Share your success story?

Suggestion: Mods make a sticky post called "Share Your Success Story / How Did You Make Your First ____ Dollar(s)?"

Every time one of these threads gets started, just roll it into that one. It'll be an absolute mess but at least there won't be hundreds of these threads floating around.

Or just delete them as they come up. We already know exactly what this topic is going to look like in a couple of hours.

Over a year ago the OP posted

Maybe YOU should be the first one to answer those questions...

We not only know what the topic will look like - could probably name 90% of those who will offer advice(s) in it.

I have fun doing what I do. And live a boring life because I have fun doing what I do

Really...what is success? (goading here

Started with Kindle publishing,

Quit my job and started doing this full time...

Then I started doing affiliate marketing, blogging, E-commerce.

Now I have multiple income streams and I love it.

No we don't.

"Clone your success" suggests to me, at least, that you are unwilling to find your own path to a profitable business ... and if that is the case, Internet Marketing is not the career for you.

Why? Every business owner is different and unique. Each one brings varying amounts of skill, knowledge, ability, past experience, resources (time and money), tenacity, and drive to the table.

Most successful and profitable businesses are created by people that optimize and take advantage of their own circumstances and assets to create a business that works specifically for them. Their business "fits" them and their own personality, persona, and ability to lead a group of followers.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with getting inspiration from someone who is running a great business. But when you ask for specifics like "how much they pay per lead," "what traffic sources they use," and "how much traffic they get" - you are begging for details that are meaningless for your business.

You don't even know what niche they are in! You have no idea what kind of a marketing budget they employ, what kind of a following they have, or the manpower it takes to run their business. Getting answers to the specific questions you're asking isn't going to be applicable to a new business that you set up.

Besides, most credible and long-term business owners aren't going to share the inner workings of their successful business on a public forum. They have worked too long and hard to get where they are to divulge the specifics you're asking in your request. Most such owners are understanding of your newbie curiosity and they will share their own story ... but do you thing they really want people cloning what they are doing to make their living?

Just my opinion,

Steve

I monetize 3rd party data mainly using PPL offers. Been doing it for over 16 years and have been extremely successful at it. Below is the short of the long.

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals (niches) I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. You don't want to get too caught up on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same or possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

Bottom line: it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

I drive traffic by acquiring 3rd party email data, which is data that the users have shown an interest in a specific vertical(niche) and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record for every user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

By acquiring data, I'm building assets that I then own and can market to over and over at very low cost. So I control and can drive traffic on-demand to the offers I'm promoting. Which is key to CPA / affiliate marketing success. However, 3rd party data will rarely be as responsive as a high-quality opt-in list you build yourself. But it really doesn't matter because it is much cheaper and highly scalable compared to convention list building.

You don't want to just buy data blindly and you want to get it from reputable sources. You should always test a small, but adequate size sample and see how it performs. Then based on your test you will have a much better idea how quickly it will take to get break-even and what it is really worth to you.

The key to making it work long term is to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting, and removing unresponsive users. That way over time you are building smaller, but more responsive lists that you should eventually be able to send less and make more with each mailing. Essentially you are converting the data from quantity to quality.

Basically, I monetize the data using PPL offers because they offer the path of least resistance to generating conversions($$$) and converting the data into cash producing assets. So it's really been the combination of the two PPL and data acquisition that has worked so well for me.

Fresh / targeted 3rd party data is widely available for PPL verticals because they have mass appeal and a lot of data is generated on a daily basis for them. Where small niches or ones that are mainly driven by sales, for the most part, are more difficult to find if they even exist.

Obviously, there is more to it, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes down to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

Something to think about.

True Story. Started out as a dishwasher in some hotel a few years ago
Got upgraded to cold foods chef
Was always interested in business. Started attending networking events
Met people that helped me travel around the world
Worked in Menlo Park (in Silicon Valley) between 2012 and 2013
Became interested in 'online stuff'. Learnt everything I could
Moved to Africa
Started a Fiverr type website called FiveSok that targets young people. Makes money by charging a commision from transactions. Has 50k members
Started a couple blogging sites. Traffic ranges from around 1k p/m all th way to over 200k p/m
Main traffic channels are social media, forums and SEO
Largely make money from advertising.

I started out being an affiliate for major health products. When I realised there was more money to be made, I then went on to creating my own products

After many years of searching and research I am down to building shops with Shopify.

I found the directory site that finds the business who works with small online entrepreneurs and I found the method make it work.

Research, product and method.

Finding the right product for you is not difficult once you know where.

Having the strategy for success building a shop form ground up is awesome and that is what you want to clone.

Due to forum rules I can't link but World wide brands for products and Andrew Minalto for method

So right now the traffic is social media mainly: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Goggle plus while Google and Bing are indexing the shop.

Google says currently: 68 countries world wide my shop is showing up for and I am just on the first keyword to rank for.

Its growing slowly every day. The products I sell are expensive and brand needs awareness for the passion to work and fans become buyers.

But I am now looking into building the next shop with much lighter products and will try paid ads on it but the main strategy is always the method by Andrew.

Every day at noon, my dog and I wonder down to Main St (after the pan handling lol) and hold up a sign that says...Entrepreneurs Wanted!

We have crossed over the $1,000,000,000 mark doing this easy to duplicate method of traffic getting.

Dog will be an asset.

You have my permission to clone this strategy.

I make money with blogging, affiliate marketing, and Google Adsense. I have a site of 2 years old and now I am making a good amount of money from this site.