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A lot of internet marketing products promise a fast-track to wealth using pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-view (PPV), solo ads, or other forms of paid advertising. What most of these publishers don’t tell you is that it’s almost impossible to make any of these methods profitable if you’ve never made money online before, and that there’s A LOT of groundwork you should cover before launching any paid advertising campaigns.
I’m not being pessimistic at all – this is a reality I’ve learned time after time over the years watching new internet marketers try their hand at different forms of paid advertising. Previous publishers have made them think it’s easy, quick, and that they’ll be counting their commission in no time.
In reality, a website has to be fine-tuned very, very well prior to launching any sort of paid advertising campaign. That requires a few different skills that you should start developing as much as possible using free traffic methods.
The first thing you need to figure out before starting any kind of paid advertising is exactly what you want your visitors to do. Do you want them to click-through to a certain page? Do you want them to opt-in to your email list? Do you want them to click through to another site you’re promoting as an affiliate? You should pick ONE major conversion path and optimize your page around that alone. Don’t just paste ads everywhere and cross your fingers.
The industry-leading book on this topic is not a light read at all, but will increase your abilities as an internet marketer tenfold: Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions (Print Version) | Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions (Digital Version)
Email marketing is much trickier than most people think it is, and it takes a decent amount of practice. First, you have to incentivize people to opt-in, then you need to gain their trust and build crediblity, and ONLY then can you even possibly make money by referring them to helpful products and affiliate offers that make you money.
I’ve put together a very extensive free training that covers email marketing as part of my SIMPLE7 lessons. You should read through the lessons over email marketing (beginning with lesson 3) at the very least.
LTV means how much the average subscriber spends after subscribing to your email list. For example, if you know that you earn an average LTV of $4 per email subscriber, then you should be completely safe spending up to $2 per new subscriber and be very profitable (a 100% profit margin). The higher your LTV, the more money you can spend to acquire each new subscriber.
This requires practice as well, and it’s impossible to build a high LTV without first building your credibility and trust with your subscribers. Again, this is something I cover very well in SIMPLE7 if you’ve never done it before, and you should take some time to look over that highly valuable free training.
Getting the hang of all of the topics I’ve mentioned above will take at least a few months if you’re very dedicated. Then and only then would I recommend you even consider thinking about paid advertising. And when you get to that point, the industry-leading book for PPC advertising is: Advanced Google AdWords (Print Version) | Advanced Google AdWords (Digital Version)
That book isn’t a light read by any means either, but this is a very complex topic that is best learned from an expert like Brad Geddes rather than setting out on your own (which will end up costing you hundreds if not thousands of dollars in trial and error).
Did the article above stir up any questions or comments? Feel free to leave them in the comments section below – I answer all comments on this site personally and am happy to help any way that I can.
I've been in internet marketing for over 10 years, and I've purchased dozens of illegitimate products for the sole purpose of evaluating them and exposing the truth about these products to anyone who's thinking about purchasing it. I never let money influence my rating of a product and your success/safety is my absolute highest priority. Don't want to buy a product? Register for one of my 100% free internet marketing training courses>>
