and it is not wise to build a business around any niche topic without doing the proper keyword research before hand. If there are not enough people interested in what you have to offer you will not be able to bring enough traffic to your website to turn a decent profit.

Is Your Site a One Trick Pony?

Is Your Site a One Trick Pony?

by: John Gergye

Copyright 2004 John Gergye Don’t know about you but I really look forward to watching The Apprentice on TV each week. Because it almost always offers a lesson in online marketing. Take the recent episode where the two teams were charged by The Donald with making money any way they could selling services to dog owners. Drama aside, the team that lost was a so called "one trick pony". They pinned their success on one thing - dog washing. A good idea but not quite good enough. Because the winning team not only offered dog washing but dog massage plus nail clipping too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that by offering a variety of services they earned three times as much. Income diversification is also a winning strategy online. One I mention to all who will listen. That’s because it’s dangerous to depend on one product’s cash flow for your site’s survival. So here are three ways to avoiding the fate of most one trick ponies. ===== > Promote Your Own Product I strongly believe you should have your own product to promote. Ideally something digitally delivered like an eBook or software? This way your "bread and butter" can’t suddenly be taken away from you should the product owner decide to no longer use affiliates. Which happens you know? Even better it’s smart to develop a higher priced back end product that offers even more help. Doing so knowing that if you offer a high quality product a certain percentage will want even more ideas and solutions from you. And these back end sales are the easiest kind. Oh and don’t think I didn’t hear that groan two paragraphs ago. But anyone can develop a starter info product in 24 hours. • Develop a list of 25 pressing questions those in your niche want answered. • Have a friend interview you for an hour over the phone asking you those questions. • You provide insightful answers while taping the call. • Transcribe the audio tape and convert the text into a PDF file. There you go - nearly instant product. If it sells flesh it out further and raise the price to reflect the added value. If not try again with another topic. ===== > Promote Related Affiliate Products But what if your visitors don’t want YOUR product? Well, don’t let them slip through your fingers without a fight. In this case affiliate products ARE the perfect solution. Because a site focusing on weddings can not only sell a wedding planning book it can also offer one on how to throw a bridal shower. Or another how to get the best deal on your honeymoon. Now to find such related eBooks available at Clickbank I use Affiliates Alert. It’s time saving software that runs from your desktop. With it you can find top selling products by keyword or commission payout by searching the entire Clickbank Marketplace or just a selected category. Best of all you can download it for free from www.AffiliatesAlert.com. ===== > Cash in on Waste Traffic Still not every visitor is going to buy from you no matter how many tempting solutions you dangle in front of them. In fact the vast majority won’t. But that doesn’t mean you still can’t make money off them. The most common way to cash in on waste traffic is to use Google’s Adsense. That’s where you display Google Adwords ads on your site for some unspecified cut of the action. The nice thing about Adsense is you can be up and running in no time. All I do is incorporate the Adsense code in my page templates using SSI or server side includes. That way every new page added gives me more opportunities to make money. Now if the mystical and magical nature of Adsense is a turnoff, there are other services that offer similar revenue sharing programs. Even better some, unlike Adsense, let you specify the keywords you wish to target. Here's a short list of them. Searchfeed www.searchfeed.com RevenuePilot www.revenuepilot.com AllPPC www.allppc.com BidClix www.bidclix.com Azoogle Ads www.azoogleads.com Of course maybe you don’t want to settle for pennies and would rather shoot for dollars? Okay so what if the ads served up were for ClickBank products? Here are several ways to do that. CBAdwords http://cbadwords.com CB Clicks www.cbclicks.com ClickAdWords www.clickadwords.com CB Ad Generator www.procoversdeluxe.com/cbgenerator The thing to remember about Adsense, or any of the alternatives, is visitors can’t click on the listings if they can’t see ‘em. So make sure you display the listings front and center. In the visitor’s face. If at all possible within the actual page content. For sure not at the bottom or below the fold somewhere lost in the recesses of the web page. So there you have it. Three ways to diversify your online marketing efforts. Play your cards right and you won’t end up washing dogs for a living.

Five Knockout Affiliate Tips

Five Knockout Affiliate Tips

by: Nicholas Dixon

Here are five “hook em in the jaw” affiliate tips that really work. Implement them and see how well they work for you. (1) Develop a positive and realistic mindset. Do you believe that you can get rich quick or that your business will take time to grow? Those who believe in the online hype are the ones who normally lose. Think positive and know in your heart you can earn an income from your efforts. (2) Too much information or the lack of it can be dangerous. Not using the knowledge that you have gain can stop your business from getting off the ground and not having the right information can have the same effect. (3) Market your programs with Google Adwords. This is a powerful strategy you can use and as long as you earn more in commissions than your PPC costs, then you are getting something for nothing. (4) Write your own ads, articles and reviews instead of the pre-formatted ones offered by affiliate programs. This will set you apart from all the other affiliates in the same program. (5) Make sure your affiliate program matches the content of your website or newsletter. If you have marketing content then you should promote marketing products on that page. Think of it like matching ads to the page content like the way Adsense does. There may a few exceptions to the rule though, even Adsense does it some time. There you go. A few tips to help you with your affiliate programs whether you are looking for your first check or to boost your current earnings. Try them all or even a couple and test and track your results. I am sure Lennox Lewis would be proud of your hooks and jabs © Oceanroc Web Publishing About the author: Nicholas Dixon is the CEO of Oceanroc Web Publishing. You are invited to sign up for a free five day mini course on search engines available at http://WWW.Oceanroc.com/Searchcourse.html