I've made millions online - ask me anything!

[limitup]

1) Recommendations on where to outsource software/web app development? I'm trying to get one developed, but weeding through unqualified firms is a challenge.

Damn I wish I could help you with a few referrals or something, but honestly I've always developed my own stuff. In the early days I was beyond broke so I started learning Perl/CGI (this was before PHP, etc. even existed) just to do basic things like setup contact forms, etc. but over the years I've learned enough to be considered a full-blown LAMP developer and I can create almost anything.

The kind of stuff I do is generally relatively simple and can be developed in anywhere from 1 day to a month or so at most, and I actually enjoy it a bit, so I just do it myself. That way I'm intimately familiar with my own stuff, I can make changes quickly, and I don't have to deal with flaky programmers.

All I can recommend is that you ask around for referrals and check references. I'm sure if you ask around on a few forums you'll get a few good leads and find someone good. Sorry I couldn't be of more help on this!

... it's not for everyone, but if you have the personality/mind for it, I would STRONGLY recommend that you at least consider learning basic coding and "techie stuff." I really believe that having this skillset has been a huge advantage to me. I know for sure that in at least one situation it was the difference between me becoming #1 or staying #3 or #4 in a particular niche. While my competitors took weeks/months to iterate and upgrade their stuff, I was adding new features in hours and days. They literally couldn't keep up with me.

 

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[limitup]

When you were first getting started in the late 90's, how did you learn your craft? Was it through friends/mentors or did you just know somebody that was working with early internet marketing?

Actually it was neither of those. I'm completely self-taught. I've been "in to" computers since I was a kid, and I was experimenting with direct mail and other direct marketing strategies when the Internet came along so it just made sense. Actually at first it was just "marketing" on AOL and Compuserve classifieds and stuff like that before the web caught on. Then it was usenet newsgroups. This was back when Yahoo's homepage was literally just a list of links, there was no Google, most people didn't know what email was, etc. Seems like a lifetime ago.

But anyway long story short I was in to direct mail like I said, and when the Internet came along I just remember saying to myself I think there might be something to this Internet thing, and it looks like I can advertise cheaper and get faster results on this Internet, so I'm gonna give it a try. If I only knew then how big and important the Internet would become, I'd be a billionaire for sure. I was online when you could buy domains like business.com for reg fee (which at the time was super expensive like $100 or something I can't even remember!)

You said it was non-stop 80+ hour weeks in the beginning, how did you know with such clarity that what you were doing was going to work?

I "knew" it would work because I knew other people were doing it. I'm of at least average intelligence and I have a sickening work ethic, so I figured if they could do it I could do it too.

And short of things that require innate athletic talent or insane amounts of resources you simply don't have and can't get, I think this holds true for just about anyone who wants to do anything.

The "sickening work ethic" part is the only problem for most people...

 

[biggeemac]

So now you need traffic, and that's where other affiliates come in. You now setup your own affiliate program or put your new offer on the affiliate networks and your offer is simple. Just like the others, you offer $1-2 per lead, when someone submits the form on your landing page.

Hey Limitup, this is me right here.....and I apologize if you answered this and I missed it. New kid on the block with a new website and no traffic. Are there any good sites or references out there that can help me get through this process without me having to just do it solo with no information?

 

[Danio]

hi limitup,

how would someone create a big product launch when they are trying to launch a product with zero contacts etc.

also you said your frist product sold 25,000 units did you mostly concentrate on paid traffic to your sales page or did you get out message people with websites etc in your niche to help you promote?

 

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[mrhahn]

What kind of tracking software do you use, or is it custom-made? I've used Prosper202 in the past, just seeing if there are any better solutions.

 

[limitup]

Hey Limitup, this is me right here.....and I apologize if you answered this and I missed it. New kid on the block with a new website and no traffic. Are there any good sites or references out there that can help me get through this process without me having to just do it solo with no information?

Can't really help much without knowing A LOT more details about what you're doing, what your cashflow situation looks like, how much money you have to spend on advertising, what your goals are, etc. There is no one-size-fits all answer to any of this "stuff." I would suggest you start a new thread with as many details as you can about you and your business. I'll reply when I see it, and I'm sure lots of other people will to.

If you want to post specific marketing related questions in this thread that's awesome too, but I don't think this thread is the best place for an in-depth, ongoing discussion about your business.

 

[limitup]

how would someone create a big product launch when they are trying to launch a product with zero contacts etc.

What exactly do you mean by a big product launch? Are you referring to a Jeff Walker "product launch formula" style launch or do you just mean introducing your new product or service to the marketplace?

Anyway, if you don't have any affiliates or partners to send you traffic, you'll have to generate it on your own. Personally I would do it with paid advertising. The specifics would depend on your niche, product(s) and/or business model. Depending on what you're doing you might also be able to leverage "social media", although that definitely isn't my specialty.

As I mentioned in my reply to the previous post, unfortunately there are no one-size-fits-all answers to these kinds of "generic" questions. If you want to provide more details I'll try to give you some advice, but I'd recommend to you the same thing I recommended to the previous poster. You should start a new thread and post as many details about what you're doing as possible, so I and others can reply.

also you said your frist product sold 25,000 units did you mostly concentrate on paid traffic to your sales page or did you get out message people with websites etc in your niche to help you promote?

That particular product was sold on the clickbank platform so 99% of the traffic and sales came from clickbank affiliates.

 

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[halfstepdown88]

What would you say the best way to monetize my site aimed at helping people defeat depression without the use of medication would be? I can post the direct link if you want it.

 

[limitup]

What would you say the best way to monetize my site aimed at helping people defeat depression without the use of medication would be? I can post the direct link if you want it.

What is your business model??

 

[limitup]

What kind of tracking software do you use, or is it custom-made? I've used Prosper202 in the past, just seeing if there are any better solutions.

Yeah everything I use these days is custom. I actually developed one of the first ad tracking systems for "small" online marketers in 1999, which I sold many years ago, but I used that as the basis for an extremely custom tracking system for myself and that's all I've used over the years. Prosper/Tracking202 is not bad, cpv lab gets good reviews, and there are some other "niche" tracking tools. I guess it kind of depends on what exactly you're trying to track ... ?

 

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[Michael W.]

The two big ones I'd recommend are stack that money and imgrind. These are definitely worth the money IF you use them intelligently. Other than that the only other forum I'd spend any time on is this one ...

Just joined STM. Lets see if I can't make you .10 cents next month.

 

[Perfectlytimed]

Where would you recommend an absolute beginner with "affiliate marketing" and "internet marketing in general" to START ? I'm new to this, and I'd love to learn about affiliate marketing, although I have no clue where to start ...

 

[superleggera]

limitup - great thread. I am from your world - but did not scale up till your levels, and I had decided quit in order to start building something more substantial.

I owned an offer in the dating niche, and I went the whole nine yards - optimized conversions (split test like a madman until I hit 4%) and price points (found a sweet spot which added +30% to my topline). EPCs were healthy, and I was making up to $4 per optin in terms of LTV for "buyer countries" - US, UK, AU, CA.

The dating advice niche is predominantly driven by ad swaps and JVs - it's nay impossible to advertise on Google, and Facebook PPC, while profitable, the sales cycle is super long. No volume at POF. Banner drops were iffy, and highly dependent on specific sites; scaling was a problem. Didn't try RTB exchanges. Porn sites were an option but that's something I chose not to do.

And so to scale, I had to rely on SEO because (1) there's not much of a choice left, (2) the ROI of organic traffic was awesome, and (3) I hated doing JVs with dating gurus who owned some really questionable products. But as anyone knows, dealing with Big G is a bitch, and Penguin 1.0 wiped out 75% of my business overnight. But I rebounded and soon was dominating Google again, surviving two Penguin updates after that (don't ask me how). Penguin 2.0 hit and it was not as bad as 1.0, although business definitely dipped.

Post Penguin 2.0 I did some serious soul searching and in the end I decided to walk away because of a few factors:-

1. I can no longer identify with the niche as I got married to a wonderful gal and had two kids.

2. To take the business to the next level I will need to get off Google and do the dating guru circle jerk which I absolutely despised.

3. Competition was brutal, and as you said, offer is everything, and the competitors were making some seriously outrageous claims which I had no doubt would convert like gangbusters. Seen those videos which sell "magical magnets" which you could strap on your penis and automatically attract women to you? Don't laugh. After working in this niche for three years, I know a winning concept when I see one.

To compete, I would need to be more aggressive in my claims in order to kick up the LTV which then enables me to buy banner drops at... porn sites. A complete non-starter for me.

To summarize, while i am with you *most* of everything you say (have a good offer, increase LTV with upsell/downsell/cross sell flow, optimize EPC), I would like to point out a couple of exceptions -

1. When your competition do the things you're unwilling to do (which could well border on being illegal or immoral or both) then expect to get your butt kicked, big time.
2. In some niches you're forced to default to certain traffic channels only, and they could well dry up or the platform might change (think Big G).
3. In my experience, EPCs could be more dependent on list quality than the offer itself. And there's "niche fatique" which needs to be accounted for as well, and so while you may be owning an offer in an evergreen niche such as dating or bizops the funnel would need to be "refreshed" periodically.

I'd agree with you that this "job" is not something that can be outsourced and it's definitely not passive. The money's good, but I don't recommend this to anyone starting out because it's far more efficient building an asset which you could monetize AND sell later right from the beginning. I wished I had known this sooner... for I have wasted three years of my life building up sand castles in the air.

The good news is that I now have a good chunk of money to spend on my next project, but I'll never, ever go back again.

 

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[TedM]

Just wanted to say "Thanks" for your contributions. I've been hearing about "make an irresistible offer" for ages, but never really put it together. You explained it really well, and put into place something I didn't know how to articulate for a new service i am launching these days.

also your comments and suggestions on creating affiliates was tremendously valuable.

 

[wonderkid]

Thank you for everything, I can't believe that I've been spending 2 days reading this thread since I joined this forum and never look at other thread yet

It would be wonderful if I could get answer from following questions:

1) What is your average email marketing email open rate, ctr rate, and conversion rate? so let's say if you send 1000 emails, how many open the email, how many people click on the link in the email, and how many people actually bought?

2) What is your average cost per lead to bring 1 visitor to your site or offer?

3) What is your average email subscription rate?

4) How to do effective media buy? are you buying google adwords, or place banner on someone else websites? if it is the latter, how do you find out if the website has high traffic? can you share some tips and tricks?

 

[billy101]

I've read through this awesome thread, and am adding relevant info below:

1. With regards to the standing vs. sitting whilst working, there are now many height adjustable desks available to solv this very problem. You can set the desk low for when you're seated, and then make it higher for when you want to stand. You even get ones that are on a pneumatic assited stand, so it's not too heavy when you want to lift it etc.

I couldn't believe they were making so much money with such a crappy site and crappy offer.

Long story short I basically copied what they were doing, put my own twist on it and created what I thought was a better product, and then I aggressively recruited their affiliates and partners.

Limitup, thanks for the chance to ask you questions. I wondered, could you tell us a little more on how you aggressively recruited specific affiliates above? How did you find them, what was said to them, and how willing were they to promote your product pls?


2. Limitup, you also mention you work pretty much on your own, ala 'lone wolf'. But everytime someone is mentioned in this thread, you seem to know them/know someone who makes significant amounts of money with single product sites etc.

If you're a lone wolf, how do you get to know so many people and network so well? I ask because I work in a similar fashion, but I think it would be really beneficial to swap ideas with more people.

Can you speak more about how you keep up with/know/stay educated about so many people pls?

Thank you kindly for your time Limitup, this is a very inormative read!

 

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[mrhahn]

What server providers do you recommend? I am assuming you use dedicated servers at this point. Is there a rough # of hits per hour I can safely stay under before a shared hosting environment may be too slow and decrease conversions?

 

[limitup]

What server providers do you recommend? I am assuming you use dedicated servers at this point. Is there a rough # of hits per hour I can safely stay under before a shared hosting environment may be too slow and decrease conversions?

Yeah I've used my own servers for many years now. I use and highly recommend Softlayer (which just announced it's being acquired by IBM for 2 Billion - not bad!).

I wouldn't worry so much about "hits per hour" or metrics like that. Personally I would recommend that as soon as your business is making money you should think about getting a dedicated server. They can be had really inexpensively these days, and the performance boost and peace of mind are well worth it.

The speed of your site is SUPER important, so definitely don't skimp on a crappy host. To give you a reference point, most of the pages on my database-driven sites load "instantly" on a decent broadband connection. You also won't have to worry about other sites crashing/overloading the server and bringing your site down with it.

 

[limitup]

Where would you recommend an absolute beginner with "affiliate marketing" and "internet marketing in general" to START ? I'm new to this, and I'd love to learn about affiliate marketing, although I have no clue where to start ...

Serious answer ... I recommend you read EVERY POST of EVERY THREAD in the relevant sub-forums here. Once you do that, you'll have a much better understand of things, and you'll know the "right" questions to ask next.

 

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[limitup]

Post Penguin 2.0 I did some serious soul searching and in the end I decided to walk away because of a few factors:-

Awesome post man. I agree 100% with just about everything you said. Many of my previous posts echoed a lot of the things you're saying, and I could have easily been the one to write your post!

Sounds like we're in similar boats, but you're a little ahead of me. I'm just now starting to think seriously about creating a truly fastlane business, and honestly have no idea what I'm going to do.

Sure wished I "quit" sooner as well.

To address the 3 points you made ...

1. When your competition do the things you're unwilling to do (which could well border on being illegal or immoral or both) then expect to get your butt kicked, big time.

Agreed 100%. I actually talked about this exact same problem in a previous post in this thread. And it seems like there's always some young and hungry "kid" out there who just doesn't care, or some guy that lives in a 3rd-world country and so he thinks he's untouchable, and they are willing to do anything to make that dollar.

Definitely hard to compete with these guys, although it's not impossible.

2. In some niches you're forced to default to certain traffic channels only, and they could well dry up or the platform might change (think Big G).

Don't think we disagree here. You're absolutely right.

3. In my experience, EPCs could be more dependent on list quality than the offer itself. And there's "niche fatique" which needs to be accounted for as well, and so while you may be owning an offer in an evergreen niche such as dating or bizops the funnel would need to be "refreshed" periodically.

Traffic source and quality are obviously important. I think what you're referring to is how I've talked about the importance of the offer? In my previous posts when talking about creating "great offers", EPCs, etc. I think I just assumed most people would know I was talking about these topics in an "all else being equal" type of scenario. Meaning, all else being equal - if we sell the same product and get the same traffic - I'm going to have more success if my offer is "great" and you are simply making a plain-jane boring offer of "click here to buy".

I wished I had known this sooner... for I have wasted three years of my life building up sand castles in the air.

Consider yourself lucky. I've "wasted" a lot more than 3 years!

 

[Berto]

1. When your competition do the things you're unwilling to do (which could well border on being illegal or immoral or both) then expect to get your butt kicked, big time.

Agreed 100%. I actually talked about this exact same problem in a previous post in this thread. And it seems like there's always some young and hungry "kid" out there who just doesn't care, or some guy that lives in a 3rd-world country and so he thinks he's untouchable, and they are willing to do anything to make that dollar.

Definitely hard to compete with these guys, although it's not impossible.

Bah! I LOVED these posts, but I think this is short term thinking and is the one thing I'll disagree with if you're trying to build a real business.

Short term, I'm not going to argue with the points above... they're right.

But let's talk about 2008. Some people made high 6 and low 7 figures on the whole acai berry rebill nonsense. Where are they now? Chances are, they're not making that kind of money anymore, especially not in berries.... so hopefully they saved and invested it to do bigger and better things.

Meanwhile, I've seen real websites and real brands who have slowly just chipped away at it, had a product go viral for the right reasons, and are now magnitudes beyond what any 2008 acai marketer is making now.

To top it off, it's the brands like the ones I mention above that Google has rewarded -- and rightly so.

I honestly think that there's a way to get a healthy mix of things. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think you can find people who want to help you promote QUALITY and not tarnish their personal brand by promoting crap - even if it gets them smaller commissions.

Things are moving to the point where you DO need to build a real brand, and you do need to put a personal touch on things to get the long-term SEO benefits (video and authorship). And I'll be damned if I'm gonna let my biggest brand or my personal reputation get damaged because I was slinging 100% snake oil.

So I am happy to compete with the next acai berry promoter. That kid will crush me this year, and can go buy that fancy car and have nothing to show for it in 2 years. But in 5 years, if I do things the right way, I'll have the last laugh.

End of story... a lot of the short-term thinking presented here isn't true "fastlane", and I hope readers don't get too sucked into the hype. That is, if they want to be proud of something and have something real to show for it.

 

[Michael W.]

End of story... a lot of the short-term thinking presented here isn't true "fastlane", and I hope readers don't get too sucked into the hype. That is, if they want to be proud of something and have something real to show for it.

Hustle with a vision.

Good post Berto.

 

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[Zen Focus]

Legendary. Thanks.

 

[superleggera]

End of story... a lot of the short-term thinking presented here isn't true "fastlane", and I hope readers don't get too sucked into the hype. That is, if they want to be proud of something and have something real to show for it.

Strangely, I have got the feeling that this thread would instead be counter-productive and start many down the "affiliate marketing" slowlane path. In fact, I'm already receiving PMs asking for advice on how to sling dating offers. Sigh...

For those who are thinking of doing this - be legit FROM DAY ONE. Otherwise you're just wasting time.

PS: Berto - too bad you decided to leave WF. I really enjoyed your posts.

 

[superleggera]

Guys,

Imagine you're building up a classifieds marketplace where you'd either charge the advertiser on a listing basis (flat fee) or CPA (per click or per lead). How would you leverage PAID traffic to build up the user (consumer) base so that you could justify charging the advertiser $xxx per listing or per click or per lead?

This is not as straightforward as the classic affiliate marketing model where you can estimate LTV down to the penny and then use that as the baseline for buying clicks or CPMs.

In short, how would you know that an acquired user is worth $xxx when you don't get sales off him directly?

 

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[Darius]

What's up Limitup,

epic thread! Lots of good information in here.

While reading this thread I didn't come across this question.

When "copying" a company and making it better like the example you gave in post #20, how did you "take apart" the company in order to re-build it better? Is this a process that comes with the experience of building a company?

In a few niches that I would like to get in, I looked at the companies that dominated that niche. All I see is the stuff on the website. I can copy and improve on that, find where they're advertising and copy that, but because I never built a fully functional business similar to the ones in this niche, it still feels like I am missing a gap on information. The bad part about it is, I don't know what I don't know. Ya know? lol

Hopefully you can shine some light on some of the dark areas. If not looks like I'll just have to run into the dark areas, make the mistakes, learn, repeat, blah blah blah with every area. Prefer not to do that if I don't have to.

Thanks for you time and response!

 

[limitup]

1) What is your average email marketing email open rate, ctr rate, and conversion rate? so let's say if you send 1000 emails, how many open the email, how many people click on the link in the email, and how many people actually bought?

These numbers can be all over the place and still be considered "good", so you shouldn't worry about my numbers. I honestly don't have this info handy anyway because as I explained in previous posts I haven't managed any sites in awhile now. These kinds of numbers are all relative to other marketers in your niche, but especially just to compare your own numbers month by month, etc. But it all depends on traffic quality, how things are presented on your site, how and why they got on your list in the first place, how well you nurture your relationship with your list, and so many other variables. You can compare your numbers with others in your market to get some kind of baseline, but really what you should do is monitor your own numbers and just constantly try to improve them.

2) What is your average cost per lead to bring 1 visitor to your site or offer?

With almost all of my projects in health, wealth and relationship niches, I generally paid anywhere from $1-5 per opt-in lead. I tracked everything to the penny so for example I knew exactly how much traffic from any particular source was worth. With my affiliates I would pay some affiliates $2 per lead and others $4 per lead because their lead quality was that much better. Again there is no right or wrong, or one-size-fits-all answer, to this kind of question.

3) What is your average email subscription rate?

Do mean opt-in rate? What percentage of people that hit my landing pages put in their info? Again, it depends on the site. I've been happy with as low as 5%, and I've seen as high as 60%, and everything inbetween. All were profitable.

4) How to do effective media buy? are you buying google adwords, or place banner on someone else websites? if it is the latter, how do you find out if the website has high traffic? can you share some tips and tricks?

Hmm there are entire courses and volumes written on this topic. I've done it all, and it can all work. It depends on what you're doing, what your goals are, how much you're looking to spend, etc. Are you getting the theme here that there are no right answers to a lot of these kinds of questions?

Generally speaking when people talk about media buying they are referring to relatively high dollar ad campaigns on big huge sites via various ad networks like advertise.com, adbrite, clicksor, pulse360, etc. With something like this you generally need to spend 1,000s just to get enough traffic to test a handful of ads. This is definitely not for beginners, but rather, this is something you work towards. Once you've dialed in your offer and you know all your numbers, this is a great way to scale your offer/traffic.

Buying ads one at a time on individual sites is a great way to get traffic. It takes some legwork but you can find some real hidden gems out there. And the cool thing is that you can outsource most of this work to a VA. Let them research, find the sites, gather all the advertising details in terms of what's offered, costs, etc. and then you can take it from there. Every now and then you'll land on a goldmine where you can get super targeted highly-converting traffic for 5 or 10 cents a click, etc.

To get an idea of how much traffic a site gets, you can use something like alexa which is a good starting point. If you're talking about "big" sites that get a good amount of traffic you can use more advanced tools like compete.com and quantcast. Google Ad Planner is probably one of my favorites. There's also google trends for websites which most people don't even know about. Lots of data available. There are also a few tools that aggregate data from multiple places. One is called dataopedia and I think there's another one called attention meter (sorry it's been awhile since I've used these!)

 

[limitup]

1. With regards to the standing vs. sitting whilst working, there are now many height adjustable desks available to solve this very problem. You can set the desk low for when you're seated, and then make it higher for when you want to stand. You even get ones that are on a pneumatic assisted stand, so it's not too heavy when you want to lift it etc.

Yup I've seen these. They are a little too slow for my liking. Although it seems like there are new options coming out all the time, which I think is great. What I ended up doing was simply buying a stand-up desk and then duplicating my entire workstation setup on it. So now I have 2 identical workstations in my home office - one traditional desk and the other for standing. I bounce back and forth between the 2, with the added benefit that I always have a backup computer system to use if one crashes or has some kind of problem.

I bought a cheap treadmill desk to try, but I could never get used to it. Plus I'm already active enough and don't need the exercise. I forget the name of it but man the treadmill it came with was so cheap and incredibly loud I through it away within a few months. If anyone ever looks in to getting a treadmill desk, or setting one up, maybe sure you use a quality, quiet treadmill.

Limitup, thanks for the chance to ask you questions. I wondered, could you tell us a little more on how you aggressively recruited specific affiliates above? How did you find them, what was said to them, and how willing were they to promote your product pls?

In the early days I ran most of my offers on Clickbank. And when you do this, all that really matters is that you have a kick a$$ high converting offer that's profitable for affiliates to promote. You don't even have to try to "get affiliates" with Clickbank if you have an awesome product, they will find you.

Same goes for running your own affiliate for that matter. Super-affiliates - the ones that really matter - will find you if you have a kick a$$ offer. In the beginning sometimes you might need to go "recruiting" affiliates, but I'd spend more time working on your offer than recruiting affiliates.

If you need to, you can have a VA or employee just surf around to find relevant sites in your niche and contact them to try to arrange a mutually-profitable relationship, etc. If you just email them and say "I have a great offer blah blah blah want to promote it?" most people will just delete it though - so if you do go this route you have to do something to really get their attention, pick up the phone and call them, etc.

When trying to break into a new market where I didn't know anyone, etc. I always had the best luck by making ridiculously great offers like I've talked about throughout this thread. For example, if someone is promoting a competitor I'd get them to test my offer by guaranteeing them some amount more than they're currently making. Then if I've done my job and my offer converts better than my competitors, the rest is history.

2. Limitup, you also mention you work pretty much on your own, ala 'lone wolf'. But everytime someone is mentioned in this thread, you seem to know them/know someone who makes significant amounts of money with single product sites etc.

If you're a lone wolf, how do you get to know so many people and network so well? I ask because I work in a similar fashion, but I think it would be really beneficial to swap ideas with more people.

Can you speak more about how you keep up with/know/stay educated about so many people pls?

I only know the people I do because I've literally been doing this for 15 years. I've never been to a single affiliate marketing "conference" or anything like that, but I've come into contact and communicated with 1,000s of people over the years. No way around it. I mean at one point I had one single website that had over 4,000 active affiliates - including ALL of the "top dogs" in that niche. That's what happens when you create GREAT offers!

I know, I'm starting to sound like a broken record but it's just that important. MJ talks about this as well although he usually refers to it as having a product-centric business. When I talk about it I usually talk about it on a slightly higher "level" and I think in terms of offers, and not necessarily just the product by itself.

But really we're talking about the same thing. Your product and your offer should be so great that it sells itself. This is huge. If you have to hire a 5-figure copywriter just to get a decent conversion rate, that's a good sign you're NOT heading in the right direction (unless your only goal is to sell hyped up crappy products)

 

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[limitup]

Bah! I LOVED these posts, but I think this is short term thinking and is the one thing I'll disagree with if you're trying to build a real business.

Short term, I'm not going to argue with the points above... they're right.

But let's talk about 2008....

I don't disagree with most of what you said. I think superleggera and I were both coming at it from the perspective of one "legit" affiliate trying to compete with other make-money-at-all-costs affiliates who don't play by the rules. In this case I'm sure you'll agree with what we both said. But sure if you're building a brand, a real business ... just keep doing your thing. In this case I wouldn't even look at scammy affiliates as competitors.

End of story... a lot of the short-term thinking presented here isn't true "fastlane", and I hope readers don't get too sucked into the hype. That is, if they want to be proud of something and have something real to show for it.

Agreed. That's why I made sure to point out in my original post that much of what I've done isn't fastlane!

 

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Imagine you're building up a classifieds marketplace where you'd either charge the advertiser on a listing basis (flat fee) or CPA (per click or per lead). How would you leverage PAID traffic to build up the user (consumer) base so that you could justify charging the advertiser $xxx per listing or per click or per lead?

This is not as straightforward as the classic affiliate marketing model where you can estimate LTV down to the penny and then use that as the baseline for buying clicks or CPMs.

In short, how would you know that an acquired user is worth $xxx when you don't get sales off him directly?

Off the top of my head I would generally try to sell leads. I would also track everything so that I DID know how much a visitor from any particular source was worth down to the penny.

If traffic from source X costs you an average of $12 per lead but you're only selling leads for $10, then obviously you have to work on optimizing that traffic or drop that traffic source. On the other hand if traffic from source Y is only costing you an average of $6 per lead, you'd go back and try to get as much of it as possible.

It might not be possible or make sense depending on what you're doing, but I would always lean towards a pay-for-performance model no matter what side of the equation I'm on. Because that's where you can put to work all of the creativity, direct marketing, optimization, and other skills you bring to the game.

These things are your competitive advantage in the marketplace. If you make a site and just charge a monthly fee to advertise on it, the barrier to entry for someone to come along and eat your lunch is much, much less.

Generally speaking directory-type sites that just charge a flat monthly fee for a listing usually rely on the customers not being savvy enough to figure out if they're getting their money's worth or not ...