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Alannah Moore
"Hey" "Guru Name Here"
You suddenly lose all your money, along with your name and reputation, and only have your marketing know-how left.
You have bills piled high and people harassing you for money over the phone.
Plus, you have a guaranteed roof over your head, a phone line, and an internet connection for only one month.
You no longer have your big guru name or JV partners. Other than your vast marketing experience, you're an unknown newbie.
What would you do, from day 1 to day 30, to save yourself?
Joe Kumar
Answer: By Alannah Moore
Joe’s 30 day proposition made me scratch my head a bit, as two of the major ways I make money on the web and would normally be very confident about, are not suitable for this scenario, as they would need more than 30 days to bring good results that would get me out of my financial hole once and for all.
However it suddenly dawned on me that the strategy I could use to save myself was actually something I had already tried out, and got surprisingly successful results from, so I knew I had found my answer, which is in fact quite a simple one.
What I would need to do in the imaginary emergency situation would be buy myself some time, and once I had secured my next month's rent and enough money for the necessities of life, would turn to the longer-term strategy and put into practice those methods I know will bring me increasing rewards.
I'll now turn to the 30-day plan which will save me from getting kicked out on the street, and then go on and describe what I'd do after that time to increase my revenues in the long term.
As I said, what I would do given this desperate situation is actually something I have done before that was really only a bit of an experiment, but one I found to be rather more effective than I had imagined.
A couple of months ago while changing over the focus of what was then my primarily website at http://www.ideasbypost.com, I found the site was not serving any great purpose while I had my hands totally full preparing my next venture, so, as it got a fair bit of traffic, I decided to put it to some temporary use by purchasing a ClickBank storefront and putting it up on the site. This was really just to see how effective this could be, but I didn't spend much time doing any extra promotion as I was too tied up with other things. The result was completely unexpected - it generated me hundreds of easy dollars in ClickBank commissions over just two weeks that I really didn't have to try too hard to get!
So having already given this system a spin I am fairly confident this would be an effective way to get myself up and running and out of my desperate straits...
Here's what I would do to get this going if I had no website with visiting traffic already in place (which I had when I ran my test).
Day 1
Step 1
Buy myself a ClickBank storefront.
I am going to need to get my skates on, if I am going to receive a nice affiliate cheque at the end of 30 days, because ClickBank send their affiliate cheques out two weeks after the end of each 14 day time span, which means that it will be the results of my first two weeks of work that I will be receiving in a month's time.
No matter, I will work quickly to get my system running, and a nice cheque in 30 days' time is well within my reach.
The ClickBank storefront I personally used for my "experiment" with such success is 1st Promotion, which costs $49 for a year. (During my experiment it was on the main home page.)
There are several other storefronts around as well as this one - but I am going to stick with this one for my 30 day sink-or-swim strategy as I am more than happy with the results I've achieved with it.
Step 2
Buy myself a domain name and some inexpensive hosting. There are plenty of companies around that offer hosting and a domain name for under $25 a year. I'll get one of these.
1st Promotion DOES offer you hosting too, all included, for your storefront, so you do not NEED a domain and site of your own. BUT, if you do get your own site, you can use pop-unders on your site and this will increase your income, as I found.
Step 3
I will set up the site as follows.
Make an invisible frame that makes it look as if the storefront is residing on my site.
Add as a pop-under to this main index page one of the top-selling products of the moment, sold through ClickBank. (Easy to find out what's going well: just look at the top selling products for each category in the ClickBank marketplace and choose one you like, or see what's new by looking at the solo ads you receive yourself.
As it happens, the page I initially used as a pop-under under my own storefront was the first volume of this book, and I made quite a number of affiliate sales this way.)
This pop-under page will be set up to be a page on my site (such as http://www.mysite.com/product.html), again with an invisible frame so that my ClickBank hoplink to this product is concealed. (All this is very easy to do. A newbie can create these 'invisible frames' as long as he or she can get access to their web page HTML and paste in the required code. You can go to http://www.ideasbypost.com/storefront.html and crib the code from there if you want to try out an invisible frame but don't know how to make one.)
I will also set my storefront to have an automatic pop-up - it offers this facility, you just need to log in to the storefront members' area and check a box - and the page I will set to pop up is the affiliate link for other people to purchase a similar storefront. (In this case, you do not need to conceal the affiliate link by creating an invisible frame as the pop-up comes up with no toolbar or address bar.)
(I have found that it works well, making a pop-up of the page where you buy your own storefront. People who click onto the storefront often seem to think it's a good idea and want to purchase one for themselves. Again, I have made quite a number of affiliate sales of the storefront this way.)
I KNOW that these tactics will work, as this is exactly what I did on my site for my 2 week trial period. I found myself getting sales from all kinds of products every single day that people had searched for from my storefront - products I had never even heard of myself - as well as the products that I had been promoting as pop-unders underneath the storefront, and affiliate sales of the storefront itself.
What I am also going to do in my 30 day scenario is set up some other pages on my site with invisible frames for other hot-selling ClickBank products.
(These pages won't be accessible from the home page of the site. All that will be on the home page will be the storefront, exactly as it stands. People will be visiting the other product pages from my promotion of those URLs.)
For these 'product' pages I will set up my ClickBank storefront as a pop-under. That way some people will stray onto that and have a browse, and a percentage of these visitors will end up making purchases.
There are 3 big advantages of promoting pages on your site rather than simply a ClickBank link.
1. People are much more likely to click on a 'real' page URL rather than a hoplink.
2. People are very inclined to change your hoplink to theirs if they get to see it - you can disguise your hoplink using a click tracker but that doesn't help you with 3:
3. If you can use your own page, you can add a pop-under.
Obviously I am going to take advantage of these benefits since I am in desperate straits, which is why I’ve decided it’s worth purchasing a domain and a web site despite the extra cost.
I also want to point out that although I have not worked these other possibilities, there are other tools provided by 1st Promotion that can be used to generate additional revenue. In a 30 day scenario I would also upload their brandible ClickBank desktop search tool and any other suitable tools they offer, and put them up for free download by my visitors using a pop-up from some of my other product pages.
I am now going to need to work out how best to promote the storefront and the other pages. You actually get some built-in traffic with your 1st Promotion storefront, but I am going to need more than that, to ensure I make a substantial number of sales from my storefront.
Day 2
For a new domain name, it can sometimes take a couple of days for the site you have set up to actually appear under the new domain name. Should this be the case I will not worry, as I can put these couple of days to good use researching the best ways of promoting my storefront and sort out which various other ClickBank products I am also going to promote, get my ads ready, etc.
What I am going to be promoting is:
i) the storefront - getting visitors there who will browse and buy, and also while they are there they will be exposed to the pop-under product and the idea of getting a similar storefront for themselves.
ii) my choice of individual products, and while the visitors are on those pages, they will also be exposed to my ClickBank storefront and again the possibility of getting a similar storefront for themselves.
I will be promoting these pages in 3 ways:
1. Via two of my favourite safelists.
I used to use safelists and get good results from them, but this has got less and less effective, I have found. These two I still get results from:
Herculist
Business World List
I am actually a member of both these lists for the rest of the year but since I have to start from scratch, membership costs $14.95 per month for Herculist (Gold membership) and $12 monthly for Business World List (Pro Membership). Once I have paid for my membership I can mail out every day and every second day respectively, so incur no further costs until the second month. At which point if I can afford it, I will purchase the yearly membership and thus make a long-term saving.
2. PPC search engines
I did not use these when I tested out the storefront as I already had a certain amount of traffic to my site, but since I am now starting from the beginning, I will need to get some traffic as quickly as I can. Minimum deposit will be $25, and I will find a suitable PPC search engine by doing a Google search. Like the domain name, it may take a couple of days to get this up and running, so I will get going as soon as possible.
3. Ezines
In my 2 week test period for this system I only mailed to my own ezine list but having no list in this scenario, I will have to purchase solo mailings from several ezines to get my ads out and about. Some ezines get booked up so I will get these underway immediately to get them sent out as soon as possible.
If I can afford it I will purchase an ad from Killer Ad whose solos I have found effective in the past - they cost $44.95. But if I cannot stretch to this I will have to find some cheaper options. I'll look at a directory such as http://www.ezinelocater.com/ to compare prices.
Day 3 and on...
As soon as my site is up on my domain, I will start sending ads to the safelists every day, and I will rotate ads for the storefront with ads for the various products I have chosen to promote directly.
Ads for the storefront are provided by 1st Promotion and I will give my URL as the reference URL - meaning people will actually visit the storefront as well as getting information about purchasing a storefront for themselves.
I will also be using my URL with the storefront itself for the PPC.
Ezine ads will go out as scheduled during the 30 days according to what I can stretch to. In the ezines I will probably advertise only the storefront (as provided by 1st Promotion) as when people click on my site's URL they will get taken to the storefront AND get info about getting their own storefront (as well as being exposed to the product on the pop-under).
Conclusion
As I found through my own experiment, following this strategy WILL generate me a nice affiliate cheque at the end of my crucial thirty days, and another one every two weeks after that, if I keep up my promotion strategy, which of course I plan to do.
Month 2 and beyond
Now that I have bought myself some time I will turn to my long-term strategy.
One of the beauties of Internet business is the multiplication principle, and although using the ClickBank storefront as described HAS got me out of my black hole, it does not exploit the real possibilities of internet business.
So now I am out of my financial hole with a roof over my head and food in the cupboards, I will look at what kind of product I can create for myself, and set up an affiliate programme for, so that dozens of people can promote my product, just as I have been doing for other people's products.
Personally speaking, as this is my own plan I have been asked to outline, I will create a series of ebooks to follow on from The Totally Virtual Entrepreneur. But other people may well look at creating software, or some other product that can be sold over and over again.
Of course an ebook CAN be created in a shorter amount of time than 30 days, but knowing from experience that it can take longer than one plans - once one has written the book, formatted it, set up the sales page, test-driven the affiliate programme, etc, etc, - since in this scenario I am absolutely relying on having cash IN the bank in 30 days' time, I would prefer to defer this to the second month when I have more time to reflect and create a really good product.
In any case, if I was going to use ClickBank to sell the ebook, I would in effect only have two weeks to prepare my ebook if I were going to receive the payment before the end of the 30 days, since they take 2 weeks after the end of each two week period to send out their cheques. This is just too close for comfort if I am about to lose my home!
The second strategy I would set to work on in my second month, once I had got myself out of my financial hole, would be to begin accruing myself an income through HYIP pools like 5th Element. This is something that after quite a bit of trial and error I have now achieved. Like many, I have had my fingers burned, and at first lost more than I made.
However I have found that by adhering to a strict set of self-imposed rules, only reinvesting my profits once I had had my principle back, never putting all my eggs in one basket, and not getting greedy - rather than trying to get great results immediately, taking, say, a year to build my income - this has been a very fruitful path to go down. Never one to embark on in a state of emergency, however, it is just too risky.
This article is supplied for information purposes only and, as experienced in this subject matter as the contributors are, the material herein does not constitute professional business advice.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher and the contributors are not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice. If legal advice or other professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
The reader is advised to consult with an appropriately qualified business professional before making any business decision. The contributors, Joe Kumar and JoeKumar.com do not accept any responsibility for any liabilities resulting from the business decisions made by readers of this article.
copyright © Joe Kumar and JoeKumar.com
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