The Secret to 6-Figure Online Income

Have you heard of the latest search engine to be unveiled?  Cuil. Cuil? Yes the new search engine can be found out at http://cuil.com . Cuil pronounced “kool” claims to be the search engine with the highest number of indexed pages, and displays their results in columns as you’ll find in a newspaper. They also display images along with your search results, as is done currently by ask.com

Interesting. The company was founded by a couple of former Google staffers and some other technical ‘eggheads’. Apparently Google is unmoved saying that they always welcome competition in the Search arena. We’ll see.. . You can find more information about this latest Search Engine offering at http://cuil.com/info/faq  or even proceed to search with a different approach at http://cuil.com .

As an Internet Marketer, I welcome the addition. We don’t want to live our lives and do our business under the monopoly of powerful Google. Maybe Cuil will finally give Google a run for their money, and succeed where the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft have failed miserably!

As you may be aware, website traffic comes in different forms and flavours. You can generate traffic from many sources: Pay Per Click [(Google Adwords, Yahoo Search (Panama, anyone?), Microsoft Adcenter etc.].

You may decide, however ,that Pay Per Click Advertising is too expensive for you and you decide to go the route of Traffic Exchanges. Traffic Exchanges are largely free, and examples include: “I Love Hits“, “WebbizInsider”, etc. But from my own experience with traffic exchanges, they are hardly effective because the purpose of those browsing your websites (ads) is to accumulate credits so that their own websites will be displayed to others. Typically, it is advisable to rotate only your lead generation pages on Traffic Exchanges, you are typically wasting your time if you attempt to sell anything directly on traffic exchanges. You stand a greater chance of success if you just generate the lead and then offer a one time offer (OTO) after the lead has subscribed. If you really want to achieve maximum success with Traffic exchanges, you should opt for a paid option. This is the case in which you pay (say) $20/month and your webpage is rotated continually throughout the month. This, I believe is a better investment of your time,instead of mindlessly browsing through webpages, you can spend that time more effectively on your business.

Another form of ‘free’ advertising is placing your ads on Classified sites. The most popular free classified site that we all know is Craigslist, and it has [phenomenal success using its business model. People have gotten excellent results using Craigslist, and this has brought up a number of competitors like AdlandPro, Ablewise, etc. These ones also offer free classified ads, but in addition, give you the opportunity to make your adds more prominent by paying a premium ranging from $1 and upwards. On other sites apart from Craigslist, I have had more success when I opt for the Premium ads, than when I stick to just free classifieds. The reason is simply that the premium ads stand out from the thousands of free ads.

How can we forget the ultimate form of free advertisement; Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A  1st page placement in google (especially positions 1-5) is worth its price in Gold, and you cannot buy it (at least not directly!) with money.  Many experts have argued, however, that SEO is not really ‘free’. You pay for it in the time you devote to it.  They say that you can actually ‘buy’ a Google 1st page placement by hiring an SEO expert to optimize your site for the search engines. The debate rages on……..

I came across this interesting bit of news this morning. A medical doctor has left his lucrative 6-figure medical practice to devote all his time and efforts to running his very popular blog: Macrumors.com. How interesting?

Dr Kim started blogging about Apple Inc’s Secrets while still a Computer Science major in the university, and the site has grown to become the 2nd most popular blog on the Internet, defeating such popular blogs as the Huffingtonpost.com etc. Don’t forget that this blog is a technology blog and it has managed to eclipse political and other news websites. How and why did this happen? The main reason is that the Internet is like “thirsty elephant”, it’s always seeking fresh “waters” in the form of fresh content. Since Dr Kim’s Macrumors.com blog regularly supplies this fresh content, it has become one of the most visited webpages (not just blogs!) in the world. Very interesting.

Dr Kim’s MacRumors thrived on the secrecy of Apple, and over the years has been able to amass an impressive following. With that huge following, Dr Kim has been able to monetize the traffic through advertising income to such an extent that the income generated from a single blog was enough to enable Dr Kim to effectively ‘retire’ from his medical practice to run Macworlds.com on a full-time basis.

Well, well..   Iam looking forward to that day when I can generate even 1% of that income through my blogging efforts. I hope that day comes pretty soon!.

You can get further details of this interesting and encourging news (to us budding internet marketers) here : Dr Kim’s story.

One of the most valuable things that you can do to
receive long-term income is to capture the contact
information of those people who have shown an
interest in whatever product or service you are
offering.

You see, one of the mistakes individuals make and which
really hurts their ability to make money is when you have an
offer that directs the prospect immediately to the
offer page. Let’s say you are selling an ebook, and
perhaps you’ll use pay per click advertising or maybe
something else, and you send the prospect directly to
the website offering the ebook.

That’s a mistake, as if they do not buy, then
guess what — you’ll lose the opportunity to plant
and build a good relationship with them to buy it later
on from you. That’s a big deficit!

This is why lead generation is so important. You
must generate leads therefore that you can contact people
many times. After all, even the best websites merely
have a 3% toward 5% conversion rate — and that is the
really high end; it has been reported that most sites have an abandonment
rate of 95% to 98%.

If you are not getting people’s information such that
you have numerous opportunities to impact them with
your message, to get them interested, and to compel
them to believe from you — your profits will never be
what you hope for.

So you need to start making plans now for how you
are going to get people to give you their information.
This is very important. What you need to do is
create valuable information which is going to assist your prospects
in getting something done, and then you can offer
them the content absolutely free in exchange,
minimally, for their name and email address.

This is clearly one the most powerful things you can
do when you advertise.

So start planning today at how you are going to
get your prospects’ names and email addresses, at a
minimum. Do this effectively and you’ll be able to
generate income steadily ad infinitum!

In my humble opinion, the above equation summarizes the essence of Internet Marketing. No matter what product you sell, whether as an affiliate or a product owner. If you get the above equation correct, you are going to laugh all the way to the bank. Traffic + Conversion = Profits.  We all know what traffic is. In internet marketing parlance,Traffic refers to targeted visitors to your website. Note that that I said ‘targeted’. Not just any traffic, but targeted, that is the most profitable kind of Traffic you can have. Imagine that you are selling wedding favors on your website, and you got a whole lot of traffic from a forum of celibate priests, how is that going to benefit you. You are going to get exactly 0 sales or signups from that traffic. Now imagine again that you get 100 visitors from a forum that discusses what to give to people who are getting married. What do you think are the chances of selling to this second set of visitors? 20%?, 50%.  You see what I mean, Targeted Traffic is to a commercial website what fertilizer is to crops. To a large extent, the more Targeted Traffic you get the more sales you make.

Now to the second part of the equation above: Conversion. Conversion is the ability (of your copy) to convert visitors to action-takers. You would have thought I would say that conversion is the ability to convert visitors to buyers. That will be a narrow definition of conversion. Not every webpage is designed for the customer to buy. For example, on a “squeeze page”, your goal is to make the visitor give their particulars such as name and e-mail address. In such a situation, if you are able to obtain such information, you have “converted” the visitor. Of course on a salespage, your intention is to get the customer to buy. But we all know, that a majority of customers don’t buy on their first visit. That is why we want to obtain their information so that we can have the ability to sell to them at a later time. So whatever you do on your website to successfully get the visitor to take a desired action is conversion.

You can see that when you are able to successfully combine (targeted) Traffic and Conversion together, you obtain a very desirable end-result, Profits.  You will agree with me that is one of the reasons most of us are doing all this ’stuff’ online. To make a profit, and a good one at that!