[Journal] From Six Figures to Seven Figures

Journal Contents

Post One - Introduction
Post Two - CASE STUDY: AQWF, Landing page
Post Three - Access to 16 Million Leads for Offline Clients


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Post 1

I've been working online since 2004. Not just playing around with things, but making a living since 2004. I see a lot of journals from beginners. These journals are great because it's like a fan base that you don't want to disappoint. You make a public message that you want to adhere to. Thus, I thought I would make a public message, display what my goal is, and document how I achieve it.

I want to go from six figures to seven figures, and I want to do it in one year.

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What I Do....

Naturally like most Internet Marketers in the early stages of my career I had ADHD. Jumping from thing to thing. While everyone tells you to fix that, and that focus is the way to success. I decided not to fight it, and instead to build upon it. All my ideas are good, well, of course they're some stupid ones. However, everything I wanted to jump to had obvious reasons to be successful. So... since I'm only one person... I found others, and built a team that gets whats needed to be done.

We have a portfolio of niche sites monetized through AdSense and Affiliate Programs
We have a portfolio of our own information products
We have a web design/seo firm


Who is We? We is my partner, a team of writers, about 3-5 designers (depending on work), and joint ventures.

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What we are doing?

Right now we are building a lot of our own offers and products. Using media buys and paid traffic we market our own offers. We are building authority websites, these are larger sites then the typical micro niche website. They are not exact match and instead we build a brand around the site. Say the site was going to be on skateboards, we would do www.findskateboards.com. They have about 15k-30k words on them, and optimized for 100's of keywords, short and long.

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What to expect from this Journal

You'll learn about the typical week to week operations, offers we make, and strategies we use. Obviously not them all They will be presented to you as case studies. Ask questions, and I'll try to answer them the best I can.



CASE STUDY: AQWF

We have a product that we affiliate for that produces around $2,000-$7,000 a month. There is such a spread because when we are in the first position for a competitive keyword we can be looking at a $7,000 month. However, after panda and penguin we float around the 6th position on that big keyword. Our long tail traffic saves some of the traffic, but it nearly triples in #1. In Jan, it made $7,800.... right now it's making around $3,000. It's horrible. The product ranges from $1,000-$2,500 and we receive a 30% commission. To the general public you can only get up to 10% commission, however, because of the results we have had in the past we have been grandfathered into higher percentages.

We are building a campaign to push this product as we know it converts and pays well. We operate our business with this equation:

TT+RO=$$

Targeted Traffic + Right Offer = Money Signs

Most of the time people forget one of these elements either they have T+RO which is just traffic and the right offer, or they have TT+O which is targeted traffic + offer, not the right one. We have found the best ways to get targeted traffic is to manufacture it yourself. The problem is, with so much going on with the Internet now and people becoming more aware you need to build a better trust with them as a user.

To build the targeted traffic we use this equation. T+T=TT

Landing Page (Target) + Media Buy (Traffic) = Targeted Traffic. Then send that Targeted Traffic to the right offer.

For this Case Study, I'm going to show you:

- The Landing Page and Funnel
- The Banner Ads
- The Results
- The Profits

stay tuned...



Hope you enjoyed this.

Gl bro!

Awesome thread, love the idea of a journal about taking it to the next level. Are you currently six figures in revenue or six figures in profit?

Very good info. Would love to read your experiences.

Can you share us your knowledge on mediabuys?
Where to buy from?
How to go about it?
Average going rate?

What type of products to target using Media buys..

tx

RightinTwo,

Six Figures in Revenue, but minus the expenses and we would still be six figures

oblivion19,

You'll learn all that knowledge as I proceed with the Journal. MediaBuys are risky for beginners, but you can play around in some networks and traffic sources that would require less then $100 to get started. I don't work with Google Adwords as I like to know my traffic sources. We do direct buys which is one business, and network buys which is something completely different. You'll learn both throughout my journey.

We pay rates anywhere from $.05 - $2.00+ CPMs, the real question is how to get the high CTR on your creatives and a high CTR on your website.

Did it help to have alot of start of cash when you first started out in internet marketing?

I started Internet Marketing in 2004, with $2,000 in my checking account in college. I knew how to design websites with basic HTML and stylesheets, and started by offering some web design to some businesses around the area in my school. I used my schools entrepreneurship program as a way to get in connection with some businesses that could use affordable design. I did a handful of jobs at around $300-$500 a piece. By the end I earned a little over $8,000. At this point I completely lost interest in engineering and started to look to craigslist for more jobs. It was my clients who introduced me to Internet Marketing. It was a customer who wanted me to build him a mini site and banners for google Adwords. At the time, back still in 03' I didn't even know what adwords was, this introduced me to the world of IM.

I dropped out of school (finished a couple years later)... took a lot of lectures from my parents, but I managed to make around $25,000 in my 6 months doing the web design getting clients through friends, online, cold calls, etc. So, the lectures were weak with what they were trying to present.

Within a few months I was getting burnt out and spent most of my money... then I learned SEO

Subscribed!!! I am going to keep an eye on your thread I love these Journals. I will be following you daily.

Thanks in advance. Rep Added.

wasted said:

oblivion19,

You'll learn all that knowledge as I proceed with the Journal. MediaBuys are risky for beginners, but you can play around in some networks and traffic sources that would require less then $100 to get started. I don't work with Google Adwords as I like to know my traffic sources. We do direct buys which is one business, and network buys which is something completely different. You'll learn both throughout my journey.

We pay rates anywhere from $.05 - $2.00+ CPMs, the real question is how to get the high CTR on your creatives and a high CTR on your website.

Click to expand...

Ok. This is turning out to be a really infomercial thread. Usually, when the big guys start a thread like this, they ignore many questions coz they are so many of them. Glad to see that you are answering and hope that you continue to do so.
I think it may be a good idea to write in your opening post that you dont want any PM's (or if you are open to communication) coz u r gonna be bombarded with questions and requests in your inbox.

Back to topic.I'm very carefully following your posts since I want to get in to media buying. But, looking at your posts, it would be silly of me to start experimenting with media buys with no background knowledge and a low budget of $1-2k

.
Also, I have a product launch coming up. It's in the health niche and gonna be on click bank. Im gonna go all out on adwords for this. Should I even think abt mediabuys? Any tips to get affiliates? Any other tips?

Tx

Thanks for your comments. I'll do my best to answer questions in the thread.

It would be silly of me to start experimenting with media buys with no background knowledge and a low budget of $1-2k

This is a fine budget, in most cases I'll use about $200 in testing to optimize a campaign. This $200 should be able to tell me all the important metrics to a media buy campaign, understanding what hours are best to run the offer, what placements on websites, and the best ads to use. The testing will allow you to fine tune a campaign to cost you $.01-$.35 CPC, a lot less then you would get over at Google Adwords.

Adwords is more targeted because people are specifically searching a keyword. To equate my media traffic to search traffic I'll send it through a funnel using a squeeze page. With some networks you can utilize contextual targeting, so say you wanted to advertise on a very large publication like entrepreneur.com you can target specific keyword areas. Example) franchise information

Another thing about Adwords is all the problems and guidelines Google can cause with a campaign. As well as their quality score rating. With Media Buys you don't need to worry about Google's guidelines, just the publishers. Thus, you can get craftier with your advertising...

I use Media Buying also based on volume... with Adwords your scalability is limited by the keyword search volume. .

Pretty much doing what I've been aiming for.. GL

Post Two - CASE STUDY: AQWF, Landing Page


Today, we are working on the funnel described in Post One. Our high end product funnel. Over the years we have honed a demographic for our offer and we are preparing to find traffic sources that we can advertise on using banner ads (media buying) and send them through a squeeze page that will build a list that we can now hone them into our customer.

The product we are pushing is a water filtration system. It sells for $1,000-$2,500.

To build a list we are going to attempt a few different angles, in different markets. The first angle we are attacking is our straight demographic. Wish happens to be an educated, pretty affluent, and older demographic. We are going to advertise on a handful of political websites.

Right now, I'm working on the sales page and banner ads. The idea here is to create some shock value to our viewer. The way we are doing it is be advertising a banner as that looks like this:



We are using a basic optimizepress landing page. We will be showing a video of this investigation, and using shock value to get them to sign up.

Very interesting to me. Media buys are something that I have always had an interest in but never had any experience. Subscribed!

this is really gonna be awesome to see a journal from a bigger player on the scene.great stuff defintely looking forward to the responses and yes don't reveal to much.

Subscribed! Very nice journal. Shall be very interesting and a great learning experience. Please keep posting

Now this is what I really call a case study.

I usually don't follow case studies but I am tempted to follow this one.

Since I do SEO and do it all the day lol - I would like to know some thing from your mouth regarding it.

Wish I would have started SEO in 2003 - it was soo easy that time but now - duh!

anyways, cheers

Subscribed. This is going to be one of the most interesting journal of BHW for sure. Good luck

Awesome thread, subscribed! keep going

Post Three - Access to 16 Million Leads for Offline Clients

This is one of the greatest tips ever given to me. In the early stages of scaling up our web design firm we used to approach companies such as www.salesgenie.com and/or infousa.com. I use to buy lists of leads based on demographics, criteria, etc.

Then one day I met for drinks with a colleague and he seemed drained, I asked him why, and he said because he has been sitting at the library for 8 hours getting leads. I was confused by his statement and when I further investigated I learned...

InfoGroup is apart of InfoUSA. InfoUSA gets their leads from InfoGroup, and InfoGroup owns ReferenceUSA.

ReferenceUSA is a database of 16 Million businesses, 680,000 new businesses, 8 Million Consumers, etc, etc you can sort by category, type, keywords, income, size, if they have a website or not, etc, etc. ReferenceUSA is freely available to anyone through the use of a Public Library.

We get our leads, sort them, then do due diligence on the list to take out bad leads, and then put them through our sales process. They also have an Ipad App which is useful when you receive a prosective clients information and you want to learn about their business, and most importantly how much cash flow they have.... it becomes very useful when pricing your services.