I recently held a webinar about the “3 Key Secrets Of Business Success” and as part of the registration process for the 137 people who attended, I asked them just one question:
“What is the ONE THING you want to know about creating a successful business?”
Every few days I’m going to answer one of those questions and here is the next one.
“How To Make A Website Make Money?”
This was an interesting question and took quite a bit of thought to be able to reply to because it’s not as simple as it looks.
I’m assuming that this person’s website is one where there is stuff for sale, rather than one, like mine, that promotes a product or service or membership.
Firstly, in an attempt not to “overlook the bleedin’ obvious” I’m going to run through a few very basic things to ask yourself about your website, this website that you want to make some money.
Is your website getting any traffic?
It never fails to amaze me that people expect to make money from a website with no traffic. Brace yourself for some discouraging statistics which are that the internet works on similar percentages to direct mail.
Or it will in the early days when you are honing your marketing chops.
If you assume that, for every 100 unique visitors you might attract between 1-10 subscribers and for every 1000 unique visitors, you might make x 1 sale of around $30-$50 value, then you won’t set your expectations unrealistically high.
When you get better at your marketing – or you learn to split test using Google Optimizer – you can expect to consistently outperform those figures dramatically – one of my squeeze pages converts at over 50% – but in the early days, get ready for some work serious work building your traffic.
Of course the paragraph above assumes some things that are essential for a website that makes money, and such assumptions are dangerous!
Many websites – even business website – don’t have the basics!
The first assumption is that you know how many unique visitors you are getting and please, don’t rely on your server statistics as in my experience they are always skewed by as much as 30% upwards. Get Google Analytics installed fast.
Are You Building A Prospect Mailing List?
The second assumption is that you have something that captures names and emails in return for a free, high perceived value gift, building a prospect subscriber mailing list.
Have You Got Something To Sell?
The third assumption is that you have something to sell. I know it sounds obvious but you are much more likely to make money if you have something unique to sell, even at a very low price point, because this will weed out the freebie seekers from the buyers in your marketplace.
Some people make money selling other peoples products or services (I do myself, by choosing products very carefully and mailing my list about them) and some people hope to make money from Google Adsense, but you really need to get a LOT of traffic before that is likely to happen.
If you do have something to sell, you can then make a one-time-offer (or OTO) on the “thank you” page, which will often convert up to 20% of the buyers to make a second purchase.
You can set up your mailing list host so that, when someone buys, they move from one list to another, so that instead of still continuing to sell them the original product (that they just bought), you can follow up and start to sell them the next complementary product.
You notice that I have been talking about my list, and to build a responsive mailing list is a really great idea. You can promote your own products and services and also those created by other people that you have carefully selected.
But nearly everyone underestimates the work involved in building a relationship with your list. You have to contact them regularly, you have to share great resources, let them into your life a little bit. People buy from people they know, like and trust, and that takes work.
I have sent out an ezine nearly every week since 1999, and my list size is not huge by any means, but I regularly come in the Top 20 affiliates when I do decide to mail about someone’s product or service. I’ve won 2 x iPads from one big name marketer from the US alone!
It’s not fashionable to say so, as everyone seems to want push button magic nowadays, but to create a website that works, that actually makes money, takes work.
The good news is that most of the time, the work only needs to be done once, then it runs on and on, on autopilot, whether you are awake or asleep. Working or on holiday.
Now that’s what I call magic.
