Lesson Category: How to Monetize Your Website

8.2 …What Now? (AF)

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Important links from this video:

In this video I discuss:

  • Who should watch this video vs. who shouldn’t
  • How to set yourself up for long-term success after you’ve finished FIMP

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8.2 Transcript Below

What’s going on, FIMP family?

So, you’re going through all of these training up to this point. You’ve completed hours and hours of self-development and you’ve got to be asking yourself: “What now? I’m coming to the end of the FIMP training, and now what do I do?” And that’s what this video is all about.

And I want to drive one thing home. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough, stop this video now unless you’ve finished all of the other training at FIMP, and at the very least, you have completed all of the following: you’ve picked your first niche, you’ve registered your domain, you’ve installed WordPress on your website – if you signed up with Bluehost, it’s automatically installed on your primary domain.

And ideally, these two aren’t required, but I would really like to see you at this point before watching this video. Because otherwise, it’s just going to complicate things for you a little bit too much: you’ve, at least, picked a handful of keywords, and hopefully, you’ve written at least your first 2 to 3 articles on your website.

So, those would be ideal. But at the very least: picked your niche, registered your domain, and WordPress is installed on your website.

So, I can’t overemphasize this: seriously, please stop this video. I know people jump around all of the time. I know tons of people skip Section 2 because they see mindset. And even though I say, over and over again: “watch Section 2, it’s usually helpful”, they skip it.

So, I know that there are going to be people that are hearing me now and going: “Ah, no, I can keep watching”. Stop this video. It’s just going to overcomplicate things, it’s going to make things confusing unless you have finished all of the other training and done everything that I just mentioned, okay?

Seriously, please stop this video if you haven’t finished everything that I just talked about.

Okay.

If you’re still watching… Seriously. I assume we’re good. Okay.

So, if you have finished all of that, I want to give you a huge congratulations. It’s a really big deal, because only 10% of people finish the training at FIMP. Even though it’s 100% free, even though it’s really step-by-step, and it doesn’t leave a whole lot of margin for error, believe it or not, only 10% of people actually complete all of the training at FIMP.

And my main focus shifts from getting you through all of the training at FIMP, because you’re obviously a self-starter and you’re really motivated, and you’re really ambitious, and you’re taking this very seriously – which is kind of important if you actually want to succeed online.

My goal is to take you from the one in ten that finishes FIMP to the one in one hundred that actually build a profitable online business.

We’ve talked about this a lot since the beginning, that it’s very few and far between when it comes to how many people succeed online and actually build a profitable business.

So, that’s what this video is about; getting you from the one in ten that finish FIMP, to the one in one hundred that are actually going to build a long-term profitable business that lasts, alright?

And that comes down to where you’re at now versus where you need to be, to be that one in one hundred.

So, right now you have the strongest foundation you can possibly get online. I don’t say that to toot my own horn. You know, I’ve just been doing this for a very long time. I’ve seen hundreds upon hundreds, thousands of people over the years attempt to build an online business.

And what has been great about that is I’ve seen a lot of people try a lot of things, and it’s made me recognize all of the patterns that lead to success and all of the patterns that lead to failure.

And that’s what ultimately drove me to create FIMP, and put it into the world, and put it into the world for free – was because I wanted to set as many people up for success as I possibly could.

Even if you stopped here, there are so many products out there that will say: “Okay, now that you’ve finished this, you need to invest in this $500 thing, or this $1,000 thing. Because without it, there’s no way you’re going to be successful.”

And they almost lead you to believe that you need something else, that’s going to make them money, whether it’s their own product or something they’re getting commissioned on.

“You need something else if you want any chance at success” – and that’s not at all true with FIMP. If you stop right here and you didn’t invest in anything else, you have everything you need to succeed online, period.

You just have to work the system, you have to stick with it, you have to be consistent, you have to put in the work, okay? So, just stick closely to the training at FIMP, and that’s all you need. Legitimately. Okay?

But, I do want to say, the more you learn in this industry, the more you’ll succeed. One of the reasons I’ve achieved the levels of success that I’ve achieved now is because I never stop learning.

There was a point, a few years in, where I stopped, I got complacent, and my my entire internet business failed. And I vowed to never make that mistake ever again in my online business.

So, I constantly keep self-developing. And I strongly recommend, as a FIMP finisher, that you do the same. Because that’s what’s going to set you up for success, the best.

And the thing that will help you the most, the best thing you can do for your success at this stage in the journey based on where people begin to fail from here out, is to get plugged in to an active internet marketing community that’s going to help you, that you can continue self-developing and most importantly, you can feel that those people are side-by-side, you’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of other people that are on the same journey as you.

Because this industry can get really lonely. And one of the biggest reasons people fail online is because they feel like they’re in it just by themselves and nobody else they know is going through these struggles, nobody else understands what they’re going through, all of the hard hours they’re putting in, and ultimately they just give up because they just can’t connect with other humans that are on the same journey as they are. And I, personally, gave up several times early in my journey because of that, too.

And that’s what this video is about – is getting you connected into a community where you can keep learning, you can keep growing, but most importantly, you can get connected with like-minded people that are going to be there to support you, be there to help you when you get stuck, and all kinds of other things. So that’s what we’re going to talk about here.

And what I’m about to recommend is, you know… there have been a handful of occasions in the Free Internet Marketing Project where I recommended premium tools… premium resources.

And this is one of those rare cases where I’m going to recommend something that’s actually a paid resource instead of a free resource, only because there’s no free resource out there that compares to it.

Even in the community at FIMP, and the training at FIMP, and the Facebook community for members, nothing compares to what I’m about to recommend, alright?

And you’ll see that. Fortunately, you can see that for free. I’ll explain that a little bit later.

But there are two types of people that are watching this video. There are going to be the people that have watched all of the training and you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I would never recommend something simply for an affiliate commission.

You know, if that’s why I got into this industry… I’ve been doing this now, I’ve been on this side of the industry for 10 years. I’ve worked very hard to preserve my reputation, which is not an easy thing to do in this industry.

I could’ve made a hell of a lot more money, and I would be making a hell of a lot more money today if I just sacrificed my ethics and my morals and said: “I’m just going to recommend things for the affiliate commissions.”

So, hopefully, by this point, you know that I practice what I preach. And that I’m all about delivering value. And my number one priority is always your success, not my bank account.

And if you don’t believe me, and you’re made uncomfortable by this, just don’t buy it through me. Buy it outside of my affiliate link, which is below this video, and just cut me out. And that way you can go: “Oh, okay. Ian doesn’t care whether or not he makes a commission. He’s going to recommend it anyway.” Because that’s the case, I would greatly appreciate it if you help FIMP stay funded by purchasing through my affiliate link. But if that bothers you, then just don’t do it.

And then, there’s the other people that are going to be watching this, and no matter what I say, you think I went to all of this effort, and I spent hundreds of hours creating FIMP, and I continue to spend hundreds of hours every year maintaining the community, growing, helping people just to sell you something.

And if that’s where you’re at, there’s just not much I can do to convince you outside of what I’ve already done. I apologize, but I’m not even going to try. There’s just… I know where my heart’s at, and hopefully you know too. I’m not going to get stuck on this, I can get stuck on things. Hopefully, you belong in the first category. But at the same time, you can’t win them all.

So, the community I’m talking about, some of you may be familiar with, you may be experienced in, you may be of heard about it in the past and it’s called Wealthy Affiliate.

And it’s far from perfect. Even if you’ve heard about it in the past, I guarantee you haven’t heard the perspective I’m about to give on it. Because people like to talk about all the sunshine, and rainbows, and daisies, and all of the gumdrops, all of the great things about Wealthy Affiliate.

But there are a lot of things that aren’t great about Wealthy Affiliate. But there is no other place like it. I’ll talk about that a little bit later too. And at the end of the day, there is no place that I feel like you could get plugged into at this point that’s going to set you up for success better than Wealthy Affiliate, including the FIMP Facebook community. These guys are years, and years ahead of anyone else. And I’ll talk about that later.

But the first thing I want to talk about is the reasons that Wealthy Affiliate sucks. Just flat out. Because I don’t believe in sugarcoating things and I would want someone to be honest with me about these things on the front-end. So, that’s of course, what I’m going to do for you.

The things that I don’t like about Wealthy Affiliate are their foundational training, the stuff that you’ve just gone through at FIMP and everything you’ve learned, isn’t as thorough as I’d prefer it to be.

The training at Wealthy Affiliate probably is about 25% to 30% as thorough as FIMP’s training is. And that’s important because what you get as your foundation is going to shape your success forever.

I mean, if you stay in this industry for 10 or 15 years, the stuff you’ve developed at FIMP, wherever you’ve developed your foundational training, will determine a lot of your success along the way.

And so, of course you don’t really have to worry about that too much because you’ve gone through all of the FIMP training. So, that one’s kind of knocked out, that’s, you know, no concern there. But that’s the one of my biggest problems at Wealthy Affiliate.

And one of the reasons that I created FIMP was to give people a stronger foundation than the number 1 place for beginner internet marketers online was giving. Even they weren’t thorough enough. So that’s one of the reasons I set out to create FIMP.

Another thing, and this isn’t just something I don’t like about Wealthy Affiliate. This is something I despise about Wealthy Affiliate. It’s just the only thing I despise about Wealthy Affiliate, and I am a very vocal opponent of this. They have something called Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp, it’s abbreviated WA Bootcamp. And it’s all about… you’ve probably seen this in other programs, as well. It’s all about becoming successful by promoting their product.

This rolled out, I want to say somewhere around 3 years ago. I have disliked it since it begin. Like I said, I’ve been a very vocal opponent of it. There’s a post on StoppingScams.com about why I don’t think anyone should do Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp.

So, when you get in there, just know to avoid that. It’s something that I make sure any one I refer into Wealthy Affiliate knows to avoid. I’ll talk about it more in another video down the road. But at the end of the day, it just doesn’t set you up for success like their other path of training and community support does.

And sometimes because it’s a community filled with a lot of newer internet marketers, some pretty crazy stuff gets taught and perpetuated. Things like: Backlinks don’t work. Even when google themselves… you know, there have been engineers and analysts from Google that have come out. And year after year, there are more of them that come out and say: “Hey! Backlinks are still the number one thing that influences rankings”

So, to say backlinks don’t work, really bothers me. Because even Google is telling us that they’re going to continue to be dependent on backlinks as a number one indicator, the number one signal for rankings for years to come.

They are getting more advanced, they are things that are improving, their algorithm is factoring in more things outside of links. But links are still very important. You have to be smart about how you do it, right? We’ve talked about that some.

You don’t want to build backlinks like you used to in 2010 or 2005. But they’re still important, right? And I take issue with any community that says backlinks don’t work. Because it’s pretty clear, by any good data you look at, that backlinks are still really important.

Another thing that comes from the very top of Wealthy Affiliate that I don’t care for very much, personally, based on my experience, is that comments are one of the biggest factors for search engine optimization and search engine rankings.

You know, basically right now, I’m knocking out the top things that you will see in Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll go: “Ah, this is different than what Ian said.” So, I would just say, Ignore them. There’s a lot of good stuff there, too.

But I, personally, have never seen good data, I don’t see good data for my own websites – and I own several of them that shows that comments are one of the biggest factors for rankings.

It would also be really idiotic for Google to do that because it’s one of the easiest things to game. It’s one of the easiest things to fake. And Wealthy Affiliate actually even has like comment exchanges and stuff built into their community, just don’t waste any time with that.

So, yeah, I’m, personally, of the belief that you get traffic and you get more comments, not you get comments and you get more traffic and more rankings. So, it’s a matter of chicken before the egg. And again, I’ve done thorough research, I’ve looked for it and looked for it, and I just have not seen any convincing data that shows that comments lead the rankings, rather than rankings lead the comments, okay?

So, the good thing about all of this is that not only in this video am I here telling you avoid these things, and setting you up for success in the Wealthy Affiliate community that way, but I personally coach every one of my referrals at Wealthy Affiliate on what to avoid.

They have some really cool systems in place that allow me to do that without a whole lot of effort. And so, you’re never going to have to worry about any of those kind of potholes in Wealthy Affiliate, that if you were referred in by someone else, you would potentially fall into. Because basically, what I’m doing through Wealthy Affiliate and through this video is I’m patching those potholes so you never trip over the things that could compromise or jeopardize your success. Okay?

So, now that I’ve talked about the things that I, personally, think suck at Wealthy Affiliate, I want to tell you the reasons that I’ve been at Wealthy Affiliate for over 5 years.

I joined in October 2012. So I’ve been a Wealthy Affiliate premium member, I will continue to be a Wealthy Affiliate premium member. The guys that founded it, the co-founders, their hearts are in the right place. They’ve had opportunity, after opportunity, after opportunity to kind of shift into that really immoral side of internet marketing and do some shady stuff, and they never have.

What they have demonstrated through their training and through the way they’ve built Wealthy Affiliate over the years is that we’re very like-minded. Where I’m at… and I try very hard to be ethical and guide people without thinking about my own monetary gain, and just help people become successful. They have done that over and over again but for many more years than I have, even.

So, the reasons I’ve been a Wealthy Affiliate member for over 5 years is that there is so much training on topics that FIMP doesn’t cover yet. And I want to cover in the future, and I want to cover really in-depth, but with me working on my own internet marketing businesses, it’s a very difficult thing for me to do.

I still have every intention to, I still plan to, and I will continue to record training. But in the mean time, there’s no better place you can go to continue your education and build on that foundation that you’ve poured at FIMP than Wealthy Affiliate. There is no safer community online.

Like I said, they’ve been doing this for years. And just between their own training and all of the training that other members have posted, and other experienced internet marketers have posted, there is a massive training library at Wealthy Affiliate that FIMP just can’t touch. And they’re years ahead, and it continues to grow almost exponentially. So, it’s going to be very difficult to keep up. So, I think you’ll really love that. And that’s one of the reasons I love it.

There are also weekly live webinars by a guy that really knows his stuff. He’s a veteran internet marketer, he runs his own local SEO business, and has a lot of really noteworthy clients, and also does a lot of affiliate marketing, as well. Ans his name is Jay.

And Jay is just a brilliant internet marketer. There are very few people in this industry that are better to learn from. And literally, every single week, he does a live webinar at the end of the week. And his material is just outstanding. He’s a great teacher.

There’s just nowhere else you can go for as cheap as the monthly dues are at Wealthy Affiliate, and get access to someone live, one-on-one, like Jay at Wealthy Affiliate. And so, that’s definitely… that alone is worth the investment at Wealthy Affiliate. But there’s so much more beyond that, as well.

And some of the community’s most knowledgeable members and veteran internet marketers (myself included) regularly add training to the community. Regularly blog about things that we’re learning. But also, something that I’ll be doing a lot more of now is I’m creating video training for Wealthy Affiliate. Just putting that into the community, and of course you would have access to all of that as well in the Wealthy Affiliate community.

And so, like I said earlier too, the community engagement and support is just unbeatable. You can’t go anywhere else and find a community like Wealthy Affiliate. It’s just such a safe place, it’s monitored so closely. It’s just incredible, what they’ve created there.

You know, there were… a couple of years ago, when bootcamp really started to gain a lot of traction. A lot of people are going into it, and I, personally, from the very beginning, didn’t feel like that set people up for success very well.

And I was really upset that it was becoming as popular and as prevalent within the community as it did. And I looked around for days on end to find a place that I could refer people to that was better than Wealthy Affiliate, and a safer community overall. And I just couldn’t find it – no exaggeration, I could not find it.

And at the end of the day, I mean, I’ve kept my eye out over the years and we’ve reviewed hundreds of products as StoppingScams, and nothing else comes close to Wealthy Affiliate.

So, ultimately, what I decided was instead of stopping promoting Wealthy Affiliate altogether, was I started using their systems that they haven’t placed for me to stay connected to my referrals. And like I said, kind of patching those potholes to make sure you never fall into them. Because there just is no other place that you can end up that’s better than Wealthy Affiliate. And it takes a lot for me to say that about a product.

After all of these years, there are very few places that I have been impressed by, but there is only one place that I would give a… I would say an unqualified recommendation, but I have qualified this recommendation a lot. There’s just nowhere that I would recommend stronger than Wealthy Affiliate. You’re just not going to find a better place online to keep growing and keep plugged in to a community.

And the best thing of all is because of the systems in place, they have some incredible support tools for their members like me. I can personally guide and mentor every single one of my referrals into Wealthy Affiliate. And that’s really special for me. It allows me to have a much more one-on-one relationship and keep tabs on your journey a lot easier. And there’s just no way I can do that using something like a Facebook group, because Facebook does not have the tools built-in to help make that efficient like Wealthy Affiliate does.

And so, one of the nice things about Wealthy Affiliate, especially now that you’ve finished FIMP and I know you’re serious about this journey, is we can connect on more of a one-on-one level. And whenever you can’t find what you need at Wealthy Affiliate, or you post a question and nobody answers or gives the answer that you were looking for, you can always reach out to me, individually.

I know that early in FIMP I talked about how you need to be very independent and don’t be you know, pinging me for every single question. You have there a lot of things that you can Google.

And you know, the nice thing about Wealthy Affiliate is that they have systems in place that allow me to have that one-on-one relationship, without it being super time-consuming.

So, you know, that basically takes us down to… I know this is getting a little bit long-winded, but it’s something I’m really passionate about. And again, it’s something that in order for you to go in and have success, you have to go about it a very specific way.

So, I apologize for taking up so much time for this video. But at the end of the day, this is what I truly believe sets you up for success best, so I didn’t want to just make a quick 5-minute video and move on.

So, if all of this sounds good to you and you’re interested in checking it out, you can check it out for free. They have something called a “Starter” account. And if you want to do it through my affiliate link and support FIMP and also, you know, get access to the resources that my referrals get… unfortunately, the only way my referrals get that information is if they’re tagged as one of my referrals because it’s built into Wealthy Affiliate’s system.

This is the link you would use: it’s stoppingscams.com/fimpfinisher (all one word, all lowercase). And you can check it out for free. I don’t get commissioned if you check it out for free. This is an affiliate link. It does keep FIMP funded, but only if you upgrade to premium, Ultimately, because you decide it’s good fit for you and where you’re at on your journey.

So, after you create a free account, fill-out your profile just really briefly. You don’t have to do anything super fancy, but upload an image and post your description about yourself, introduce yourself to the community.

And please stop by my profile (you can skip this one step, if you want to). I would love to know that you made it. I would love to know that you went through FIMP, and then you decided: “Okay, I’m going to keep growing, I’m going to keep developing, I’m really serious about this. So, Ian, I ended up at Wealthy Affiliate.”

So, please stop by my profile and just say hi. Just introduce yourself really quickly if we haven’t already connected. And if we have already connected, just let me know you made into Wealthy Affiliate. Because that’s really special for me, to know that a community that I’ve been a member of, and I’m so passionate about – someone from FIMP made it in there, as well.

So, my profile is “Pribs” (P-R-I-B-S), and you can just search that on their platform and you’ll find my profile, and stop by and introduce yourself.

And then, you know, the best part of Wealthy Affiliate, just start interacting with the community. They have a live chat feature, they have the ability to post questions, and you can do a lot of that for the first several days that you’re a free member. If you decide to upgrade, you get unlimited access to the community, and posting in the community, and stuff. But you at least get a taste of it, early on.

And one thing I do want to mention is, you know, in the free starter account at Wealthy Affiliate, you do get access to some training. At the free level, it’s lower level than what you’ve already gotten at FIMP – which is great. It speaks volume as to what we’re doing at FIMP. But at the same time, just know that that is not representative of the plethora of training that becomes available to you after you upgraded to premium.

They have several levels of what’s called “Online Entrepreneur Certification”, I’ll talk about that here in a minute. They have 5 levels and they’re continuing to add to them. You would pick up at level 3 – is where FIMP has left off.

So, you only get access to level 1, as a free member. So that’s not going to be very representative, or very helpful for you if you’ve already completed FIMP, just know that.

And know that if you do like the community, and you like what they’re doing at Wealthy Affiliate, and you decide to invest in their premium membership, which is $19 your first month and $49 every month thereafter. There are some discounts for an annual membership too. But if you decide to do that, you’ll get access to the premium training, as well; which is where you would continue learning, continue growing, and continue developing.

So, the other thing is, I mentioned some of the systems at Wealthy Affiliate has in place for me to stay in touch with you, and keep tabs on you, and guide you, check in on you, et cetera. One of those things is automated messages that I get to post to your profile at Wealthy Affiliate. So keep an eye on your profile for those, again, full disclosure automated messages from me that I’ve put in place.

But, if you ever get stuck, or you look at one of the questions I asked in one of those automated messages and you go: “No, I do really need help with this”, reply to it because I personally receive every single one of those, and I personally respond to every single one of those.

So, although I have some automated messages set up at Wealthy Affiliate, it’s one of the things that enables me to have that more one-on-one coach/mentor relationship with the people that I refer over to Wealthy Affiliate.

So, keep an eye on your profile and on your inbox, if you decide to upgrade to premium. Because I am always just one reply away from my referrals at Wealthy Affiliate, if you decide you need a little bit of help.

So, I just mentioned this too, if you decide to invest in a premium membership and you get access to the premium training, pick up where we left off in the Online Entrepreneur Certification level 3. And I’ll post a link to that below this video as well, so you can just click directly over. But again, you won’t be able to access it until you have a premium account. It’s not accessible through the free starter account. Alright?

So, I want to knock out, before we tie off here, just a couple of questions that are probably on a lot of your minds. And I know, if you don’t have them on your mind right now, they’re going to come up. I’ll just blow through these really quick.

One of them is: Do I need Bluehost or external hosting since Wealthy Affiliate premium includes hosting?

The answer is absolutely yes. In my personal opinion, Wealthy Affiliate has a lot of cool features built into their hosting platform, they also have some limitations. But at the end of the day, if you build your website there, you get trapped into, essentially, $49 a month hosting. If you ever want to cancel your account, and then you have to go through the hassle of transferring your websites out of Wealthy Affiliate to an external host.

So, it’s cheap enough, that from the very beginning, I just recommend hosting externally. That way, when you do decide that you want to leave Wealthy Affiliate, whether it’s a month down the road, or 3 months down the road, or 8 months down the road, not everyone’s going to become a Wealthy Affiliate member for over 5 years, like I have been, you can continue to have access to your websites and not lose access to them because you cancel your Wealthy Affiliate membership.

Another thing that people ask a lot is: Should I use Jaaxy (which is Wealthy Affiliate’s keyword tool) or LongTail Pro (which I teach as the premium keyword tool in FIMP)?

If you’ve invested in LongTail Pro, absolutely, hands down, use it over Jaaxy. The data is better, the competition data is more reliable, the keyword search volume is more reliable, it’s just all around much better, more reliable tool.

But if you can’t afford LongTail Pro, Wealthy Affiliate’s free version of Jaaxy is better than nothing. They’ve got a really cool engine built into that that’s very good for suggesting keywords. But just make sure that you still use the free tools taught at FIMP. I believe that’s video 5.5, The Free Keyword Planner, Google Keyword Planner, and the Moz bar to check competition. Just double-check the keywords you’re finding in Jaaxy, still. Because the data just isn’t as reliable as I would prefer it to be.

I know they’re constantly improving that, too. But as of right now, as I record this video, just continue to set yourself up for success, as well as possible, using the tools taught at FIMP, as well. But Jaaxy can help a lot if you don’t have the money to afford a premium keyword tool.

And, you know, one of the biggest questions I see coming up at this point is… okay, you’ve taught me a ton at FIMP and you’re going to see some overlap at Wealthy Affiliate and you’re going to go: “Well, how the hell do I actually get the most out of my membership at Wealthy Affiliate?”

Pick up where FIMP left off at the Online Entrepreneur Certification level 3, if you decide to upgrade to premium. Get plugged in to the Wealthy Affiliate community because it is just an outstanding community.

One of the best ways to learn is to teach. I have found that over and over again in everything I’ve done in my life. And you will have plenty of opportunities to help other people and teach.

Obviously, you don’t want to get too caught up in that because it takes time away from your business, and that should be your main focus. But at the end of the day, the more you teach other people in the Wealthy Affiliate community because you have gotten a better foundation than they have at Wealthy Affiliate, the better that’s going to solidify and make more concrete your own understanding of internet business and set you up for long term success.

So, get plugged in to the community, ask questions when you have them yourself, help other people when you have answers to their questions, as long as it’s not taking too much time away from your business. And you’re going to love that. That community is just outstanding, and it is unmatched, unparalleled across the rest of the internet marketing world.

Attend the live weekly webinars by Jay. There are always replays too, if you can’t attend live. Check those out because he’s one of the most knowledgeable members in Wealthy Affiliate.

And drop me a message if you’re ever stuck anywhere. Again, this is one of the biggest advantages to having a Wealthy Affiliate membership is that they have the systems and tools in place for me to have that more one-on-one relationship.

And also, the nice thing is, by this point, especially in this video if you’re still watching, a lot of people have been weeded out throughout the FIMP training. So, it kind of, separates, to live this to the very end, it separates the people that are serious about their success and those that aren’t.

So, I don’t get overwhelmed by this huge support burden by a lot of people that aren’t ever going to take this very seriously. I know you’re serious, I know you’re ambitious, I know you’re committed to this journey, so I want us to have that one-on-one relationship. And the best way for that to happen is through Wealthy Affiliate’s platform. Thanks to the tools and support features that they built in, that I have access to.

So, if you get stuck anywhere, if you can’t get the help you need from the community, drop me a messages, post to my profile, whatever, get in touch with me so that I can help you personally. Alright?

So, I know it’s been a long video. Thanks for hanging in there with me through it all. I guess it’s fitting that we finished again. This is such an important video. Where you go from here will determine so much about your success online.

And I just want to congratulate you for finishing FIMP. That is such a huge accomplishment. And I don’t want to undermine that by just going: “Hey! Alright, you’re done! Now here’s another assignment.”

But at the end of the day, the best thing for you, and the best thing for your success is to get plugged in to a community and keep learning, and keep growing, and don’t become complacent or stagnant. And I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the best way to keep you moving forward is to stay in touch with, more of, a one-on-one relationship through Wealthy Affiliate.

So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. I hope you’ve enjoyed all of the FIMP training. I have no doubt that you will enjoy the Wealthy Affiliate community, if you decide to get plugged in.

So, if you want to do it in a way that supports FIMP, please click the button below this video, or the link below this video.

If you’re uncomfortable with me making a commission if you upgrade to premium, just go ahead and head straight over to Wealthy Affiliate. But I would greatly appreciate your support for what I’m trying to do at Free Internet Marketing Project if you would create an account through my Wealthy Affiliate link, posted below this video.

And I look forward to seeing you there. I look forward to, hopefully, continuing to see you around the FIMP Facebook community, as well. And most importantly, I look forward to seeing where you end up several months or several years down the road.

And, hopefully, we get you to that one in one hundred that not only finish FIMP, but built a successful, profitable, long-term internet business that helped you change your life.

So, thank you all so much for sticking with me through this long, long, long video. And for completing the FIMP training. I truly hope it helps you change your life.

I’ll be around if you need me. Take care. And I hope to talk to you soon.

8.1 When and How to Monetize Your Content (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
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Or simply log in if you already have one.

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[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

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[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
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Helpful links from this video: https://stoppingscams.com/how-to-make-money-dropshipping-using-aliexpress-and-shopify/

In this video I discuss:

  • How many daily visitors you should be receiving before you start worrying about how to monetize your content
  • How to monetize your content using physical products
  • How you should start with physical products and work your way up
  • How to monetize your content using CPA marketing
  • How to monetize your content using digital products
  • When to move from CPA marketing to creating your own digital products
  • Why this is so important and how big of a difference it can make in your bottom line/revenue

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

8.1 Transcript Below

What’s going on, beautiful people?

Time for another lesson. Another section. This section’s going to be pretty brief overall, at least as I have it planned for now.

And the main thing that I want to talk about in this section is when and how to monetize your content. So this will be a fairly long lesson compared to a lot of the ones we’ve done recently.

But it’s a very, very important thing to address. Because just like people try to get the website design perfect from the very beginning and they play with all the colors, they’re trying to get all their widgets perfect, and, they’re just tweaking all these things that don’t really matter until you get traffic; monetization is the exact same thing. It falls under the same category.

It’s not going to do you any good to worry about all those little details and how finally integrated your affiliate links are. Or how well you’re monetizing or you’re optimizing for opt-ins to your e-mail list. None of that’s really going to matter until you get traffic anyways.

So I want to talk about when to start monetizing your content exactly. And how you might consider monetizing your content once you break that threshold, okay?

So, if you stick things out until you’re getting traffic, that’s really when it’s time to start worrying about monetization. So typically, this is, at least, a few months in. I’ll talk about some exceptions there.

But once you get traffic, it’s time to start making money, right? Once you’re getting consistent traffic, it’s time to start making money. And the way you do that is by monetizing your content.

You will notice that in my article that I created in this section about creating high-quality content, there were no affiliate links, there were no calls-to-action yet. And it’s just flat out… in my experience, it’s not worth spending the time on until you start seeing which of your posts are getting the most traffic, which of your posts are getting the most engagement. And then, you worry about monetizing those posts.

Because I could spend at least a couple three, four hours hunting down affiliate offers or trying to figure out how I’m going to monetize the traffic for that one article. And on top of that, I could spend all kinds of time, as much as dozens of hours, coming up with a lead magnet to get people to opt-in to my list. And none of it means anything until I get traffic anyways.

And another thing you’ll find is – as you work on these dozens of articles over the coming months, you have no idea which ones are going to gain traction first.

So, you could spend two hours optimizing each one of those articles for monetization and getting people to click through your affiliate links, buy things through your affiliate links.

And the ones that you least expect, could be the ones that get the most traffic because they’re the ones that get rankings first.

So, you can spend all kinds of time. Just frankly, in the early stage is wasted, that could go towards traffic-producing activities, worrying about monetization. But I wouldn’t really suggest that. I wouldn’t recommend that.

I would recommend focusing on content, content, content and some promotion. Focusing on everything we’ve talked about up until this point. And once you start to see that tipping point, where your traffic is catching, that’s when you should worry about monetization. Because before you get traffic, it’s just not going to mean anything.

You may lose out on a few dollars over the first few months. But, you know, if you lose out on a couple of hundred dollars over the first 8 or 12 months versus being highly productive and putting out more content and focusing on the things that matter at that stage of your business, I think it’s a pretty fair trade-off.

Because your going to see a lot better results once you start to hit that tipping point if you just focus on the things that matter in those early stages. And that is traffic-producing activities – which are content creation, on-page SEO, picking good keywords and other forms of promotion that we discussed in the last section.

I would say, once your consistently getting about 75-100 visitors… ah, I say that per month, that’s actually supposed to be per day. I’m actually going to correct that because that’s a pretty, pretty big one. Sorry about that. It’s important that that’s in there correctly.

So, once you’re consistently getting 75-100 visitors per day, is when I would start worrying about a monetization. I often don’t even worry about it until I’m getting a couple of hundred visitors per day, it’s just a matter of taste. And I can understand if you’re antsy and you want to get making money as quickly as possible after you’re getting traffic.

And it’s warranted, I’d say, once you get to 75-100 visitors per day. You’re not going to be making anywhere near a full-time income in most niches with only 75-100 visitors per day, but it warrants the time and effort to start worrying about content optimization and monetization. Okay?

So, next bullet point I guess. So, you’re going to have several options and I’m going to go through each one of these, one-by-one.

You have advertising as an option. You have CPA marketing – which is Cost Per Acquisition marketing – and it’s one of the many areas of affiliate marketing that you can participate in. Physical products that you own or dropshipping, and digital products that you own. We’re going to take a look at each one of these in this video.

So, we’ve discussed these, somewhat, a long time ago in one of the first sections. We talked about different ways to monetize content and we talked about each one of these when we discussed reverse math. If you can remember that far back, because it’s probably a ways back, depending on how quickly you’ve covered these lessons.

But advertising is going to be one of the most straightforward and easy things to implement. Especially if you’re going to Google Adsense route. You basically just copy a code from Google Adsense, you paste it on your website and it starts populating ads automatically. And you get paid based on how many times people click those ads on your website.

But as I discussed when we visited this topic the first time, advertising doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re getting a ton of traffic. I’m taking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of visitors a month. And the vast majority of websites just never make it to that point of traffic. And even if they did, unless it’s just in a non-buying audience or it’s just this really weird traffic that isn’t super valuable any other way, advertising is going to be one of the least effective ways to monetize your content.

Because odds are that you could integrate CPA marketing intelligently or your own physical products or your own digital products in a way that you would make a lot more money than advertising is going to produce. Because really, advertising just produces pennies per thousands of visitors. And at the end of the day, that’s just not a level of traffic most people are going to hit to make this make sense.

And as I mentioned, for the vast majority of websites, what this is actually going to do is it’s going to distract from the things that actually make you money.

So what a lot of people do is they integrate maybe their own product and they integrate their own lead magnet – which is opt-in to my e-mail list, get these free things so that you can start pitching them in a sales funnel. And then they, you know… add advertising and they’ve got all of these different CPA offers, their own offers, lead magnet, advertising. And it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because what you’re actually doing is dwindling your conversion optimization.

We know based on study, after study, after study in the conversion optimization industry that every time you stack something else onto your page – whether it’s a banner, whether it’s an ad, whether it’s an in-text link – if those things aren’t congruent with one another, if they’re not all part of the same sales funnel on that page, what you’re doing is you’re pulling someone in multiple different directions.

And there have even been psychological studies that show: when you give people too many options, they just don’t make a decision. That’s something that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his book, Blink. And it’s proven hard science, it’s just how we react as humans.

So the best practice for conversion optimization is to keep people on one straight funnel and kind of pitch them one offer at a time.

Which is why if you see any of my websites, you’ll notice that I have a consistent funnel across all sections of a website. Maybe I have multiple different niches on the same website because it’s really established authority website, but you know… for example: on StoppingScams internet marketing stuff stays internet marketing stuff, survey stuff stays survey stuff.

I don’t pitch survey people on the internet marketing stuff. I don’t pitch internet marketing subscribers, that are looking for ways to make money online, survey offers and ways to make money taking surveys online. I don’t pitch either of those markets anything having to do with MLM or network marketing, because it hurts conversion rates when you do so.

And so, whenever you put ads on a website unnecessarily, maybe you’re making a few extra pennies per day. But what you’re actually doing is really dropping your conversion rate for other offers that could make you more money.

So, for the vast majority of people, advertising just isn’t going to make sense. It’s super easy, yes. It makes you a little bit of money. You know, literally, pocket change. But it’s just not going to make sense for the vast majority of people. Unless you’re getting hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors a month.

The next thing that I would like to discuss is CPA Marketing. And in Cost Per Acquisition Marketing, under that umbrella, you have pay-per-sale, pay-per-free-trial giveaway, pay-per-lead… just all kinds of offers that kind of exist under that umbrella.

And there are tons of different CPA networks that have all kinds of offers that you can look for and compare and shop.

The most important thing about CPA marketing, about anything, when you’re talking about monetization is to remember to integrate offers that are actually valuable to your audience.

If you’re writing a piece of content about a specific topic and about how to solve a pain point or answer their question, don’t just pitch the thing that’s going to make you the most money. Because that’s going to significantly, again, decrease your conversion rates.

What you want to do is you want to pitch things that are actually valuable and helpful to them. And not only are you going to make commissions that way, but you’re going to forge a relationship that you can continue to monetize, as time goes on. And get your lifetime value (which is abbreviated LTV) up and up and up with that subscriber as long as you never burn that bridge.

The first time you recommend something that’s not useful to them, and you’re just recommending it because it’s going to make you a good chunk of money, you’re very likely to burn that relationship and never be able to make money off of that subscriber or that website visitor ever again. And on top of that, most of them won’t even convert because it’s not something that’s truly valuable to them.

So remember that when you’re integrating CPA offers and, again, anything else for monetization on your website, you want to continue building that relationship. You want to continue adding value. You don’t just want to throw out there whatever is going to make you the most money.

If something’s going to make you $10 and it’s relevant. Or something’s going to make you $100 and it’s kind of a stretch, it’s a little bit relevant. Maybe I can get people to convert. Pitch the thing that’s going to make you $10, because you’re going to convert more people and probably make up the vast majority of that difference, if not significantly more by converting more people than the $100 offer that’s only slightly relevant with convert. I hope that makes sense.

It’s best to integrate CPA offers through, in my experience… through in-text links and kind of buttons throughout the content.

So if you’re talking about something and someone’s reading, reading, reading… in my experience, you convert much higher if you kind of integrate your affiliate links in the content as text. Because they’re reading the article and, again, it’s value to them, it’s relevant to what you’re talking about.

If it makes sense to do so, those are some of the best converting links that I have. And some of the best paying affiliate links that I’ve had on any of my websites over the past 10 years.

It converts much better, typically speaking, than banners. Especially if you have multiple banners for different products down the right-hand side of your website, or at the top of your website, or in your content. Those banners just don’t work remotely as well as in-text links and buttons with really strong calls-to-action that tie in contextually to whatever you’re talking about.

So, if you’ve just made a reference to something in your content and you hit a point where it makes sense to add a button – a call-to-action button right there – you know, loop it in to whatever you’re talking about in the content. And try to create a compelling call-to-action, that not only ties in to the content, but also is really enticing to your audience.

And whenever you’re linking through affiliate links, you are legally required to make sure it’s really obvious. You know, the FTC implemented that a long time a go. A lot of people implement this by just kind of trying to bury it in their terms and conditions, and that is not the blatant label that the FTC requires – this is for U.S.-based companies. But other countries also have their own requirements, you need to familiarize yourself with them if you’re getting into affiliate marketing.

But it’s also a good way to forge that trust and that relationship. And typically, what I’m going to do, because I am promoting things that are of value to my audience. I just make it really clear: “Hey! This is an affiliate link and this is how we stay funded. These commissions are what keep us going. They’re what keep us doing this, so please support us by purchasing through our affiliate link.”

And because I am pitching things of value, I’m not just trying to take them for every dime they’re worth. It’s a highly compelling way to increase your conversions and get people supporting you.

Because there’s no reason for them not to support you and purchase through your affiliate link if you’ve really gone out of your way to create a high-quality content that helps them. It’s just a click of a button, they’re going to pay the same amount either way. So they might as well just buy through you.

So, again, Conversion Optimization 101, it’s usually best to push one offer rather than spread your visitor’s attention across several different offers.

And you can find a lot of CPA offers, pretty much no matter what your niche is, through sites like OfferVault or AffPlus.com. If you want to read reviews from really established affiliates on which CPA networks are the best, there’s AffPaying – A F F… and I can’t remember if there’s a hyphen or not… A F F – Paying. And if there’s no hyphen, it’s just AffPaying, one word… P A Y I N G. AffPaying. Just google it. I can’t remember if it’s a .net or .com.

But they’re the go-to resource for if you’re looking to apply for a CPA network. Kind of… and read reviews on CPA networks, whether they stiff their people on commissions, how helpful their affiliate managers are, how great their selection on offers, and how great their pay-outs compare to other CPA networks. That’s a really, really good resource.

And one of the reasons you want to wait until you’re getting, at least, 75-100 visitors per day, especially when you’re talking CPA marketing, is because any reputable CPA network is going to want to see you have existing traffic.

You know, it’s really hard to get approved for any good CPA network if you’re just getting started. You know, you can get approved for Amazon but their commissions are pretty low compared to a lot of those CPA networks that have pay-per-free-trial giveaways, pay-per-lead, pay-per-email submit, all kinds of stuff like that.

So, that’s just another reason to wait until you’re getting to the point that you’re getting 75-100 visitors per day. Because you’re just not going to get approved by most reputable CPA networks otherwise. And for a lot of them, that even may not be enough traffic.

But if you pick up the phone and you call a lot of those CPA networks and you get in touch with an affiliate manager, you can get approved, a lot of the time, even for a brand new website. If you call them, you talk to them, you prove that you’re trustworthy and you prove that you know what you’re talking about, a lot of the times those guys will approve you just because you went to that extra effort. So keep that in mind as well.

But hopefully, somewhere down the road, I’ll be able to create a more extensive lesson about how to apply for affiliate networks and get approved even if your traffic numbers aren’t as high as they may usually like to see.

Okay. Physical products that you own or dropshipping – this is something I started doing a lot of in my business in the last year. And it’s been really, really helpful to diversify my streams of revenue.

If you go this route, you’re likely going to start off with dropshipping and expands into managing your own inventory, sourcing your own products, or even possibly manufacturing your own products as volume increases. Because, again, 75-100 visitors per day, you’re probably not going to get a massive amount of conversions.

You may be lucky to get 1 or 2 sales per day, pushing physical products, unless it’s just a really, really targeted piece of content – which that does happen, where you would get 5-10% conversion rates compared to in the industry standard of 0.5% or 1%. But anyway around it, you’re probably going to start off with dropshipping.

And for those of you who don’t know what dropshipping is, I apologize. It’s where you never manage inventory, you just receive the order from a customer, you pass that information along to a supplier somewhere else and they ship directly to your customer. You never touch the inventory.

And typically, you’re probably going to be marking up your products at least 2 or 3 times. So maybe someone pays you $20, you buy it from someone else for $5 and they ship it directly to your customer. And now you’ve made $15 profit. So, that’s a pretty cool way to make money if you know what you’re doing.

AliExpress.com – a lot of products source from China there – is kind of the go-to for cheap products. And you just want to make sure you pay attention to the reviews when you’re sourcing products from there, and how many purchases that product has, and how many purchases that supplier has, when you’re looking on AliExpress.

Because if you’re not ordering the product yourself and verifying quality first, which is the ideal thing to do, you at least want to make sure that it has a lot of reviews, a lot of purchases and a lot of happy customers. Otherwise, you’re really likely to get something shipped to your customer that’s a total piece of crap. And that’s going to hurt your reputation and your relationship with your subscriber, again, and probably burn a bridge that you can never make money off of them again. So be careful with that.

And I actually discussed this extensively – how to evaluate products, how to source products, how to even automate the process whenever you receive an order… just kind of one-click their software, that will go in and fill-out all the customer information – their name, their address – and pass that, all of that, onto your supplier that you’re using to dropship to the customer. Rather than you having to do all of that manually, which is a pretty big pain in the butt.

So, I go through all of that in the article on the screen right now. It is a very, very, very extensive lesson. One of the most extensive on StoppingScams.com. And I think you’ll find it’s very helpful and very high-quality.

So, if this is something you’re interested in doing and you want to start with dropshipping, once you get to 75-100 visitors per day and it starts making sense to integrate some of these things to your content, that is a very, very, very good article for you to check out. I think you’ll find it really insightful.

So, it’s based on experiences in my own business where I got a dropshipping site, up to a little over a hundred thousand dollars of revenue per month.

So, yeah, it’s not to be overlooked. It’s not like I’m some chump that’s just speculating at these things. Whether you believe me or not, that’s up to you.

But it was an adventure, for sure. And it’s something that I’ve really enjoyed, again, expanding as an extra stream of revenue in my business. Because I come from SEO, I come from affiliate marketing. So to get into the kind of the e-commerce world and crack dropshipping – which I always frankly thought was kind of a myth that product publishers kind of made up, was really, really fun and adventurous.

So, all of my experiences are documented, and everything I learned are documented in that article. So, I highly, highly recommend it.

In time, once you’re getting to the point that you’re consistently selling, you know, 100, or 200, or 300 of the same item through your site, you might consider either going directly to the manufacturer. Because most of those suppliers on AliExpress aren’t the manufacturers, they’re just middlemen that buy in bulk.

So they’ll go and they’ll buy from the actual manufacturer. They’ll mark it up, and it’s still super cheap for us in a way that we can mark it up to our consumers. But they’re probably marking it up 1-2 times, at least, themselves.

So, you can kind of cut the middlemen out, go directly to the supplier or start manufacturing yourself and ordering bulk inventory – where you’re buying 500 or 1,000 of these units at once. And fulfilling yourself from your own home or office. Or also there’s the ability to partner with a… oh, I’m having a brain fart… fulfillment facility.

So, you can kind of ship all of your inventory there. Amazon does this too. But there are a lot of companies out there that, you know, you’ll pay a dollar per product, per order that comes through. And they will ship it to your customer.

So technically, you’re still kind of dropshipping even though you’re buying inventory in bulk.

And again, this is something that I’d really like to dig into, really in-depth, down the road. But for now, just know that this is an option and you’re probably going to start off testing the waters with dropshipping. Because it’s really high-risk to buy a thousand units of something, even if it’s only $5 per unit. You’re still paying $5,000 out of pocket before you even know how well it’s going to sell.

So it’s kind of the equivalent of, you know… I’ll talk about digital products here in a second. But typically, you don’t start off just releasing your own digital product. You kind of test the waters with a similar affiliate offer. Some kind of CPA offer first. And then once you see it’s established, you start getting a lot of traffic and you perfect your funnel, then you spend the time to create your own digital product.

And the same is kind of true with physical products. You want to kind of test the waters with dropshipping. That minimizes your risk and minimizes your investment. And then as time goes on, you start supplying, sourcing from your own manufacturer or manufacturing items yourself.

So yeah, I think this is… I don’t think… I know this is one of the most often overlooked ways to monetize a website. People will create a website on brewing… you know, brewing beer or something like that… and they’ll try to monetize it by creating a digital product or by affiliating with certain other info products. The thing that makes the most sense there is if you’ve got the traffic to manufacture or source your own brewing supplies from China. Because they’re super cheap and just dropship them directly to your customer.

Once you get enough going, start building your own brand and start shipping your own branded products. Because when you’re buying in bulk and you’re buying, you know, 500 or 1,000 units at once or manufacturing your own products, they’re going to have your own brand on them, and your own custom packaging and stuff like that. And that’s where you can really get into something that’s incredibly valuable.

And even potentially down the road, a sellable asset that you could sell to someone from 10 to 20 times, even up to 35, 40 times your monthly revenue.

So yeah, worth noting. Just kind of getting off-track there.

But this is, I think, one of the best ways to build a really, really, really big business in internet marketing that most people just aren’t even looking at.

So, again, I hope to get into it more in-depth down the road and kind of create it’s own section. But probably, it would ultimately be at least 2 or 3 sections to really do this topic justice. But know it’s an option. On a high-level, those are kind of the steps you go through. Check out that article I linked.

I just mentioned this, I kind of spoiled it, Digital Products that you own. This is going to be one of the most time-consuming things to do, if you want to do it with any degree of quality. I can tell you right now.

Of course you know I’ve spent several weeks just putting together these first few sections for Free Internet Marketing Project. It is not an easy thing to do. It is very time-consuming, very tasking. And if you want to put out any degree of quality, there is so much you have to learn, and so much time you have to dedicate to it to do it well.

So, if you’re going to go this route, I recommend at least getting to 200-300 visitors per day. And monetizing through CPA marketing until you’re getting to that point. And even two or three-hundred dollars a day is kind of… what?! My brain has gone out the window again.

Even when you get to the point that you’re getting 200-300 visitors per day, it makes a lot of sense to wait longer, in most cases. Because, again, if you release your own digital product and you’re getting a 1% conversion rate, you’re still only getting 2 or 3 sales per day. And it’s just so much time and effort. I mean, to put together a really good digital product is probably going to take you at least a few weeks of full time work. So just keep that in mind.

You can continue promoting CPA offers until you get to the point taht you can really dedicate the time to doing that well. Because again, your reputation is on the line here, your brand is on the line here.

If people buy something from you, and they’ve been your follower for a long time, and it’s not the quality that they’ve come to expect from you, they will never come back to your website. They will unsubscribe from your e-mail list and they will disappear into the dark, okay?

And if you continue fostering a really strong relationship there, and growing your relationship with customer, increasing your credibility in their eyes – that relationship can last, in theory, forever. For years, and years, and years. So just keep that in mind. Always have the long-term play in mind. Don’t just burn your readers and your subscribers for a quick commission.

So, you know, once you’re getting at least 200-300 visitors per day, I would probably say more along the lines of at least 700-1,000 visitors per day, it’s probably time to start considering your own digital product if you’ve kind of tested the waters with CPA marketing and seen what your market is really interested in, what your audience is really interested in.

And you have a really good idea about at least starting market research, where you can e-mail your subscribers and see what their biggest concerns are, what their biggest struggles are, and start to build your product around those.

So, whether that’s an e-book, a video course, or something else – there’s so much potential there. You know, audio tracks, video stock footage, photography stock… by the way, to say that, would be stock photography – you know, selling really high-quality professional bundles of photos. All different kinds of ways to release your own digital products.

So, at that point is when I would kind of start considering doing it because before then, it’s just going to be way too time-consuming for the amount of money it going to produce for you.

Typically, these are going to grow into sales funnels that can really increase revenue. It’s a totally other section but… you can start doing things like selling a bundle of photos for a dollar, right? For 20 super high-quality or 50 or a 100 super high-quality photos, just way overdelivering on value.

And then maybe there’s an upsell for $47 on how to take their own really high-quality photography so they never have to buy stock photography again.

And then after that, maybe there’s another upsell that’s $100 a month membership to ongoing education and growing.

And beyond that, maybe there’s a thousand dollar, two thousand dollar course on exactly everything they have to do, step-by-step super high-quality training on how to start a local photography business.

So that’s kind of what a sales funnel looks like. A really simple example, totally off the top of my head but you can do this in pretty much every industry. And that’s when you start maximizing your value, you maximize your income, your revenue, your profits when you start kind of building the sales funnel that stair steps up – which referred to as a value ladder.

You get them in really early, you overdeliver, you show that you’re reputable and that super credible and trustworthy. And you continue doing that every single tier until you’ve possibly increased your average lifetime value per subscriber to $100 per subscriber.

And if you’re doing paid traffic and you’re paying, on average, $10 for every subscriber to come on board… and based on your value ladder, from everything, from the dollar sale to the up to the two thousand dollar course with continuity – which continuity is like a monthly recurring membership. With continuity in between, you’re getting to the point that you’re paying $10 for a new subscriber but you’re making $100 lifetime value for every subscriber, that’s $90 profit per subscriber.

If you’re getting, on average… if you’re getting 10 subscribers per day, if you’re getting 100 subscribers per day, you’re making some pretty serious money, $900 per day. And then beyond, that’s where the potential really blows up in this industry.

So I’m sorry if I’ve totally lost you just by talking numbers. They’re really clear in my head as they sound but I realized they may not be that way for everyone. But just know, again, I would really like to expand on this with its own section or two.

But when you talk about creating funnels and kind of engineering a really profitable value ladder, if you’ve got the traffic, things get really, really crazy in this industry when you start focusing on that.

So… whew! Okay! I told you it’s going to be a heavy lesson.

I want to kind of wrap up here and recap when and how to monetize your content. You’re probably going to start off with some form of CPA marketing or dropshipping when you get to that 75 or 100 visitors per day level.

Like I said, I’ll (a lot of the time) kind of lazily wait until I’m getting to 200 or 300 visitors per day before I start monetizing my content really actively. But you’re probably going to start off one of those routes.

A lot of people start off with advertising. And again, it’s just not a good idea. You can make a lot more money doing CPA marketing or dropshipping physical products than you will with advertising, unless you’re getting a ton of traffic.

Another important take-away here is don’t just spam your content with a bunch of links and banners and hope for the best. Remember to kind of focus your calls-to-action to one thing in a funnel.

And then after they convert on that thing, you know, kind of move them up to the next thing. And start practicing that value ladder – where you get from making, you know, or possibly losing $5 per every one that subscribes to making $10, or $15, or $20+ every time someone subscribes over the course of their lifetime value. Okay?

And that’s just done by testing, testing, testing. You want to… data is your friend in this industry, it is your absolute bestfriend. You want to make sure that you’re constantly testing. You’re testing new headline, you’re testing new graphics, you’re testing new e-mail messages, new subject lines.

Because every time you get a little 3% bump, or a 5% bump, or you know… say your prayers and get a 10% bump. That has a huge effect across your entire revenue for that funnel, for that website. Because they stack on top of each other. If you get a 10% bump in your opt-ins and then you get a 10% bump on how much money you’re making per opt-in, those things combine. They multiply one another, okay?

And over time, that becomes exponential and you start to, you know, kind of tweak these things. You get these 3%, 5%, 10% increases. And if you get them at multiple points across your sales funnel, they really stack up on one another and kind of, again, become very cumulative and… you know I feel like we’re talking really abstractly here, and I apologize for that. But just know that that’s where the potential is in this industry.

You know, a lot of people would just continue grinding, grinding, grinding on content and pushing out content. There’s a lot to be said for that, because it keeps things simple.

But at the same time, if you begin when it makes sense to focus on some of these other things, you can amplify your income so much faster – if you start focusing on conversion optimization, building funnels, and stuff like that. So, just keep that in mind.

One of the most common ways that you see across every industry, every niche is to use a giveaway – which is what I’ve referred to throughout this video as a lead magnet (very common term for it).

You give something really high-value away for free, you start building your e-mail list, and then you focus on building your relationship and over time, improving that lifetime value. Which again, you do best by just continuing to give them the value that they need – whatever their struggle is, whatever their problem is, help them overcome it. Continue to help them overcome it.

And whether you’re doing that through free training, or whether you’re doing that through paid opportunities along the way, if you’re always overdelivering on quality, you will continue building that lifetime value. And in time, potentially make a metric crap ton of money. So again, that’s where the money’s really at in this industry.

But I want to focus very extensively on e-mail marketing and then building funnels, and stuff like that down the road. So hopefully, I’ll get the opportunity to do that.

So this really is what makes a difference between a $1,000 a month website and a $5,000 a montt website.

I’ve known people that got five times as much traffic as I did in the same niche and they made the same amount of money as I did. And it’s just because I was so much smarter with my traffic. I focused more on conversions and I kind of hit those key points and got those 10% increases, those 5% increases across my entire sales funnel.

And before I knew it, you know, I was making just as much money as someone with 5 to 10 times as much traffic. You know, competing for the same keywords, the same level of qualified traffic. I was just being much smarter in how I built out my funnels on my sites.

So, remember that this makes the difference, alright? This can make a huge, huge, huge difference. And that’s before you even get into… if you’re converting a lot more and your traffic is really high-quality, you can make a lot more money just by negotiating with your affiliate manager. Because you’re one of their top affiliates, you’re producing some of the best revenues, some of the best money, they will actually pay you more per conversion. Whereas, you know, they may pay a standard of $2 per conversion.

I’ve negotiated up to $4 and $6 per conversion because I drove a lot of really high-quality traffic and my conversions were really, really good.

So that’s another way. Again, you just kind of tweak that little thing and you multiply how much money you’re making and how much profit you’re producing.

One little tweak like that has taken me from making $1,500 a month off of one of the affiliate offers I’m pushing to over $5,000 a month. Just because I negotiated a tiered (T-I-E-R-E-D)… so kind of steps up a tiered commission for myself. Because my traffic was converting so well and it was such high-quality.

So, anyways, hopefully we can really dig in to a lot of that stuff down the road. Because that’s where you go from I’m just getting some traffic and making some money to just really boom! Like, stepping it up to where you’re making a really ridiculous and very lucrative full-time income even from one simple authority website.

So anyways, that’s that. I hope I haven’t just totally overwhelmed your brain with way too much. I hope I’ve shown you some of the potential that… you know you’re not going to hit those points when you’re only getting 75-100 visitors per day.

But once you start getting to 300, 500, 1,000 visitors per day, if you’re in a good niche, you should be making a full-time income off of that traffic. You just have to get creative and be committed to testing. Always testing and trying new things.

Alright. So once again, I talk about a lot of things that I want to build extra sections out about in the future. Hopefully I get that opportunity. Hopefully Free Internet Marketing Project does really well, and it’s received well, and we can keep pressing forward with a lot of this, and continuing education.

So, if you have any questions, as always, please feel free to post them to the Facebook group. I’ll keep an eye out for them there. And otherwise, I will just see you in the next video.

8.2 …What Now?

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

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PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

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Important links from this video:

In this video I discuss:

  • Who should watch this video vs. who shouldn’t
  • How to set yourself up for long-term success after you’ve finished FIMP

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

8.2 Transcript Below

What’s going on, FIMP family?

So, you’re going through all of these training up to this point. You’ve completed hours and hours of self-development and you’ve got to be asking yourself: “What now? I’m coming to the end of the FIMP training, and now what do I do?” And that’s what this video is all about.

And I want to drive one thing home. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough, stop this video now unless you’ve finished all of the other training at FIMP, and at the very least, you have completed all of the following: you’ve picked your first niche, you’ve registered your domain, you’ve installed WordPress on your website – if you signed up with Bluehost, it’s automatically installed on your primary domain.

And ideally, these two aren’t required, but I would really like to see you at this point before watching this video. Because otherwise, it’s just going to complicate things for you a little bit too much: you’ve, at least, picked a handful of keywords, and hopefully, you’ve written at least your first 2 to 3 articles on your website.

So, those would be ideal. But at the very least: picked your niche, registered your domain, and WordPress is installed on your website.

So, I can’t overemphasize this: seriously, please stop this video. I know people jump around all of the time. I know tons of people skip Section 2 because they see mindset. And even though I say, over and over again: “watch Section 2, it’s usually helpful”, they skip it.

So, I know that there are going to be people that are hearing me now and going: “Ah, no, I can keep watching”. Stop this video. It’s just going to overcomplicate things, it’s going to make things confusing unless you have finished all of the other training and done everything that I just mentioned, okay?

Seriously, please stop this video if you haven’t finished everything that I just talked about.

Okay.

If you’re still watching… Seriously. I assume we’re good. Okay.

So, if you have finished all of that, I want to give you a huge congratulations. It’s a really big deal, because only 10% of people finish the training at FIMP. Even though it’s 100% free, even though it’s really step-by-step, and it doesn’t leave a whole lot of margin for error, believe it or not, only 10% of people actually complete all of the training at FIMP.

And my main focus shifts from getting you through all of the training at FIMP, because you’re obviously a self-starter and you’re really motivated, and you’re really ambitious, and you’re taking this very seriously – which is kind of important if you actually want to succeed online.

My goal is to take you from the one in ten that finishes FIMP to the one in one hundred that actually build a profitable online business.

We’ve talked about this a lot since the beginning, that it’s very few and far between when it comes to how many people succeed online and actually build a profitable business.

So, that’s what this video is about; getting you from the one in ten that finish FIMP, to the one in one hundred that are actually going to build a long-term profitable business that lasts, alright?

And that comes down to where you’re at now versus where you need to be, to be that one in one hundred.

So, right now you have the strongest foundation you can possibly get online. I don’t say that to toot my own horn. You know, I’ve just been doing this for a very long time. I’ve seen hundreds upon hundreds, thousands of people over the years attempt to build an online business.

And what has been great about that is I’ve seen a lot of people try a lot of things, and it’s made me recognize all of the patterns that lead to success and all of the patterns that lead to failure.

And that’s what ultimately drove me to create FIMP, and put it into the world, and put it into the world for free – was because I wanted to set as many people up for success as I possibly could.

Even if you stopped here, there are so many products out there that will say: “Okay, now that you’ve finished this, you need to invest in this $500 thing, or this $1,000 thing. Because without it, there’s no way you’re going to be successful.”

And they almost lead you to believe that you need something else, that’s going to make them money, whether it’s their own product or something they’re getting commissioned on.

“You need something else if you want any chance at success” – and that’s not at all true with FIMP. If you stop right here and you didn’t invest in anything else, you have everything you need to succeed online, period.

You just have to work the system, you have to stick with it, you have to be consistent, you have to put in the work, okay? So, just stick closely to the training at FIMP, and that’s all you need. Legitimately. Okay?

But, I do want to say, the more you learn in this industry, the more you’ll succeed. One of the reasons I’ve achieved the levels of success that I’ve achieved now is because I never stop learning.

There was a point, a few years in, where I stopped, I got complacent, and my my entire internet business failed. And I vowed to never make that mistake ever again in my online business.

So, I constantly keep self-developing. And I strongly recommend, as a FIMP finisher, that you do the same. Because that’s what’s going to set you up for success, the best.

And the thing that will help you the most, the best thing you can do for your success at this stage in the journey based on where people begin to fail from here out, is to get plugged in to an active internet marketing community that’s going to help you, that you can continue self-developing and most importantly, you can feel that those people are side-by-side, you’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of other people that are on the same journey as you.

Because this industry can get really lonely. And one of the biggest reasons people fail online is because they feel like they’re in it just by themselves and nobody else they know is going through these struggles, nobody else understands what they’re going through, all of the hard hours they’re putting in, and ultimately they just give up because they just can’t connect with other humans that are on the same journey as they are. And I, personally, gave up several times early in my journey because of that, too.

And that’s what this video is about – is getting you connected into a community where you can keep learning, you can keep growing, but most importantly, you can get connected with like-minded people that are going to be there to support you, be there to help you when you get stuck, and all kinds of other things. So that’s what we’re going to talk about here.

And what I’m about to recommend is, you know… there have been a handful of occasions in the Free Internet Marketing Project where I recommended premium tools… premium resources.

And this is one of those rare cases where I’m going to recommend something that’s actually a paid resource instead of a free resource, only because there’s no free resource out there that compares to it.

Even in the community at FIMP, and the training at FIMP, and the Facebook community for members, nothing compares to what I’m about to recommend, alright?

And you’ll see that. Fortunately, you can see that for free. I’ll explain that a little bit later.

But there are two types of people that are watching this video. There are going to be the people that have watched all of the training and you know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I would never recommend something simply for an affiliate commission.

You know, if that’s why I got into this industry… I’ve been doing this now, I’ve been on this side of the industry for 10 years. I’ve worked very hard to preserve my reputation, which is not an easy thing to do in this industry.

I could’ve made a hell of a lot more money, and I would be making a hell of a lot more money today if I just sacrificed my ethics and my morals and said: “I’m just going to recommend things for the affiliate commissions.”

So, hopefully, by this point, you know that I practice what I preach. And that I’m all about delivering value. And my number one priority is always your success, not my bank account.

And if you don’t believe me, and you’re made uncomfortable by this, just don’t buy it through me. Buy it outside of my affiliate link, which is below this video, and just cut me out. And that way you can go: “Oh, okay. Ian doesn’t care whether or not he makes a commission. He’s going to recommend it anyway.” Because that’s the case, I would greatly appreciate it if you help FIMP stay funded by purchasing through my affiliate link. But if that bothers you, then just don’t do it.

And then, there’s the other people that are going to be watching this, and no matter what I say, you think I went to all of this effort, and I spent hundreds of hours creating FIMP, and I continue to spend hundreds of hours every year maintaining the community, growing, helping people just to sell you something.

And if that’s where you’re at, there’s just not much I can do to convince you outside of what I’ve already done. I apologize, but I’m not even going to try. There’s just… I know where my heart’s at, and hopefully you know too. I’m not going to get stuck on this, I can get stuck on things. Hopefully, you belong in the first category. But at the same time, you can’t win them all.

So, the community I’m talking about, some of you may be familiar with, you may be experienced in, you may be of heard about it in the past and it’s called Wealthy Affiliate.

And it’s far from perfect. Even if you’ve heard about it in the past, I guarantee you haven’t heard the perspective I’m about to give on it. Because people like to talk about all the sunshine, and rainbows, and daisies, and all of the gumdrops, all of the great things about Wealthy Affiliate.

But there are a lot of things that aren’t great about Wealthy Affiliate. But there is no other place like it. I’ll talk about that a little bit later too. And at the end of the day, there is no place that I feel like you could get plugged into at this point that’s going to set you up for success better than Wealthy Affiliate, including the FIMP Facebook community. These guys are years, and years ahead of anyone else. And I’ll talk about that later.

But the first thing I want to talk about is the reasons that Wealthy Affiliate sucks. Just flat out. Because I don’t believe in sugarcoating things and I would want someone to be honest with me about these things on the front-end. So, that’s of course, what I’m going to do for you.

The things that I don’t like about Wealthy Affiliate are their foundational training, the stuff that you’ve just gone through at FIMP and everything you’ve learned, isn’t as thorough as I’d prefer it to be.

The training at Wealthy Affiliate probably is about 25% to 30% as thorough as FIMP’s training is. And that’s important because what you get as your foundation is going to shape your success forever.

I mean, if you stay in this industry for 10 or 15 years, the stuff you’ve developed at FIMP, wherever you’ve developed your foundational training, will determine a lot of your success along the way.

And so, of course you don’t really have to worry about that too much because you’ve gone through all of the FIMP training. So, that one’s kind of knocked out, that’s, you know, no concern there. But that’s the one of my biggest problems at Wealthy Affiliate.

And one of the reasons that I created FIMP was to give people a stronger foundation than the number 1 place for beginner internet marketers online was giving. Even they weren’t thorough enough. So that’s one of the reasons I set out to create FIMP.

Another thing, and this isn’t just something I don’t like about Wealthy Affiliate. This is something I despise about Wealthy Affiliate. It’s just the only thing I despise about Wealthy Affiliate, and I am a very vocal opponent of this. They have something called Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp, it’s abbreviated WA Bootcamp. And it’s all about… you’ve probably seen this in other programs, as well. It’s all about becoming successful by promoting their product.

This rolled out, I want to say somewhere around 3 years ago. I have disliked it since it begin. Like I said, I’ve been a very vocal opponent of it. There’s a post on StoppingScams.com about why I don’t think anyone should do Wealthy Affiliate Bootcamp.

So, when you get in there, just know to avoid that. It’s something that I make sure any one I refer into Wealthy Affiliate knows to avoid. I’ll talk about it more in another video down the road. But at the end of the day, it just doesn’t set you up for success like their other path of training and community support does.

And sometimes because it’s a community filled with a lot of newer internet marketers, some pretty crazy stuff gets taught and perpetuated. Things like: Backlinks don’t work. Even when google themselves… you know, there have been engineers and analysts from Google that have come out. And year after year, there are more of them that come out and say: “Hey! Backlinks are still the number one thing that influences rankings”

So, to say backlinks don’t work, really bothers me. Because even Google is telling us that they’re going to continue to be dependent on backlinks as a number one indicator, the number one signal for rankings for years to come.

They are getting more advanced, they are things that are improving, their algorithm is factoring in more things outside of links. But links are still very important. You have to be smart about how you do it, right? We’ve talked about that some.

You don’t want to build backlinks like you used to in 2010 or 2005. But they’re still important, right? And I take issue with any community that says backlinks don’t work. Because it’s pretty clear, by any good data you look at, that backlinks are still really important.

Another thing that comes from the very top of Wealthy Affiliate that I don’t care for very much, personally, based on my experience, is that comments are one of the biggest factors for search engine optimization and search engine rankings.

You know, basically right now, I’m knocking out the top things that you will see in Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll go: “Ah, this is different than what Ian said.” So, I would just say, Ignore them. There’s a lot of good stuff there, too.

But I, personally, have never seen good data, I don’t see good data for my own websites – and I own several of them that shows that comments are one of the biggest factors for rankings.

It would also be really idiotic for Google to do that because it’s one of the easiest things to game. It’s one of the easiest things to fake. And Wealthy Affiliate actually even has like comment exchanges and stuff built into their community, just don’t waste any time with that.

So, yeah, I’m, personally, of the belief that you get traffic and you get more comments, not you get comments and you get more traffic and more rankings. So, it’s a matter of chicken before the egg. And again, I’ve done thorough research, I’ve looked for it and looked for it, and I just have not seen any convincing data that shows that comments lead the rankings, rather than rankings lead the comments, okay?

So, the good thing about all of this is that not only in this video am I here telling you avoid these things, and setting you up for success in the Wealthy Affiliate community that way, but I personally coach every one of my referrals at Wealthy Affiliate on what to avoid.

They have some really cool systems in place that allow me to do that without a whole lot of effort. And so, you’re never going to have to worry about any of those kind of potholes in Wealthy Affiliate, that if you were referred in by someone else, you would potentially fall into. Because basically, what I’m doing through Wealthy Affiliate and through this video is I’m patching those potholes so you never trip over the things that could compromise or jeopardize your success. Okay?

So, now that I’ve talked about the things that I, personally, think suck at Wealthy Affiliate, I want to tell you the reasons that I’ve been at Wealthy Affiliate for over 5 years.

I joined in October 2012. So I’ve been a Wealthy Affiliate premium member, I will continue to be a Wealthy Affiliate premium member. The guys that founded it, the co-founders, their hearts are in the right place. They’ve had opportunity, after opportunity, after opportunity to kind of shift into that really immoral side of internet marketing and do some shady stuff, and they never have.

What they have demonstrated through their training and through the way they’ve built Wealthy Affiliate over the years is that we’re very like-minded. Where I’m at… and I try very hard to be ethical and guide people without thinking about my own monetary gain, and just help people become successful. They have done that over and over again but for many more years than I have, even.

So, the reasons I’ve been a Wealthy Affiliate member for over 5 years is that there is so much training on topics that FIMP doesn’t cover yet. And I want to cover in the future, and I want to cover really in-depth, but with me working on my own internet marketing businesses, it’s a very difficult thing for me to do.

I still have every intention to, I still plan to, and I will continue to record training. But in the mean time, there’s no better place you can go to continue your education and build on that foundation that you’ve poured at FIMP than Wealthy Affiliate. There is no safer community online.

Like I said, they’ve been doing this for years. And just between their own training and all of the training that other members have posted, and other experienced internet marketers have posted, there is a massive training library at Wealthy Affiliate that FIMP just can’t touch. And they’re years ahead, and it continues to grow almost exponentially. So, it’s going to be very difficult to keep up. So, I think you’ll really love that. And that’s one of the reasons I love it.

There are also weekly live webinars by a guy that really knows his stuff. He’s a veteran internet marketer, he runs his own local SEO business, and has a lot of really noteworthy clients, and also does a lot of affiliate marketing, as well. Ans his name is Jay.

And Jay is just a brilliant internet marketer. There are very few people in this industry that are better to learn from. And literally, every single week, he does a live webinar at the end of the week. And his material is just outstanding. He’s a great teacher.

There’s just nowhere else you can go for as cheap as the monthly dues are at Wealthy Affiliate, and get access to someone live, one-on-one, like Jay at Wealthy Affiliate. And so, that’s definitely… that alone is worth the investment at Wealthy Affiliate. But there’s so much more beyond that, as well.

And some of the community’s most knowledgeable members and veteran internet marketers (myself included) regularly add training to the community. Regularly blog about things that we’re learning. But also, something that I’ll be doing a lot more of now is I’m creating video training for Wealthy Affiliate. Just putting that into the community, and of course you would have access to all of that as well in the Wealthy Affiliate community.

And so, like I said earlier too, the community engagement and support is just unbeatable. You can’t go anywhere else and find a community like Wealthy Affiliate. It’s just such a safe place, it’s monitored so closely. It’s just incredible, what they’ve created there.

You know, there were… a couple of years ago, when bootcamp really started to gain a lot of traction. A lot of people are going into it, and I, personally, from the very beginning, didn’t feel like that set people up for success very well.

And I was really upset that it was becoming as popular and as prevalent within the community as it did. And I looked around for days on end to find a place that I could refer people to that was better than Wealthy Affiliate, and a safer community overall. And I just couldn’t find it – no exaggeration, I could not find it.

And at the end of the day, I mean, I’ve kept my eye out over the years and we’ve reviewed hundreds of products as StoppingScams, and nothing else comes close to Wealthy Affiliate.

So, ultimately, what I decided was instead of stopping promoting Wealthy Affiliate altogether, was I started using their systems that they haven’t placed for me to stay connected to my referrals. And like I said, kind of patching those potholes to make sure you never fall into them. Because there just is no other place that you can end up that’s better than Wealthy Affiliate. And it takes a lot for me to say that about a product.

After all of these years, there are very few places that I have been impressed by, but there is only one place that I would give a… I would say an unqualified recommendation, but I have qualified this recommendation a lot. There’s just nowhere that I would recommend stronger than Wealthy Affiliate. You’re just not going to find a better place online to keep growing and keep plugged in to a community.

And the best thing of all is because of the systems in place, they have some incredible support tools for their members like me. I can personally guide and mentor every single one of my referrals into Wealthy Affiliate. And that’s really special for me. It allows me to have a much more one-on-one relationship and keep tabs on your journey a lot easier. And there’s just no way I can do that using something like a Facebook group, because Facebook does not have the tools built-in to help make that efficient like Wealthy Affiliate does.

And so, one of the nice things about Wealthy Affiliate, especially now that you’ve finished FIMP and I know you’re serious about this journey, is we can connect on more of a one-on-one level. And whenever you can’t find what you need at Wealthy Affiliate, or you post a question and nobody answers or gives the answer that you were looking for, you can always reach out to me, individually.

I know that early in FIMP I talked about how you need to be very independent and don’t be you know, pinging me for every single question. You have there a lot of things that you can Google.

And you know, the nice thing about Wealthy Affiliate is that they have systems in place that allow me to have that one-on-one relationship, without it being super time-consuming.

So, you know, that basically takes us down to… I know this is getting a little bit long-winded, but it’s something I’m really passionate about. And again, it’s something that in order for you to go in and have success, you have to go about it a very specific way.

So, I apologize for taking up so much time for this video. But at the end of the day, this is what I truly believe sets you up for success best, so I didn’t want to just make a quick 5-minute video and move on.

So, if all of this sounds good to you and you’re interested in checking it out, you can check it out for free. They have something called a “Starter” account. And if you want to do it through my affiliate link and support FIMP and also, you know, get access to the resources that my referrals get… unfortunately, the only way my referrals get that information is if they’re tagged as one of my referrals because it’s built into Wealthy Affiliate’s system.

This is the link you would use: it’s stoppingscams.com/fimpfinisher (all one word, all lowercase). And you can check it out for free. I don’t get commissioned if you check it out for free. This is an affiliate link. It does keep FIMP funded, but only if you upgrade to premium, Ultimately, because you decide it’s good fit for you and where you’re at on your journey.

So, after you create a free account, fill-out your profile just really briefly. You don’t have to do anything super fancy, but upload an image and post your description about yourself, introduce yourself to the community.

And please stop by my profile (you can skip this one step, if you want to). I would love to know that you made it. I would love to know that you went through FIMP, and then you decided: “Okay, I’m going to keep growing, I’m going to keep developing, I’m really serious about this. So, Ian, I ended up at Wealthy Affiliate.”

So, please stop by my profile and just say hi. Just introduce yourself really quickly if we haven’t already connected. And if we have already connected, just let me know you made into Wealthy Affiliate. Because that’s really special for me, to know that a community that I’ve been a member of, and I’m so passionate about – someone from FIMP made it in there, as well.

So, my profile is “Pribs” (P-R-I-B-S), and you can just search that on their platform and you’ll find my profile, and stop by and introduce yourself.

And then, you know, the best part of Wealthy Affiliate, just start interacting with the community. They have a live chat feature, they have the ability to post questions, and you can do a lot of that for the first several days that you’re a free member. If you decide to upgrade, you get unlimited access to the community, and posting in the community, and stuff. But you at least get a taste of it, early on.

And one thing I do want to mention is, you know, in the free starter account at Wealthy Affiliate, you do get access to some training. At the free level, it’s lower level than what you’ve already gotten at FIMP – which is great. It speaks volume as to what we’re doing at FIMP. But at the same time, just know that that is not representative of the plethora of training that becomes available to you after you upgraded to premium.

They have several levels of what’s called “Online Entrepreneur Certification”, I’ll talk about that here in a minute. They have 5 levels and they’re continuing to add to them. You would pick up at level 3 – is where FIMP has left off.

So, you only get access to level 1, as a free member. So that’s not going to be very representative, or very helpful for you if you’ve already completed FIMP, just know that.

And know that if you do like the community, and you like what they’re doing at Wealthy Affiliate, and you decide to invest in their premium membership, which is $19 your first month and $49 every month thereafter. There are some discounts for an annual membership too. But if you decide to do that, you’ll get access to the premium training, as well; which is where you would continue learning, continue growing, and continue developing.

So, the other thing is, I mentioned some of the systems at Wealthy Affiliate has in place for me to stay in touch with you, and keep tabs on you, and guide you, check in on you, et cetera. One of those things is automated messages that I get to post to your profile at Wealthy Affiliate. So keep an eye on your profile for those, again, full disclosure automated messages from me that I’ve put in place.

But, if you ever get stuck, or you look at one of the questions I asked in one of those automated messages and you go: “No, I do really need help with this”, reply to it because I personally receive every single one of those, and I personally respond to every single one of those.

So, although I have some automated messages set up at Wealthy Affiliate, it’s one of the things that enables me to have that more one-on-one coach/mentor relationship with the people that I refer over to Wealthy Affiliate.

So, keep an eye on your profile and on your inbox, if you decide to upgrade to premium. Because I am always just one reply away from my referrals at Wealthy Affiliate, if you decide you need a little bit of help.

So, I just mentioned this too, if you decide to invest in a premium membership and you get access to the premium training, pick up where we left off in the Online Entrepreneur Certification level 3. And I’ll post a link to that below this video as well, so you can just click directly over. But again, you won’t be able to access it until you have a premium account. It’s not accessible through the free starter account. Alright?

So, I want to knock out, before we tie off here, just a couple of questions that are probably on a lot of your minds. And I know, if you don’t have them on your mind right now, they’re going to come up. I’ll just blow through these really quick.

One of them is: Do I need Bluehost or external hosting since Wealthy Affiliate premium includes hosting?

The answer is absolutely yes. In my personal opinion, Wealthy Affiliate has a lot of cool features built into their hosting platform, they also have some limitations. But at the end of the day, if you build your website there, you get trapped into, essentially, $49 a month hosting. If you ever want to cancel your account, and then you have to go through the hassle of transferring your websites out of Wealthy Affiliate to an external host.

So, it’s cheap enough, that from the very beginning, I just recommend hosting externally. That way, when you do decide that you want to leave Wealthy Affiliate, whether it’s a month down the road, or 3 months down the road, or 8 months down the road, not everyone’s going to become a Wealthy Affiliate member for over 5 years, like I have been, you can continue to have access to your websites and not lose access to them because you cancel your Wealthy Affiliate membership.

Another thing that people ask a lot is: Should I use Jaaxy (which is Wealthy Affiliate’s keyword tool) or LongTail Pro (which I teach as the premium keyword tool in FIMP)?

If you’ve invested in LongTail Pro, absolutely, hands down, use it over Jaaxy. The data is better, the competition data is more reliable, the keyword search volume is more reliable, it’s just all around much better, more reliable tool.

But if you can’t afford LongTail Pro, Wealthy Affiliate’s free version of Jaaxy is better than nothing. They’ve got a really cool engine built into that that’s very good for suggesting keywords. But just make sure that you still use the free tools taught at FIMP. I believe that’s video 5.5, The Free Keyword Planner, Google Keyword Planner, and the Moz bar to check competition. Just double-check the keywords you’re finding in Jaaxy, still. Because the data just isn’t as reliable as I would prefer it to be.

I know they’re constantly improving that, too. But as of right now, as I record this video, just continue to set yourself up for success, as well as possible, using the tools taught at FIMP, as well. But Jaaxy can help a lot if you don’t have the money to afford a premium keyword tool.

And, you know, one of the biggest questions I see coming up at this point is… okay, you’ve taught me a ton at FIMP and you’re going to see some overlap at Wealthy Affiliate and you’re going to go: “Well, how the hell do I actually get the most out of my membership at Wealthy Affiliate?”

Pick up where FIMP left off at the Online Entrepreneur Certification level 3, if you decide to upgrade to premium. Get plugged in to the Wealthy Affiliate community because it is just an outstanding community.

One of the best ways to learn is to teach. I have found that over and over again in everything I’ve done in my life. And you will have plenty of opportunities to help other people and teach.

Obviously, you don’t want to get too caught up in that because it takes time away from your business, and that should be your main focus. But at the end of the day, the more you teach other people in the Wealthy Affiliate community because you have gotten a better foundation than they have at Wealthy Affiliate, the better that’s going to solidify and make more concrete your own understanding of internet business and set you up for long term success.

So, get plugged in to the community, ask questions when you have them yourself, help other people when you have answers to their questions, as long as it’s not taking too much time away from your business. And you’re going to love that. That community is just outstanding, and it is unmatched, unparalleled across the rest of the internet marketing world.

Attend the live weekly webinars by Jay. There are always replays too, if you can’t attend live. Check those out because he’s one of the most knowledgeable members in Wealthy Affiliate.

And drop me a message if you’re ever stuck anywhere. Again, this is one of the biggest advantages to having a Wealthy Affiliate membership is that they have the systems and tools in place for me to have that more one-on-one relationship.

And also, the nice thing is, by this point, especially in this video if you’re still watching, a lot of people have been weeded out throughout the FIMP training. So, it kind of, separates, to live this to the very end, it separates the people that are serious about their success and those that aren’t.

So, I don’t get overwhelmed by this huge support burden by a lot of people that aren’t ever going to take this very seriously. I know you’re serious, I know you’re ambitious, I know you’re committed to this journey, so I want us to have that one-on-one relationship. And the best way for that to happen is through Wealthy Affiliate’s platform. Thanks to the tools and support features that they built in, that I have access to.

So, if you get stuck anywhere, if you can’t get the help you need from the community, drop me a messages, post to my profile, whatever, get in touch with me so that I can help you personally. Alright?

So, I know it’s been a long video. Thanks for hanging in there with me through it all. I guess it’s fitting that we finished again. This is such an important video. Where you go from here will determine so much about your success online.

And I just want to congratulate you for finishing FIMP. That is such a huge accomplishment. And I don’t want to undermine that by just going: “Hey! Alright, you’re done! Now here’s another assignment.”

But at the end of the day, the best thing for you, and the best thing for your success is to get plugged in to a community and keep learning, and keep growing, and don’t become complacent or stagnant. And I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the best way to keep you moving forward is to stay in touch with, more of, a one-on-one relationship through Wealthy Affiliate.

So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. I hope you’ve enjoyed all of the FIMP training. I have no doubt that you will enjoy the Wealthy Affiliate community, if you decide to get plugged in.

So, if you want to do it in a way that supports FIMP, please click the button below this video, or the link below this video.

If you’re uncomfortable with me making a commission if you upgrade to premium, just go ahead and head straight over to Wealthy Affiliate. But I would greatly appreciate your support for what I’m trying to do at Free Internet Marketing Project if you would create an account through my Wealthy Affiliate link, posted below this video.

And I look forward to seeing you there. I look forward to, hopefully, continuing to see you around the FIMP Facebook community, as well. And most importantly, I look forward to seeing where you end up several months or several years down the road.

And, hopefully, we get you to that one in one hundred that not only finish FIMP, but built a successful, profitable, long-term internet business that helped you change your life.

So, thank you all so much for sticking with me through this long, long, long video. And for completing the FIMP training. I truly hope it helps you change your life.

I’ll be around if you need me. Take care. And I hope to talk to you soon.

8.1 When and How to Monetize Your Content

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

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[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

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Helpful links from this video: https://stoppingscams.com/how-to-make-money-dropshipping-using-aliexpress-and-shopify/

In this video I discuss:

  • How many daily visitors you should be receiving before you start worrying about how to monetize your content
  • How to monetize your content using physical products
  • How you should start with physical products and work your way up
  • How to monetize your content using CPA marketing
  • How to monetize your content using digital products
  • When to move from CPA marketing to creating your own digital products
  • Why this is so important and how big of a difference it can make in your bottom line/revenue

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

 

8.1 Transcript Below

What’s going on, beautiful people?

Time for another lesson. Another section. This section’s going to be pretty brief overall, at least as I have it planned for now.

And the main thing that I want to talk about in this section is when and how to monetize your content. So this will be a fairly long lesson compared to a lot of the ones we’ve done recently.

But it’s a very, very important thing to address. Because just like people try to get the website design perfect from the very beginning and they play with all the colors, they’re trying to get all their widgets perfect, and, they’re just tweaking all these things that don’t really matter until you get traffic; monetization is the exact same thing. It falls under the same category.

It’s not going to do you any good to worry about all those little details and how finally integrated your affiliate links are. Or how well you’re monetizing or you’re optimizing for opt-ins to your e-mail list. None of that’s really going to matter until you get traffic anyways.

So I want to talk about when to start monetizing your content exactly. And how you might consider monetizing your content once you break that threshold, okay?

So, if you stick things out until you’re getting traffic, that’s really when it’s time to start worrying about monetization. So typically, this is, at least, a few months in. I’ll talk about some exceptions there.

But once you get traffic, it’s time to start making money, right? Once you’re getting consistent traffic, it’s time to start making money. And the way you do that is by monetizing your content.

You will notice that in my article that I created in this section about creating high-quality content, there were no affiliate links, there were no calls-to-action yet. And it’s just flat out… in my experience, it’s not worth spending the time on until you start seeing which of your posts are getting the most traffic, which of your posts are getting the most engagement. And then, you worry about monetizing those posts.

Because I could spend at least a couple three, four hours hunting down affiliate offers or trying to figure out how I’m going to monetize the traffic for that one article. And on top of that, I could spend all kinds of time, as much as dozens of hours, coming up with a lead magnet to get people to opt-in to my list. And none of it means anything until I get traffic anyways.

And another thing you’ll find is – as you work on these dozens of articles over the coming months, you have no idea which ones are going to gain traction first.

So, you could spend two hours optimizing each one of those articles for monetization and getting people to click through your affiliate links, buy things through your affiliate links.

And the ones that you least expect, could be the ones that get the most traffic because they’re the ones that get rankings first.

So, you can spend all kinds of time. Just frankly, in the early stage is wasted, that could go towards traffic-producing activities, worrying about monetization. But I wouldn’t really suggest that. I wouldn’t recommend that.

I would recommend focusing on content, content, content and some promotion. Focusing on everything we’ve talked about up until this point. And once you start to see that tipping point, where your traffic is catching, that’s when you should worry about monetization. Because before you get traffic, it’s just not going to mean anything.

You may lose out on a few dollars over the first few months. But, you know, if you lose out on a couple of hundred dollars over the first 8 or 12 months versus being highly productive and putting out more content and focusing on the things that matter at that stage of your business, I think it’s a pretty fair trade-off.

Because your going to see a lot better results once you start to hit that tipping point if you just focus on the things that matter in those early stages. And that is traffic-producing activities – which are content creation, on-page SEO, picking good keywords and other forms of promotion that we discussed in the last section.

I would say, once your consistently getting about 75-100 visitors… ah, I say that per month, that’s actually supposed to be per day. I’m actually going to correct that because that’s a pretty, pretty big one. Sorry about that. It’s important that that’s in there correctly.

So, once you’re consistently getting 75-100 visitors per day, is when I would start worrying about a monetization. I often don’t even worry about it until I’m getting a couple of hundred visitors per day, it’s just a matter of taste. And I can understand if you’re antsy and you want to get making money as quickly as possible after you’re getting traffic.

And it’s warranted, I’d say, once you get to 75-100 visitors per day. You’re not going to be making anywhere near a full-time income in most niches with only 75-100 visitors per day, but it warrants the time and effort to start worrying about content optimization and monetization. Okay?

So, next bullet point I guess. So, you’re going to have several options and I’m going to go through each one of these, one-by-one.

You have advertising as an option. You have CPA marketing – which is Cost Per Acquisition marketing – and it’s one of the many areas of affiliate marketing that you can participate in. Physical products that you own or dropshipping, and digital products that you own. We’re going to take a look at each one of these in this video.

So, we’ve discussed these, somewhat, a long time ago in one of the first sections. We talked about different ways to monetize content and we talked about each one of these when we discussed reverse math. If you can remember that far back, because it’s probably a ways back, depending on how quickly you’ve covered these lessons.

But advertising is going to be one of the most straightforward and easy things to implement. Especially if you’re going to Google Adsense route. You basically just copy a code from Google Adsense, you paste it on your website and it starts populating ads automatically. And you get paid based on how many times people click those ads on your website.

But as I discussed when we visited this topic the first time, advertising doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re getting a ton of traffic. I’m taking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of visitors a month. And the vast majority of websites just never make it to that point of traffic. And even if they did, unless it’s just in a non-buying audience or it’s just this really weird traffic that isn’t super valuable any other way, advertising is going to be one of the least effective ways to monetize your content.

Because odds are that you could integrate CPA marketing intelligently or your own physical products or your own digital products in a way that you would make a lot more money than advertising is going to produce. Because really, advertising just produces pennies per thousands of visitors. And at the end of the day, that’s just not a level of traffic most people are going to hit to make this make sense.

And as I mentioned, for the vast majority of websites, what this is actually going to do is it’s going to distract from the things that actually make you money.

So what a lot of people do is they integrate maybe their own product and they integrate their own lead magnet – which is opt-in to my e-mail list, get these free things so that you can start pitching them in a sales funnel. And then they, you know… add advertising and they’ve got all of these different CPA offers, their own offers, lead magnet, advertising. And it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because what you’re actually doing is dwindling your conversion optimization.

We know based on study, after study, after study in the conversion optimization industry that every time you stack something else onto your page – whether it’s a banner, whether it’s an ad, whether it’s an in-text link – if those things aren’t congruent with one another, if they’re not all part of the same sales funnel on that page, what you’re doing is you’re pulling someone in multiple different directions.

And there have even been psychological studies that show: when you give people too many options, they just don’t make a decision. That’s something that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his book, Blink. And it’s proven hard science, it’s just how we react as humans.

So the best practice for conversion optimization is to keep people on one straight funnel and kind of pitch them one offer at a time.

Which is why if you see any of my websites, you’ll notice that I have a consistent funnel across all sections of a website. Maybe I have multiple different niches on the same website because it’s really established authority website, but you know… for example: on StoppingScams internet marketing stuff stays internet marketing stuff, survey stuff stays survey stuff.

I don’t pitch survey people on the internet marketing stuff. I don’t pitch internet marketing subscribers, that are looking for ways to make money online, survey offers and ways to make money taking surveys online. I don’t pitch either of those markets anything having to do with MLM or network marketing, because it hurts conversion rates when you do so.

And so, whenever you put ads on a website unnecessarily, maybe you’re making a few extra pennies per day. But what you’re actually doing is really dropping your conversion rate for other offers that could make you more money.

So, for the vast majority of people, advertising just isn’t going to make sense. It’s super easy, yes. It makes you a little bit of money. You know, literally, pocket change. But it’s just not going to make sense for the vast majority of people. Unless you’re getting hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors a month.

The next thing that I would like to discuss is CPA Marketing. And in Cost Per Acquisition Marketing, under that umbrella, you have pay-per-sale, pay-per-free-trial giveaway, pay-per-lead… just all kinds of offers that kind of exist under that umbrella.

And there are tons of different CPA networks that have all kinds of offers that you can look for and compare and shop.

The most important thing about CPA marketing, about anything, when you’re talking about monetization is to remember to integrate offers that are actually valuable to your audience.

If you’re writing a piece of content about a specific topic and about how to solve a pain point or answer their question, don’t just pitch the thing that’s going to make you the most money. Because that’s going to significantly, again, decrease your conversion rates.

What you want to do is you want to pitch things that are actually valuable and helpful to them. And not only are you going to make commissions that way, but you’re going to forge a relationship that you can continue to monetize, as time goes on. And get your lifetime value (which is abbreviated LTV) up and up and up with that subscriber as long as you never burn that bridge.

The first time you recommend something that’s not useful to them, and you’re just recommending it because it’s going to make you a good chunk of money, you’re very likely to burn that relationship and never be able to make money off of that subscriber or that website visitor ever again. And on top of that, most of them won’t even convert because it’s not something that’s truly valuable to them.

So remember that when you’re integrating CPA offers and, again, anything else for monetization on your website, you want to continue building that relationship. You want to continue adding value. You don’t just want to throw out there whatever is going to make you the most money.

If something’s going to make you $10 and it’s relevant. Or something’s going to make you $100 and it’s kind of a stretch, it’s a little bit relevant. Maybe I can get people to convert. Pitch the thing that’s going to make you $10, because you’re going to convert more people and probably make up the vast majority of that difference, if not significantly more by converting more people than the $100 offer that’s only slightly relevant with convert. I hope that makes sense.

It’s best to integrate CPA offers through, in my experience… through in-text links and kind of buttons throughout the content.

So if you’re talking about something and someone’s reading, reading, reading… in my experience, you convert much higher if you kind of integrate your affiliate links in the content as text. Because they’re reading the article and, again, it’s value to them, it’s relevant to what you’re talking about.

If it makes sense to do so, those are some of the best converting links that I have. And some of the best paying affiliate links that I’ve had on any of my websites over the past 10 years.

It converts much better, typically speaking, than banners. Especially if you have multiple banners for different products down the right-hand side of your website, or at the top of your website, or in your content. Those banners just don’t work remotely as well as in-text links and buttons with really strong calls-to-action that tie in contextually to whatever you’re talking about.

So, if you’ve just made a reference to something in your content and you hit a point where it makes sense to add a button – a call-to-action button right there – you know, loop it in to whatever you’re talking about in the content. And try to create a compelling call-to-action, that not only ties in to the content, but also is really enticing to your audience.

And whenever you’re linking through affiliate links, you are legally required to make sure it’s really obvious. You know, the FTC implemented that a long time a go. A lot of people implement this by just kind of trying to bury it in their terms and conditions, and that is not the blatant label that the FTC requires – this is for U.S.-based companies. But other countries also have their own requirements, you need to familiarize yourself with them if you’re getting into affiliate marketing.

But it’s also a good way to forge that trust and that relationship. And typically, what I’m going to do, because I am promoting things that are of value to my audience. I just make it really clear: “Hey! This is an affiliate link and this is how we stay funded. These commissions are what keep us going. They’re what keep us doing this, so please support us by purchasing through our affiliate link.”

And because I am pitching things of value, I’m not just trying to take them for every dime they’re worth. It’s a highly compelling way to increase your conversions and get people supporting you.

Because there’s no reason for them not to support you and purchase through your affiliate link if you’ve really gone out of your way to create a high-quality content that helps them. It’s just a click of a button, they’re going to pay the same amount either way. So they might as well just buy through you.

So, again, Conversion Optimization 101, it’s usually best to push one offer rather than spread your visitor’s attention across several different offers.

And you can find a lot of CPA offers, pretty much no matter what your niche is, through sites like OfferVault or AffPlus.com. If you want to read reviews from really established affiliates on which CPA networks are the best, there’s AffPaying – A F F… and I can’t remember if there’s a hyphen or not… A F F – Paying. And if there’s no hyphen, it’s just AffPaying, one word… P A Y I N G. AffPaying. Just google it. I can’t remember if it’s a .net or .com.

But they’re the go-to resource for if you’re looking to apply for a CPA network. Kind of… and read reviews on CPA networks, whether they stiff their people on commissions, how helpful their affiliate managers are, how great their selection on offers, and how great their pay-outs compare to other CPA networks. That’s a really, really good resource.

And one of the reasons you want to wait until you’re getting, at least, 75-100 visitors per day, especially when you’re talking CPA marketing, is because any reputable CPA network is going to want to see you have existing traffic.

You know, it’s really hard to get approved for any good CPA network if you’re just getting started. You know, you can get approved for Amazon but their commissions are pretty low compared to a lot of those CPA networks that have pay-per-free-trial giveaways, pay-per-lead, pay-per-email submit, all kinds of stuff like that.

So, that’s just another reason to wait until you’re getting to the point that you’re getting 75-100 visitors per day. Because you’re just not going to get approved by most reputable CPA networks otherwise. And for a lot of them, that even may not be enough traffic.

But if you pick up the phone and you call a lot of those CPA networks and you get in touch with an affiliate manager, you can get approved, a lot of the time, even for a brand new website. If you call them, you talk to them, you prove that you’re trustworthy and you prove that you know what you’re talking about, a lot of the times those guys will approve you just because you went to that extra effort. So keep that in mind as well.

But hopefully, somewhere down the road, I’ll be able to create a more extensive lesson about how to apply for affiliate networks and get approved even if your traffic numbers aren’t as high as they may usually like to see.

Okay. Physical products that you own or dropshipping – this is something I started doing a lot of in my business in the last year. And it’s been really, really helpful to diversify my streams of revenue.

If you go this route, you’re likely going to start off with dropshipping and expands into managing your own inventory, sourcing your own products, or even possibly manufacturing your own products as volume increases. Because, again, 75-100 visitors per day, you’re probably not going to get a massive amount of conversions.

You may be lucky to get 1 or 2 sales per day, pushing physical products, unless it’s just a really, really targeted piece of content – which that does happen, where you would get 5-10% conversion rates compared to in the industry standard of 0.5% or 1%. But anyway around it, you’re probably going to start off with dropshipping.

And for those of you who don’t know what dropshipping is, I apologize. It’s where you never manage inventory, you just receive the order from a customer, you pass that information along to a supplier somewhere else and they ship directly to your customer. You never touch the inventory.

And typically, you’re probably going to be marking up your products at least 2 or 3 times. So maybe someone pays you $20, you buy it from someone else for $5 and they ship it directly to your customer. And now you’ve made $15 profit. So, that’s a pretty cool way to make money if you know what you’re doing.

AliExpress.com – a lot of products source from China there – is kind of the go-to for cheap products. And you just want to make sure you pay attention to the reviews when you’re sourcing products from there, and how many purchases that product has, and how many purchases that supplier has, when you’re looking on AliExpress.

Because if you’re not ordering the product yourself and verifying quality first, which is the ideal thing to do, you at least want to make sure that it has a lot of reviews, a lot of purchases and a lot of happy customers. Otherwise, you’re really likely to get something shipped to your customer that’s a total piece of crap. And that’s going to hurt your reputation and your relationship with your subscriber, again, and probably burn a bridge that you can never make money off of them again. So be careful with that.

And I actually discussed this extensively – how to evaluate products, how to source products, how to even automate the process whenever you receive an order… just kind of one-click their software, that will go in and fill-out all the customer information – their name, their address – and pass that, all of that, onto your supplier that you’re using to dropship to the customer. Rather than you having to do all of that manually, which is a pretty big pain in the butt.

So, I go through all of that in the article on the screen right now. It is a very, very, very extensive lesson. One of the most extensive on StoppingScams.com. And I think you’ll find it’s very helpful and very high-quality.

So, if this is something you’re interested in doing and you want to start with dropshipping, once you get to 75-100 visitors per day and it starts making sense to integrate some of these things to your content, that is a very, very, very good article for you to check out. I think you’ll find it really insightful.

So, it’s based on experiences in my own business where I got a dropshipping site, up to a little over a hundred thousand dollars of revenue per month.

So, yeah, it’s not to be overlooked. It’s not like I’m some chump that’s just speculating at these things. Whether you believe me or not, that’s up to you.

But it was an adventure, for sure. And it’s something that I’ve really enjoyed, again, expanding as an extra stream of revenue in my business. Because I come from SEO, I come from affiliate marketing. So to get into the kind of the e-commerce world and crack dropshipping – which I always frankly thought was kind of a myth that product publishers kind of made up, was really, really fun and adventurous.

So, all of my experiences are documented, and everything I learned are documented in that article. So, I highly, highly recommend it.

In time, once you’re getting to the point that you’re consistently selling, you know, 100, or 200, or 300 of the same item through your site, you might consider either going directly to the manufacturer. Because most of those suppliers on AliExpress aren’t the manufacturers, they’re just middlemen that buy in bulk.

So they’ll go and they’ll buy from the actual manufacturer. They’ll mark it up, and it’s still super cheap for us in a way that we can mark it up to our consumers. But they’re probably marking it up 1-2 times, at least, themselves.

So, you can kind of cut the middlemen out, go directly to the supplier or start manufacturing yourself and ordering bulk inventory – where you’re buying 500 or 1,000 of these units at once. And fulfilling yourself from your own home or office. Or also there’s the ability to partner with a… oh, I’m having a brain fart… fulfillment facility.

So, you can kind of ship all of your inventory there. Amazon does this too. But there are a lot of companies out there that, you know, you’ll pay a dollar per product, per order that comes through. And they will ship it to your customer.

So technically, you’re still kind of dropshipping even though you’re buying inventory in bulk.

And again, this is something that I’d really like to dig into, really in-depth, down the road. But for now, just know that this is an option and you’re probably going to start off testing the waters with dropshipping. Because it’s really high-risk to buy a thousand units of something, even if it’s only $5 per unit. You’re still paying $5,000 out of pocket before you even know how well it’s going to sell.

So it’s kind of the equivalent of, you know… I’ll talk about digital products here in a second. But typically, you don’t start off just releasing your own digital product. You kind of test the waters with a similar affiliate offer. Some kind of CPA offer first. And then once you see it’s established, you start getting a lot of traffic and you perfect your funnel, then you spend the time to create your own digital product.

And the same is kind of true with physical products. You want to kind of test the waters with dropshipping. That minimizes your risk and minimizes your investment. And then as time goes on, you start supplying, sourcing from your own manufacturer or manufacturing items yourself.

So yeah, I think this is… I don’t think… I know this is one of the most often overlooked ways to monetize a website. People will create a website on brewing… you know, brewing beer or something like that… and they’ll try to monetize it by creating a digital product or by affiliating with certain other info products. The thing that makes the most sense there is if you’ve got the traffic to manufacture or source your own brewing supplies from China. Because they’re super cheap and just dropship them directly to your customer.

Once you get enough going, start building your own brand and start shipping your own branded products. Because when you’re buying in bulk and you’re buying, you know, 500 or 1,000 units at once or manufacturing your own products, they’re going to have your own brand on them, and your own custom packaging and stuff like that. And that’s where you can really get into something that’s incredibly valuable.

And even potentially down the road, a sellable asset that you could sell to someone from 10 to 20 times, even up to 35, 40 times your monthly revenue.

So yeah, worth noting. Just kind of getting off-track there.

But this is, I think, one of the best ways to build a really, really, really big business in internet marketing that most people just aren’t even looking at.

So, again, I hope to get into it more in-depth down the road and kind of create it’s own section. But probably, it would ultimately be at least 2 or 3 sections to really do this topic justice. But know it’s an option. On a high-level, those are kind of the steps you go through. Check out that article I linked.

I just mentioned this, I kind of spoiled it, Digital Products that you own. This is going to be one of the most time-consuming things to do, if you want to do it with any degree of quality. I can tell you right now.

Of course you know I’ve spent several weeks just putting together these first few sections for Free Internet Marketing Project. It is not an easy thing to do. It is very time-consuming, very tasking. And if you want to put out any degree of quality, there is so much you have to learn, and so much time you have to dedicate to it to do it well.

So, if you’re going to go this route, I recommend at least getting to 200-300 visitors per day. And monetizing through CPA marketing until you’re getting to that point. And even two or three-hundred dollars a day is kind of… what?! My brain has gone out the window again.

Even when you get to the point that you’re getting 200-300 visitors per day, it makes a lot of sense to wait longer, in most cases. Because, again, if you release your own digital product and you’re getting a 1% conversion rate, you’re still only getting 2 or 3 sales per day. And it’s just so much time and effort. I mean, to put together a really good digital product is probably going to take you at least a few weeks of full time work. So just keep that in mind.

You can continue promoting CPA offers until you get to the point taht you can really dedicate the time to doing that well. Because again, your reputation is on the line here, your brand is on the line here.

If people buy something from you, and they’ve been your follower for a long time, and it’s not the quality that they’ve come to expect from you, they will never come back to your website. They will unsubscribe from your e-mail list and they will disappear into the dark, okay?

And if you continue fostering a really strong relationship there, and growing your relationship with customer, increasing your credibility in their eyes – that relationship can last, in theory, forever. For years, and years, and years. So just keep that in mind. Always have the long-term play in mind. Don’t just burn your readers and your subscribers for a quick commission.

So, you know, once you’re getting at least 200-300 visitors per day, I would probably say more along the lines of at least 700-1,000 visitors per day, it’s probably time to start considering your own digital product if you’ve kind of tested the waters with CPA marketing and seen what your market is really interested in, what your audience is really interested in.

And you have a really good idea about at least starting market research, where you can e-mail your subscribers and see what their biggest concerns are, what their biggest struggles are, and start to build your product around those.

So, whether that’s an e-book, a video course, or something else – there’s so much potential there. You know, audio tracks, video stock footage, photography stock… by the way, to say that, would be stock photography – you know, selling really high-quality professional bundles of photos. All different kinds of ways to release your own digital products.

So, at that point is when I would kind of start considering doing it because before then, it’s just going to be way too time-consuming for the amount of money it going to produce for you.

Typically, these are going to grow into sales funnels that can really increase revenue. It’s a totally other section but… you can start doing things like selling a bundle of photos for a dollar, right? For 20 super high-quality or 50 or a 100 super high-quality photos, just way overdelivering on value.

And then maybe there’s an upsell for $47 on how to take their own really high-quality photography so they never have to buy stock photography again.

And then after that, maybe there’s another upsell that’s $100 a month membership to ongoing education and growing.

And beyond that, maybe there’s a thousand dollar, two thousand dollar course on exactly everything they have to do, step-by-step super high-quality training on how to start a local photography business.

So that’s kind of what a sales funnel looks like. A really simple example, totally off the top of my head but you can do this in pretty much every industry. And that’s when you start maximizing your value, you maximize your income, your revenue, your profits when you start kind of building the sales funnel that stair steps up – which referred to as a value ladder.

You get them in really early, you overdeliver, you show that you’re reputable and that super credible and trustworthy. And you continue doing that every single tier until you’ve possibly increased your average lifetime value per subscriber to $100 per subscriber.

And if you’re doing paid traffic and you’re paying, on average, $10 for every subscriber to come on board… and based on your value ladder, from everything, from the dollar sale to the up to the two thousand dollar course with continuity – which continuity is like a monthly recurring membership. With continuity in between, you’re getting to the point that you’re paying $10 for a new subscriber but you’re making $100 lifetime value for every subscriber, that’s $90 profit per subscriber.

If you’re getting, on average… if you’re getting 10 subscribers per day, if you’re getting 100 subscribers per day, you’re making some pretty serious money, $900 per day. And then beyond, that’s where the potential really blows up in this industry.

So I’m sorry if I’ve totally lost you just by talking numbers. They’re really clear in my head as they sound but I realized they may not be that way for everyone. But just know, again, I would really like to expand on this with its own section or two.

But when you talk about creating funnels and kind of engineering a really profitable value ladder, if you’ve got the traffic, things get really, really crazy in this industry when you start focusing on that.

So… whew! Okay! I told you it’s going to be a heavy lesson.

I want to kind of wrap up here and recap when and how to monetize your content. You’re probably going to start off with some form of CPA marketing or dropshipping when you get to that 75 or 100 visitors per day level.

Like I said, I’ll (a lot of the time) kind of lazily wait until I’m getting to 200 or 300 visitors per day before I start monetizing my content really actively. But you’re probably going to start off one of those routes.

A lot of people start off with advertising. And again, it’s just not a good idea. You can make a lot more money doing CPA marketing or dropshipping physical products than you will with advertising, unless you’re getting a ton of traffic.

Another important take-away here is don’t just spam your content with a bunch of links and banners and hope for the best. Remember to kind of focus your calls-to-action to one thing in a funnel.

And then after they convert on that thing, you know, kind of move them up to the next thing. And start practicing that value ladder – where you get from making, you know, or possibly losing $5 per every one that subscribes to making $10, or $15, or $20+ every time someone subscribes over the course of their lifetime value. Okay?

And that’s just done by testing, testing, testing. You want to… data is your friend in this industry, it is your absolute bestfriend. You want to make sure that you’re constantly testing. You’re testing new headline, you’re testing new graphics, you’re testing new e-mail messages, new subject lines.

Because every time you get a little 3% bump, or a 5% bump, or you know… say your prayers and get a 10% bump. That has a huge effect across your entire revenue for that funnel, for that website. Because they stack on top of each other. If you get a 10% bump in your opt-ins and then you get a 10% bump on how much money you’re making per opt-in, those things combine. They multiply one another, okay?

And over time, that becomes exponential and you start to, you know, kind of tweak these things. You get these 3%, 5%, 10% increases. And if you get them at multiple points across your sales funnel, they really stack up on one another and kind of, again, become very cumulative and… you know I feel like we’re talking really abstractly here, and I apologize for that. But just know that that’s where the potential is in this industry.

You know, a lot of people would just continue grinding, grinding, grinding on content and pushing out content. There’s a lot to be said for that, because it keeps things simple.

But at the same time, if you begin when it makes sense to focus on some of these other things, you can amplify your income so much faster – if you start focusing on conversion optimization, building funnels, and stuff like that. So, just keep that in mind.

One of the most common ways that you see across every industry, every niche is to use a giveaway – which is what I’ve referred to throughout this video as a lead magnet (very common term for it).

You give something really high-value away for free, you start building your e-mail list, and then you focus on building your relationship and over time, improving that lifetime value. Which again, you do best by just continuing to give them the value that they need – whatever their struggle is, whatever their problem is, help them overcome it. Continue to help them overcome it.

And whether you’re doing that through free training, or whether you’re doing that through paid opportunities along the way, if you’re always overdelivering on quality, you will continue building that lifetime value. And in time, potentially make a metric crap ton of money. So again, that’s where the money’s really at in this industry.

But I want to focus very extensively on e-mail marketing and then building funnels, and stuff like that down the road. So hopefully, I’ll get the opportunity to do that.

So this really is what makes a difference between a $1,000 a month website and a $5,000 a montt website.

I’ve known people that got five times as much traffic as I did in the same niche and they made the same amount of money as I did. And it’s just because I was so much smarter with my traffic. I focused more on conversions and I kind of hit those key points and got those 10% increases, those 5% increases across my entire sales funnel.

And before I knew it, you know, I was making just as much money as someone with 5 to 10 times as much traffic. You know, competing for the same keywords, the same level of qualified traffic. I was just being much smarter in how I built out my funnels on my sites.

So, remember that this makes the difference, alright? This can make a huge, huge, huge difference. And that’s before you even get into… if you’re converting a lot more and your traffic is really high-quality, you can make a lot more money just by negotiating with your affiliate manager. Because you’re one of their top affiliates, you’re producing some of the best revenues, some of the best money, they will actually pay you more per conversion. Whereas, you know, they may pay a standard of $2 per conversion.

I’ve negotiated up to $4 and $6 per conversion because I drove a lot of really high-quality traffic and my conversions were really, really good.

So that’s another way. Again, you just kind of tweak that little thing and you multiply how much money you’re making and how much profit you’re producing.

One little tweak like that has taken me from making $1,500 a month off of one of the affiliate offers I’m pushing to over $5,000 a month. Just because I negotiated a tiered (T-I-E-R-E-D)… so kind of steps up a tiered commission for myself. Because my traffic was converting so well and it was such high-quality.

So, anyways, hopefully we can really dig in to a lot of that stuff down the road. Because that’s where you go from I’m just getting some traffic and making some money to just really boom! Like, stepping it up to where you’re making a really ridiculous and very lucrative full-time income even from one simple authority website.

So anyways, that’s that. I hope I haven’t just totally overwhelmed your brain with way too much. I hope I’ve shown you some of the potential that… you know you’re not going to hit those points when you’re only getting 75-100 visitors per day.

But once you start getting to 300, 500, 1,000 visitors per day, if you’re in a good niche, you should be making a full-time income off of that traffic. You just have to get creative and be committed to testing. Always testing and trying new things.

Alright. So once again, I talk about a lot of things that I want to build extra sections out about in the future. Hopefully I get that opportunity. Hopefully Free Internet Marketing Project does really well, and it’s received well, and we can keep pressing forward with a lot of this, and continuing education.

So, if you have any questions, as always, please feel free to post them to the Facebook group. I’ll keep an eye out for them there. And otherwise, I will just see you in the next video.

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