Internet Marketing & Home-Based Business

So we know that Internet Marketing is all about driving traffic and creating relationships. How can you turn that into money? There are a few specific techniques that can bring in the bucks, and one thing in particular that you might want to…well avoid isn’t right, but you shouldn’t focus on it too much.

First off, don’t spend all of your time trying to get rich off of Google AdSense payments. Do you realize just how much traffic you will have to generate to get enough money that Google ad clicks is your primary source of income. Let’s just say that you have a blog with AdSense on it, and you get $.10 per click. Sometimes you get less, and sometimes more…this is just an example.

With a cashflow goal of $6000 per month (let’s face it…can you run a business on any less?), you’re going to have to generate a lot of clicks. For the sake of example, we’ll say your average click rate is 2%. That’s pretty high, but I’m feeling generous. Your blog is fairly popular, so you get 20,000 unique visitors each month. Those 20,000 unique visitors have an average of 2.8 pages per visit, so they click around on your site a little bit. That is a monthly average of 56,000 page views per month. With your 2% AdSense click rate, you’ll have 1120 ad clicks. At $.10 per click, that’s $112. Not exactly six grand.

This was just an example, but can you see how much work and traffic it can take to get up to $6000 a month in AdSense income? I’m not saying that you should avoid it — I don’t. But I don’t think that optimizing your site and articles to generate AdSense income should be your only business goal. Use it, but just as a part of the puzzle, and not your only effort.

If not AdSense, then what? CPA, CPL, and good old fashioned sales. CPA means Cost Per Action, and that can be just as simple as someone submitting an email address or phone number. CPL stands for Cost Per Lead. This is where you gather information from an individual and sell that information to a waiting party. Finally, sales are just that — trading goods in exchange for money.

CPA is good because you don’t have to get a person to shell out cash. All you have to do is get them to take whatever action your client, or customer, is looking for, and you’ll get paid. For example, say someone is trying to build up an email marketing list, and they know you are good at driving traffic. They hire you to get people to subscribe to the newsletter, and they’ll pay you $.50 per valid email address. So you get your marketing boots on and drive enough traffic to your customer’s form that 30,000 people sign up with valid email addresses. You earn a cool $15,000, which is a nice chunk of change.

CPL, or Cost Per Lead, is similar to CPA, but a little more in depth. This entails collecting information about a person, and pre-qualifying them for validity, and  interest in a particular thing. I’ll use my real-world experience as an example. I have a CPL site that connects student prospects with educational institution admissions offices. These schools have budgets for getting new students, and are willing to pay for the contact information of people already interested in learning more about what they have to offer.

That’s really the key element of a CPL structure. The individual already has an interest in what is being sold. In this case, education is what’s being sold. My site does the pre-qualifying on an interest level. Someone who is already interested in education gets to my site via Google, or an ad, or something similar. They find an area of study they like, and then find a particular school close to where they live. Then, they request more information.

You see, they are already interested in what is being offered — an education for a particular degree from a particular school. This person is ripe for the sales process. This is what I mean by a pre-qualified lead. The school is happy to pay for this person’s contact information, because they have proven, by filling out an information request form, that they are already interested in what the school offers. Whether or not this person actually attends the school doesn’t matter. What the school pays for is a good lead…someone who might attend the school and pay tuition. Once they get the lead, their sales process takes over, and they pay for the information.

The last way to make Internet marketing profitable is to just sell stuff. Whether you sell digital goods, such as ebooks or a training course, or actual products that need to be shipped, you’ll need to market to sell. In this case, opposed to CPA or CPL setups, you’ll take care of the entire sales process. You’ll get the leads, use a sales process, sell, and then deliver your goods.

The benefit here is two-fold. First, you’ll have total control over the entire sales funnel. This will allow you to fine tune it until you get maximum profits for your efforts. Keeping the entire sales funnel in your control gives you opportunity to refine it to generate more profit. The second benefit is repeat sales. If you are selling something, you have that lead for follow-up sales. You can keep selling to that person. If they like what you have, and have money, they’ll buy your stuff. Remember, it costs less to keep an existing customer than to prospect and land new customers.

Internet marketing is more than just driving traffic. You need a specific purpose. You need a financial goal, and the means to get there. In this article, we discussed CPA, CPL, and traditional sales. Which method is right for you? My business uses CPL and traditional sales. What can you do to make more money with your Internet marketing efforts?

Links:

Education Finder – my CPL educational directory

Zero Friction Marketing – CPA training, with some very convincing (and large) numbers.