Do I HAVE to be an authority to develop another income stream?

I think that's the appeal of kindle books. You can appear an authority, just sell books, don't have to manage/build list.

Yes, I know many authors who are doing very well for themselves on Amazon.

I've worked with two best selling authors who didn't have a list.

And there are many others who don't even have websites, email lists, coaching or speak at seminars.

The world's a big place and people are thriving in all kinds of ways.

Authors survived plenty fine before the interwebz and before list building. You'd just make more money with one, but you already know that.

I've been there too..back when I didn't really have a clue what I was doing, I hit my first $1,000 day without a list or affiliates - just a simple product. So yes, you can make good money from just product sales.

Adsense Sites are still a viable way to develop a stream. Not like it was in 2009 but still an option.

But this guy...is he for real? If it worked, I've got the money to test. But this goes against everything I've read on this forum.

Interested to see what path(s) you decide on with the various ideas being offered here. (Burned myself out trying to go the authority route a few years back. Don't ever want to go there again.)

I posted this the other day in the Ad network section, when someone asked how to make money with CPA marketing. It's not for everyone, but at least it's not a bunch of BS or theory.

I have been promoting CPA offers for over 16 years. I do thing s a bit differently than most.

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, in order to generate a commission. So conversion rates are typically much higher than offers that require a purchase.

I favor PPL offers that have a make, get or save money angle / benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best for me. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal, so the potential exists to generate high volume. I also promote offers like free signups (dating for example) and free trials + s&h (weight loss, ecig, etc...) and a small amount of offers that are purchases.

Regardless what I run, I always look for broad mass appeal to exists, so it is likely to appeal to a very large audience. That way the potential exists to generate conversion, even with lesser targeted traffic and so that it is not hard to cross promote offers. If someone is interested in saving money with X, they could very possibly be interested in saving money on Y.

There are many offers that pay $20-$60 per lead (there are offers that pay more/less, depending on the vertical) that work well on a front-end campaign. I find my sweet spot to be offers that are in the $20-$40 range and then I typically run the other on the back-end.

However, price isn't the most important factor. You also have to consider the conversion rate. You can have an offer that pays $9 and it could convert at 2X or higher than a $20 offer. So the $9 offer could make just as much money or possibly better, than the $20 offer. At the same time, you could have a $90 offer and if it converts poorly, it may not even be worth running.

All the traffic that I generate, I do it through purchasing data (email). This is because I'm building assets that I then own and can market to over and over at low cost. Compared to what most marketers do, which is to pay for traffic that often just ends up producing a bunch of clicks that convert poorly or use some free traffic method that fails to deliver and wasn't even worth the time spent on it.

I buy fresh targeted data, in that I know what the users are interested in and that a PPL offer exists that matches their inters.

I generate real-time co-reg, that promotes specific PPL offers.

I acquire aged data, however, this is a bit more complex and requires additional tools / resources to do profitably.

Last but not least, I get rev-share data. Which is data that I get from list owners at $0 upfront cost and then I split the revenue generated from it with them.

One thing you do have to keep in mind with purchased data, is that it rarely will be as responsive as a high targeted opt-in list you build. So to compensate for it, you have to work with higher volume. This really isn't an issue, as you can buy data much quicker and cheap, than you could ever build a list.

The real key to making this work, is you always want to be collecting your open / clickers and segmenting the data and removing the unresponsive users. that way you will be building smaller, but very responsive lists. That way you will eventually be sending less / making more with each mailing.

In the end, really what I'm doing is monetizing data, using PPL offers that have mass appeal. Because they offer the path of least resistance to generating conversions and converting the data into cash producing assets.

Obviously there is more to it, but it really does work. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, does 6-7 figures. While that is a huge range, much comes down to ones ability to scale and then effective manage the infrastructure that comes with scaling.

Anyway, something to think about.

You dont want to handle customer support?

Be an affiliate. Easy.