Desperately Seeking IM-Profits!

Hey! Well, thanks for putting me on the spot!

Firstly, sorry if my response seemed a little pompous or arrogant. I realise, having just read it back to myself, that it could be perceived as if I was being so - but that absolutely isn't the case or intention.

I was merely surprised that after all you've done, all you've tried, all the people you've asked for help, and all the money you've invested, you weren't able to turn a profit yet. And it ("internet marketing") so clearly can be profitable; you only have to look around to see that.

I was actually only referring to your background as far as your online money-making endeavours!

I just wanted to get an idea of what sort of business models you've tried, so I and others could perhaps begin to unravel, after a few more posts back-and-forth, where you've been stumbling or going wrong.

(Alright, enough of the quotes - they get confusing, lol).

I don't know what sort of lifestyle and income you're used to (and therefore what sort of "baseline" online income figure you have in mind in order to consider anything you do to be worthwhile, or what not), so perhaps we'll approach this discussion with your stated goal of at least $1,000 USD profit per month in mind.

Anyway, here's the issue, as I see it.

Making money online, through methods or business models that may come under the seemingly all-encompassing term of "internet marketing", isn't really hard.

Unfortunately, there are "gurus", mentors, and other misinformed people who perpetuate a lot of myths and inadvertently (or sometimes even intentionally) make things out to be harder or more complex than (or, conversely, sometimes easier than, or just different to) how they really are.

If you think about it from a mentor/guru perspective, it's not too much of a stretch to believe that some might have a conscious motive (of a financial nature, of course) to lead newbies/students/customers astray a bit. After all, if they can just keep enough motivation, hope and optimism instilled within you, and yet ensure you're never quite successful enough to pass beyond the point of frustration, you will keep on paying their mentoring fees, buying their ebooks/software or remaining subscribed to their courses and programs, and so on.

You've obviously tried a lot of different stuff, and that means you've had to jump around and shift your focus from one thing to another - perhaps prematurely, before you've really had a chance to nail down a particular business model, and to begin really driving a profit.

But maybe you're just expecting potential revenues from any endeavour to be so huge that you're splashing dollar bills around willy-nilly in large numbers, and destined never to make a reasonable profit for that reason. I don't know.

So forget all of it.

You've forked out, you've tried, and so far you've not been able to call any of it worthwhile, it seems.

At least not as far as your bottom line is concerned.

Right now you really need to be picking a model that is proven to work, and allows for a degree of flexibility, and doesn't necessarily take a whole lot of financial investment up-front.

A lot of people here are successful with e-product affiliate marketing - especially through Clickbank. This is something I'm just getting into myself (as mentioned in my previous response, in that other thread).

There is no doubt good money can be made there. But whether you have the potential to churn a profit in anything but the longer-term (if at all) depends, I think, on how much of the work you're prepared to do yourself, or how smart you allocate and limit your outgoings to those who may be doing the work for you.

Before anyone can really give you any specific advice, though, you really need to pick a model. Whether it's one you've tried before or not. Then hopefully someone with experience of that model can begin to identify, via a process of elimination (as best as can be done, anyway), just where you might've gone wrong.

But that cannot even begin to happen until you decide what specific model you want to make work for you.

Whether you respond or don't, just don't be dismayed into believing that the only way anyone here makes any money is by teaching others how to make money, as you insinuated - nay; as you outright expressed - in the other thread.

Not only are people making a few thousand a month, but they are also making a thousand a day. Be it affiliate marketing, product creation or membership sites.

Infact, some are making high 4 figures, 5 figures and even high 5 figures a day, in the tune of 80 k a day doing CPA offers.

But those are huge campaigns. i.e using several methods on a large scale such as PPC for example.

Unless people actually see the efforts you put in and can analyze your work then we wont be able to help.


For example like above, you could have left prematurely and attempted too many different things. You may have chosen a topic that just doesnt make money or you may have gone about that topic the wrong way.

But if you really want some good help, or to be critized on what you may have done wrong, just show people your e-books, links to your articles, blogs and websites.

Even though it may gives things away for free, people will be able to see the actual effort you have put in or what you did wrong.

Apart from that, people can tell you what to do, and tell you how its done, but very few will actually tell you what niche to go for, what keywords to go for and write your copy for you.

How much help you get is dependant on how much you are willing to show past being given methods.

*EDIT* oh and very few people will do the above of helping you with niches and keywords etc because its just more competition for them.

I think right now it would be fine to do so, as it has been suggested by another party (me) rather than from yourself, so clearly not promoting them.

But so you aren't posting them blindly without knowing how it could help I will explain it a little.

Interms of websites, we can check the backlinks, age of domain, and overal look around the website for keyword usage and detail on making better conversions plus using well placed and relevant offers or opt-in forms.

Interms of articles I suppose someone who is better at copy could explain to you if what you've written seems good enough to make sales or to get people to click through.

So overall provided you can also give over some stats such as your article stats, which makes me wonder, have you had a look at your article stats at all?

Such as how many views they've had, and how many have actually clicked through.

Same with other platforms such as blogger.

And I don't think you need to show us your ebooks, I just mentioned it accidently, as the problem is noone has purchased them... not that there's a problem with them.

Ok so I'll start it off, I'm guessing this is one of your sites?

Settlement Loan - Apply Online for Your Lawsuit Loan and Lawsuit Pre Settlement Loans

I'm guessing the term you're trying to rank for is in the domain right?

You've got 2 k backlinks I see so you've been busy with it, and it says created on the 14th of november and it ends on the 13th of november 2013.

What other terms are you trying to rank for?

Also I ran it through a proxy and looked at the term legal settlement loans and you rank first.

But then I headed over to adwords and set it to all countries then put an exact match on this term, and less than 500 people search this term monthly.

So it would be good to know what other terms you are targetting.

But in terms of your primary keyword, that is a very low search.

Unless you're trying to rank for settlement loan in which case you've not done enough to rank at the top.

I also think your site is cluttered with too many ads, all of which link back to your own website? I reckon you find a more efficient way of getting your visitors to get to your application page.

It doesn't help that you have got both those ads and adsense on your site.

And the placement of your adsense isn't all that great either. You've got a block adsense within the text that makes it look uneven, and one at the bottom which most people are unlikely to look at.

And also in your navigation, rather than call it home, your home page hyper link is called settlement loan which although may not affect many, might just cause a few visitors to leave.

So I think interms of that your navigation should be a bit clearer.

Apart from that, I see you only have one other domain.

Hope some of that starts helping.

This is probably your primary problem. Not enough traffic. But I would think that site is making something from adsense.

On a positive note... I searched google for Legal Settlement Loans and your site was #1 so you've figured out how to rank a site.

What do you do next? Either try to get that site ranking for more keywords (which might not be worth the effort) or move on to a new site and keywords that bring in more traffic.

I'm guessing your PPC costs were awfully steep, since you're competing with physical therapists and chiropractors who can recoup their costs through office visits billed to insurance.

I don't see a very large market for this one at all.

I find this odd, since to my memory, Kevin's program was inexpensive and required little investment to operate. I didn't do much with it myself, but it certainly didn't seem like a money sink... it just seemed overly labour-intensive.

In the legal and medical niches, lifetime customer value is massive if you have an actual office.

You are simply not going to be able to compete with them in the market when your customer value is $17 less PayPal fees. They'll outbid you every time.

It strikes me that you could turn your medical office management system into a training program that you market to local doctors. As their practices grow, they'll need managers, and if you have this waving flag in front of them that says "train your new managers for $1,500" that's a drop in the bucket when you're hiring a $45k employee. You can also position yourself as a high-dollar consultant to doctors that want to start their own private practices.

But $17 ebooks? Not in these niches. It's just not high-dollar enough unless you can promote VERY cheaply.

Don't have time to look at it just yet but I will do tonight and give my opinions.

For starters though your articles received very few views, not even enough to tell whether they would convert.

Either because they don't rank, or the terms just don't get searches.

I'll post later hopefully! if not tomorrow, but I'll definately look at it later.

Probably one of the most interesting threads I have read in a while. Obviously we have all had a problem starting out but it looks like you had it real bad. In reply to your sqiudoo section, I use hubpages to make about $500 a month from clickbank revenue. I believe that hubpages work better than blogs if you are getting direct traffic, (not through the search engines.)

You didn't seem like you have tried video marketing yet or video marketing linked to CPA offers. If you go sign up somewhere (cj.com) a CPA network, have a look about at some offers that are free to sign up and then base your theory that way. Create a video in a niche, do a little SEO on this video, add adsense everywhere, add your cpa offer everywhere link video to blog/hub drive traffic using only free methods.

In my opinion, what you need is some focus. Clearly, you're successful offline because you've been able to focus on a target market who is in need of your particular knowledge, and have been able to provide value to them for the money.

Online is the same. You have to find a hungry market for a product or service, and then provide a solution that attracts them and entices them to spend money.

With your background, it's very possible for you to have success online too, but you need to slow down and stop spreading your attention in too many places.

You've tried enough things now to have an idea of what you like doing and what you don't like doing in the online world. Stick with your strengths - the things you are good at online. Forget about everything else.

Once you know what your strengths are, then you can focus on picking a business model that fits those strengths. Then you work on finding a niche that you're comfortable with (and that has hungry buyers). Then you work on finding products to promote to those people. Then you build a site and write good product reviews, etc.

Then you promote that site with articles, SEO, etc.

And so on.

How does someone spend several thousand dollars maintaining a website?

I'd like to echo what the earlier posters had commented about you being all over the place. I'm a little bewildered at the many different terms you're attacking, and I wonder how you keep track of them all. If you're outsourcing this, I wonder if you're keeping tabs on what your team is doing and whether or not they're doing an effective job of getting you ranked for those terms.

I noticed that many of the medical terms you're attacking are high-value ones, and as one of the earlier posters had mentioned it'd be very profitable IF you had a medical or legal practice that specifically catered to those issues, but it looks like you're probably just using Adsense on those sites, right? (I tried clicking on the links you provided, but none of them seem to work as it looks like you've left out some part of those links).

These are all typically low search volume terms, so in order to be truly profitable you have to make a lot on each conversion and/or sell these leads. If you're just using Adsense and not selling these leads to the associated law/medical firms who pay big money for them, then I'm afraid you're not going to make much headway here.

I know you talked about following your passion, but it has to be tempered with common sense and logic. You have to determine if a niche is going to be potentially profitable before entering it, and not just blindly do something out of passion, and ultimately I think this is where your issue lies. I think the guys at the IMC tried their best to accommodate your wishes, but I'd like to stress that nothing is guaranteed in internet marketing. (I'm sure you broached the subject of carpal tunnel syndrome to them, and they merely tried to help you out with it - off of the top of my head, I'm quite sure that this is not going to be a very profitable niche to be in, especially at the price point you mentioned). You simply have to test and tweak things until they become profitable, and you'll most likely not get things right on your first try, hence the need for focus on your part (being all over the place as you currently are).

Paul

I'm still very busy and thus have had a quick glance of it so my answer wont come just yet.

But your niche isn't entirely non-profitable. Probably have gone about it the wrong.

In any case I'll name the obvious niches:

Get your EX back
Make money
Some issue like warts
Forex

Basically anything that people urgently want and think they can get a cheap fix for.

Dog training

Even "train your cat" has 6 k monthly views.

Settlement loans doesnt seem something that would be very easy to obtain or get urgently via the internet. I'm sure very few even know about it.

Carpal tunnel on the other hand could work, the term is quite competitive and for someone who may have it and desperately wants to dodge surgery would love to find an alternative to do so.

Twitter is quite competitive and has a ton of guides coming out. Infact there are plenty of guides for free that do what you explain.

Unless you can promise some enormous amount of traffic or conversions I don't see it working.

I don't think the carpal tunnel one is bad at all... I think that's your best shot interms of what you have so far!

posted from the above thread:

* Gamblers in debt
* People whose home is about to be foreclosed
* People about to go out of business
* Students who need money to enroll
* People who want to get rich quick
* Parents with children needing legal help
* Insurance agents, doctors, therapists, who have failed or fear failing there exams
* Women who can not get pregnant
* Women scared of husbands having affairs
* Men who cant get women at all
* People with illnesses who cant get better and running out of time
* People who have work drug tests coming up soon

Warrior Members Additions: UPDATED Oct 23, 2008

* Headache relief
* Backpain relief
* Toothache relief
* Women scared of husbands having affairs
* Parents with children needing legal help
* Job hunting / career change / resume
* How to sell your house
* Debt consolidation
* Stress management / relief
* Online traders
* Impotence
* Divorce Consultation
* Obesity
* Criminal Charges
* Civil Charges
* Man breasts seems to be a desperate problem
* 99 secrets you should know before marriage (boys/girls)
* People will spend huge sums of money getting sick pets back to health.
* Anybody who needs a good lawyer.
* Creating IM products in different languages...
* Get your ex back or Save your Relationship
* How to cope/what to do if laid off.
* How to get a good nights sleep...
* Salespeople that hate doing cold calls
* Women that need to get slim quick before a holiday

Are great niches, although unless you are extremely serious and genuinely feel you can help a person out I wouldn't go for the "People with illnesses who cant get better and running out of time". Unless ofcourse you have no conscience. But I'd personally stay well away of trying to cater to that.

Apart from that, those above are great.

Others that are based on more a hobby are:

Golfing tips
Mechanical tips
Gaming guides

Niches that work with content locking:

Movies ( stay away from this I'd say)
Cracks and hacks (not viruses that endanger other computers, but more useful cracks and hacks)
Game cheats
Lyrics
All of the above niches work with content locking (but this is done better with cpa offers)

You should be able to get plenty of ideas from this list, or atleast get the gist on what niches would work well.

btw what site is it that you purchased? the settlement loans one?

Thanks for your suggestions. I do appreciate your willingness to gather this information in an effort to provide some guidance. (I obviously need it!)