The Wild World of Starting Again - Easiest Route? (34)
Hey guys,
It's been a loonngg while since I hopped on here. I got "lifed" as they say...
Anyhow, I have a bit of money to try again. About $12,000 to commit to my affiliate journey. I really want to do it right this time and would love to hear your guys opinions on where to start. I have a few ideas, four really, that I am interested in trying though will only do 1 till I'm successful.
I already know my traffic source will be facebook. And I'll probably use
I realize I should start with a low payout kind of offer in the $4-5 range so I can test the waters and hone the skill since each offer should be tested x10 from their payout.
So without further ado, here's the 4 or so routes I've thought of as I decided to grit my teeth and take the plunge with some hard saved cash to make a real go at this as a career/day job killer.
1. SEO Service
I would target biz owners selling a monthly SEO service to them. Target mainly high end businesses (probably a service business) so I could get away charging $1500-$4000 a month (eventually). I would spear head this by first offering to optimize a page for the business for $19 (Say like optimizing a facebook page or youtube channel etc.).
The idea behind it is that the $19 will allow me to to upsell them on more monthly services to ultimately get the really big monthly fees.
There probably be additional costs here since I would likely end up buying email lists to create a custom audience. And while the pro of an awesome monthly income be cool, I would have to create the entire sales funnel which I'm not much better than a newb probably haha.
(Probably cause I am a newb who just reads a lot)
2. CPA $2-$5 payouts probably through MaxBounty
Go this route, build up hopefully a profitable campaign of $50 to $100 a day on one of the lower payouts . I would probably use MaxBounty, as that is currently the only CPA network I'm approved on.
3. Pay Per Call
I was reading some interesting stuff on here with PAy Per Call and I actually just submitted my application to RingPartner to see what kind of offers they have. I always thought it would be really awesome to run an ad agency where my clients pay me on a per a call kind of basis, so I thought cutting my chops with something like RingPartner would be really beneficial down the road.
But not sure if this is more of advanced area or newbie friendly area.
4. Arbitrage
I just saw the post today on this forum about XYZ international. Not really sure about the whole concept as I just found out what it was (kind of) today. From what I understand is you send a ton of volume to a general-like offer and when they click on that link they are automatically served one of the accepted offers in their country that XYZ has on their rotation list.
The post I read said it is one of the easier ways to start making money, albeit smaller amounts as it is harder to scale but easier to be profitable quicker if you're a newbie.
And there you have it! 
My 4 ideas.
What are your thoughts and what would you suggest?
I'm likely only going be spending $10-15 bucks a day on my ad spend once I get going, going be extremely conservative with all cashflow haha.
Thanks in advance for any input!
I'm not sure there are any "easy" routes to take. But, it's good to hear you're trying again.
I'm biased towards pay per call, there is still an opportunity here. As more advertisers get in to the game and more traffic opportunities open up, there is still potential to be a "first mover" on something unique and make some profits.
Add me on Skype - RingPartnerMike. I can chat about the opportunity and help you assess if it's right for you. Also, we can expedite your application.
Cheers and good luck!
If you're going to push CPA offers, I'd strongly - very strongly - recommend getting onto more networks before you do anything. Having only one network available is not a reliable route to the win!
The SEO service is a good idea if you have the skills, but it's a very different play to the other options. Have you undertaken that sort of project before?
Thanks Mike, I'll add you on Skype. I get off work Sunday so it'll be sunday/Monday before I can. (I work 12 hour days in the oil field, but I get 2 weeks off a month.)
And Caurmen, yes I have done SEO. I actually rank #1 for my city + SEO on a few keywords, but no search volume where I'm at so it was easy and didn't take much of a budget. I'm in a lot of masterminds, and I can feed almost endless clients hands free to a buddy of mine that does $70k a month with his SEO firm. He takes 40% I keep 60% - if I ever get another client that is lol.
I use to do it for a firm, but since leaving I've not gotten any clients on my own, only a few bites.
I prefer to go after high income people for it too so not stuck with little $500-$1000 a month budgets.
I would love to learn paypercall so I can use it for other stuff too. As I imagine the skill would cross over well for say getting a dentist calls etc.
As far as "easiest" route, I know they're difficult, but I meant learning curve and time-wise. The professional opinion of the professionals is always nice lol
Thanks guys
The SEO thing will probably be the slowest to get going. There are a lot more moving parts to that plan! However, it's also connected to recurring income, which is very nice!
If you do go for the SEO plan, make sure to get contracts in place for all parties including your buddy. Sounds like a good opportunity though.
Thanks Caurmen.
By the way, as a side, if any of you guys have SEO clients, I''ll split my share of the 60% with you (you get 50%, I'll get 10%, and my friend gets his 40%)
Would you suggest me going the SEO route?
If I do there would be some obstacles - buying a list of emails for instance to build a custom facebook audience. Also, my landing pages would need to look more professional and I'm still a total newb with Muse.
I would probably go opt in -> sales letter -> paypal button for the $19
And hit them up with a solid 2 week autoresponder relating to businesses succeeding with SEO (but I would be talking more about profits, leads, etc and how to see if SEO would work for them.)
The list of say a 1,000 owners of a specifc niche probably cost $200-300 bucks upfront I think.
Hey there,
I certainly do not want to discourage you, but I really think this SEO idea is not very well thought out.
What is useful before diving into any business is to at least try to understand what the basic economics of the business looks like or can look like.
Have you one this?
If not, do this now.
You say you are going to be spending $10 a day.
How many inquiries per day do you think this will result in? How many of these will actually become paying customers? How long will it take them to become customers, and how much work will be required by you to sell to them before they sign for the initial $19 product? How much work will be required to service them for the initial order? Then how much work will you need to do in order to upsell them on a $5000 product? etc etc etc
At the very least whip out Excel or Google Sheets and just run some numbers just to see how believable your business plan is.
For example, if you find that in order for this business to be successful, you need to generate 10 leads a day on $10 of daily ad spend, 5 of which become customers for the $19 product and of which you need to convert 50% of them to the $5000 product, I can tell you right away, that's not going to happen.
Maybe there are believable assumptions under which this business can work.
But YOU need to be confident in this and you need to have done your homework well in advance.
Hey cmdeal
The SEO funnel would be $19 first for the optimized page, then I would sell multiple little upsells ($400 a month to rank a fb page, $500 youtube etc.) that would lead up to the bigger monthly ticket. The idea is based on an irrefusable offer funnel, make the price points really small to get started, build the rapport and go from there.
The splitting service idea added about $44k in monthly revenue for my acquaintance who taught me it - but he was doing massive cold emails/going to conventions not FB ads over 90 days.
All the money in the funnel there would be from the backend.
Though it takes more skill and money I think to do initially. Landing pages/sales letters/videos, the follow up email campaign, the upsell etc. As Caurmen said, lots of moving parts but the reward can be pretty fantastic.
Ultimately I would do the authority style once I have tons of testimonials, to bypass the entire irrefusable offer low entry point.
I have a few friends fairly successful with fb ads, but they stop and start all the time. They can only handle 2-3 new clients max a month and still do the work involved since they don't have an outsourcing connection reputable enough for them to use.
Definitely give it a try, but I think you will probably find that the conversion rates across each stage of your funnel will be much lower than you expect and that 10/day in ad spend will not get you very far.
I definitely do not want to discourage you or anyone else, and I would love to be proven wrong. I do have a bit of experience in this area however, and I do think several of these assumptions seem very off from what I have personally seen.
Oops, missed the "$10 a day" mention.
Yeah, I'd agree with cmdeal on this one. You're going to need more initial outlay for the project to test it. Probably a lot more.
And definitely do your due dilligence with a spreadsheet before you start.
If you're willing to open the floodgates a little, or start by getting clients with hustle rather than paid clicks, it could still work, but at $10 a day you'll struggle to get enough data to optimise.
Actually, that's true of any of these plans. If you plan to spend more like $50 a day I think you'll do significantly better with any of these plans, and even that might be a bit low to attract SEO clients through paid traffic. Bear in mind it's a very competitive field and click costs across the board are pretty high.
Also, if you've not done it before, be aware that targeting businesses with paid traffic is trickier than targeting consumers - there are less available spots to advertise and they're more expensive.
Yo cmdeal and caurman.
Hm maybe $10 is too low of a daily budget for fb ads?
I'm still not sure which plan I'll go for, the SEO funnel probably be the hardest to get all done and make anything from it. How I was planning on targeting businesses though was through custom audiences from bought email lists. A couple friends in my masterminds have found some success through that (but no idea how much their ad spent/data was).
Maybe I'll lean towards the pay per call.
This sunday going sign up for a bunch of different networks as well since that's when I'll have time to do so.
Why don't you open up Google Spreadsheets and just model these out?
Make the output variable based on the assumption which you identify upfront and which you can adjust directly on the spreadsheet in order to tease out different scenarios.
If you are willing to do the hard work in thinking this though and building such a spreadsheet model, I would be happy to give comments and feedback.
Even more important that helping you see what assumptions you have to believe in order for this to be a profitable activity for you, you will
- learn a lot about the interrelationship between the key metrics in conversion economics
- start developing independent issue identification and problem solving skills, and
- begin to understand the different between various business models
from this process.
These are incredibly valuable skills to have in AM, and indeed, in any business endeavors.
$10/day for FB ads to a sales funnel for a $19 product? That's certainly running things with a foot on the hose, especially if you intend to split-test age, gender, etc.
Your spend should really reflect the revenue generation you are aiming for. If you intend to sell a $19 product and upsell one in a hundred to a $400 product, really you should be spending thousands on this funnel.
Originally Posted by cmdeal
Could you go PM or describe in more detail how to build such a spreadsheet? Are you talking playing with speculative numbers? If I know my CPC is $1 and my CTR is 10% I know I can get 1 lead per $10 spent type of thing? Only do it throughout the entire funnel.
@Zeno - I am not expert on FB like you, but I have had friends in my mastermind do some pretty good numbers through the buying an email list to build a custom audience then gearing the funnel purely towards that audience (for instance, plastic surgeons). It seems they didn't spend thousands on the funnel either, but like I said no idea what their ad spend was.
It seems a $50 daily budget be a better strategy than the $10 from what I've been reading on here.
I get off work today for a couple of weeks. Maybe I'll stick with straight AM not the SEO services just to cut some of my chops and get familiar with the systems.
The trouble with targeting high end service businesses is that, by nature, they're more likely to opt for a high end SEO service.
Getting them through the door by optimising one page for $19 might work for a small business, but for a larger agency, you have two problems:
1. Cheap is not necessarily good in the eyes of your target market.
2. You have to reach the business owner, or the head of marketing, or whoever is in charge of making that decision. Facebook is notorious for impulse buys. But anybody owning a business (of the stature that you're targeting) is not going to make such an impulse buy for his SEO.
I think you'd end up spending a lot more than $10, or even $50, to sell a single $19 package targeting the type of business people that match the ideal client you'd be upselling to.
It's an interesting model, but I think you'd have to drill down in to specific businesses that you'd target. Maybe a single sector. And then you'd need a whole hell of a lot of social proof to make the pitch stick.
I will just be brutally honest. Your plan of a $97 optimized site or page or whatever is not going to lead to a $5000 a month client.
I deal ONLY with clients in that monthly range, and I would say none of them would be interested in a $97 offer. And if they saw one, they would see it as a cheap, spammy SEO offer.
You might get some $300-$500 a month clients. But even reading your SEO plan, I get the feeling you dont really know SEO, at least not $5,000 a month SEO. Again, that is just what I perceive, so I could be off base and you could be the best SEO in the biz. But, if I perceive this from your plan, business owners will perceive this from your plan as well.
Also a heads up - the sales cycle on a $3500-$5000 a month client is around 3-4 months. So expect your average lead to take 4 months to actually convert.
Originally Posted by fishinseo
I know a crap ton about SEO though, definitely enough for a couple high end clients.
I'm not sure where you got the $97 dollar offer, the spear head was $19 due to lack of social proof and to make it an impulse buy, and it would be targeting smaller businesses (the owners) that I would build a custom audience with by buying an email list off of a place like InfoUSA. The 3-4 month turn around is a good estimate. Make a few small biz owners some good ROI, then I would use that proof to build a much bigger campaign targeting the bigger businesses and use my testimonials as a way to get them to buy from me versus pitching the $19 optimized page (the keyword with the $19 is optimizating a FB page, twitter etc. not ranking). It serves purely as a door opener to start a rapport with the small biz owner. My SEO is done via using PBNs, and a few other strategies. And something at the $5k a month level I would rank them for all 10 spots (depending on what the keyword is). I would control pretty much all the links, so can take them down anytime they quit from my service. I don't know everything about SEO, but I know it pretty good
I think my route will going with the CPAs first before selling my SEO service, just due to the nature of all the moving parts and I should probably grasp some things better than I do (tracking, LP creation etc.).
I just went and applied for all the CPA networks that stackthatmoney refers to in their skype directory index. Going be talking to a few of the AMs here shortly
I'm really interested in getting started on FB ads again - I made a clickbank sale last time I was messing around with it (I had an opt in, email followup and a small bridge sales page leading to the offer) without spending the 10x of the product. I should've kept that ad going but then I stopped for whatever reason haha. I hear that is kind of hard to do with clickbank for a newbie, so it gives my ignorant mind hope.
As far as fb ads go, I really do know hardly anything about it. Just the basics and from what I gleaned from Zeno's very excellent guide.
So jumping in with my first post after a couple of months (shame on me).
This is my opinion about your statements for your 'SEO funnel'. I got a bit of experience in SEO, especially with 'higher end' clients... think luxury jewelrys, lawyers, a hotel chain plus my own aff stuff, which is mainly gambling:
The idea behind it is that the $19 will allow me to to upsell them on more monthly services to ultimately get the really big monthly fees.
While the $19 idea sounds good initially, it's crap. Nobody takes you seriously if you quote $19. That's just not how it works. If you wanna go high-end, quote the hell out of them. They are used to get heavy quotes, take advantage of this. With the $19 idea, you'll not gonna get anywhere.
Keep in mind: they don't care about optimizing something. They pay you for a hands-off approach. ALWAYS keep that in mind.
I use to do it for a firm, but since leaving I've not gotten any clients on my own, only a few bites.
I prefer to go after high income people for it too so not stuck with little $500-$1000 a month budgets.
Before you tackle the big guns, go to some small business first. Make them a contract job that covers your office fees along with your 'basic' costs every month. Most of the time you'll face questions like 'Show me samples'... you can't come up with any. If you have a portfolio of 10 small shops that you ranked top3 for 'niche keyword city' you're big clients will love that already.
--
Don't take this post as offensive, please don't. It's just you have some mistakes (in my opinion) to your plan for a SEO service. Make sure to re-consider most aspects you wrote down. Highend isn't 4k. A lead to a lawyer can be worth easily 5-10k alone. That's a single lead. While obviously note very lawyer can afford such high monthly costs, ALL of them will go for it if it's +ROI at the end. Moreover, don't make the mistake to forward all your SEO clients to another guy. Get your own stuff together and keep your own clients. You can't run a SEO service just part-time, it just won't work unfortunately. At least not a service that's targeted towards clients. Selling blasts or anything else on forums is a totally different story again and probably better for you at your stage since it's less hassle, faster money and easier to handle your clients.
Hey fjk87
No offense taken at all!
Man, I guess I do have the high end clients all wrong. When I think high end clients $4k-5k a month is definitely what I think lol. That is pretty impressive on the jewelry client's spend. Very cool.
As far as buying email lists, I figured it would convert higher than just broad targeting on facebook. I could target a list of roofers specifically, build the funnel all around their occupation etc or lawyers or whatever.
You make a lot of good points there though. Definitely things for me to reconsider. I'll probably start off going with CPA stuff just to learn facebook advertising in general then try to sell the service when I'm a bit more confident in running campaigns. I was confused on one part of what you said though.
What do you do mean by "selling blasts or anything else on forums"? As in going on niche specific forums and then selling them from the forum to my service?
On a sidenote, since one person on here said I'd be at a disadvantage only having one network open to me, I just logged into skype and now have 8 affiliate managers or so skyping me at once. I guess that problem is solved at least - I think lol. Was not expecting that quick of a turn around!
What I mean is selling a specific SEO service on other forums (like blackhatworld, wickedfire, trafficplanet etc.). You can EASILY get 200-300% margins with such services once it's all outsourced and automated. Selling a single service, like a spam blast or something, is TOTALLY different to a whole SEO package.
Ohh okay I see what you're saying.
Yes I rent out high PR links now and again. It can be pretty profitable too.
LOADS of really good advice here. This is becoming One Of Those Truly Awesome STM Threads.
Google around the phrase "enterprise sales" to get more info on that sort of sales process - it's quite a different animal to low-cost product sales.
Start from the basics. Where can you get clients? How many? What CTR do you expect? What conversion rate? How many hours will each job cost? Exactly what will your service entail? etc. Just put all that in a spreadsheet, and see how the numbers look.
Then start checking your assumptions. Will people really convert straight off? Can you get more detail on the conversion rates that competitors have, or the amount they charge? Can you double-check that you can target the right demo?
If you're seeing unrealistically good numbers, something's probably off in your calculations. Try and figure out what that is.
Then bring your figures back here and ask for more advice!
Good luck with the SEO services. There is a certain bad stigma around agencies selling 'SEO' services now a days so its usually a hard sale.
I know someone doing xxx,xxx per month with seo services. He might spend your whole budget to land a client who pays $10,000 per month. Also I'd argue there are better places than facebook to reach decision makers.
Originally Posted by cloudf
Know how you can fight that bad stigma even better? You rank a site in the niche of the client and offer him to place his infos / ads on the site. Proof of being legit and successfully ranking bette than he currently does.
All that bad stigma, people being uninterested thing is actually not really true. All you need is a proof of being legit and something your client doesn't own (like the spot above him in the SERPs) to convince him he's investing in something that's going + ROI. Win-Win is the only possibility to actually KEEP a client.
Just out of curiosity (I'm not doing SEO) how do you experts usually spend a 5K monthly budget for SEO?
Our clients pay $10-12k per month for 'seo'. This really includes CRO, content creation, local SEO for multiple locations, strategy, and link outreach/content promotion. We really market it as more lead generation than SEO. Clients want to see traffic, leads, and revenue go up on a monthly basis. We do have some one off clients for large technical seo audits, link building campaigns, etc but I tend to shy away from those. Too much work, not enough return.
You are going to find large clients by speaking to groups such as Vistage, EO, etc. You have to start small and work your way in. Referrals are key too.
For those looking to get started... another strategy is to find clients that want to hire 'remote' seo employees. Find 2-3 of these at $5k per month. Figure out how to outsource the work and show up for remote meetings. It takes some juggling but is a good way to quickly stack some dough to do your own thing.
It is not hard to sell if you are doing doing quality SEO. We do all manual outreach, in-depth tech audits, high quality content creation, etc. I use to mess around with PBN, tiers, etc. years ago but too short sighted for me. It's tough to sell that kinda of stuff to a Fortune 500 brand or funded start up.
@Dario - I may be wrong, but tons of outreach, infographic creation, link bait pages that have been meticulously designed to attract links, social campaigns for social signals, article curation, PPC campaigns yielding an ROI, full audits etc - $5K is a LOT though and would be interested to know what else!
Originally Posted by dario
What you can do for links (not buying links) is only limited by the budget the client has to produce the link assets.
Basically SEO has moved from "buying links" to "buying content that is worth new links" over the years?
Originally Posted by dario
Generally, we use value based pricing at a rate of ~$200 per hour. 12-24 month contract or 'plans'.
Strategy is expensive but getting high quality infographics, visual bait produced isnt bad. We just had an infographic picked up by Fast Company, GQ, etc. that cost $250. You just need to be sure you are creating content that authority sites have been shown to link to. This can be done with ahrefs and google.
You can still 'buy links' by paying people with author accounts on authority sites to link out to you. It's too expensive and not really a long term strategy IMO.
Cool, you do fly in fly out type work? I have a friend that works in Adelaide - Australia and I've always suggested for him to do learn a bit of affiliate marketing on his 2 weeks off.
SEO consulting would be hard being 2 weeks on 2 weeks off wouldn't it? Considering you're flat out working 12 hours a day for 14 days straight, I can't imagine having time to talk to a client on the phone, etc.
Anyway, what ever you decide to choose, there's no 'wrong' answer. Each method you've noted above can get you thousands per month so it's really about what type of work appeals to you most and then hammering away it it till you get it to work. Just pick something and go hard, at the end of the day skills are transferable from one vertical to the next so don't think you're 'missing out' if you don't have your hands in a certain method.
FaceBook is a great traffic source to master and builds a lot of entrepreneurship skills such as designing, targeting, even running a business if your fanpages pick up traction which is why I've personally spent the last 6-8 months solely on it.
All the best
~ Mateen
Man, you guys are awesome.
Haven't been around last couple days, been doing some work for my dad on my two weeks off. But I got accepted into a bunch of affiliate networks. Found an offer with a $1 payout, that is also apparently converting very highly according to my affiliate manager. A friend of mine does japanese/english translating, and my AM tells me there is another gaming offer that does very well in Japan. So probably will hit up my buddy for the translation for that offer after I get this first campaign going.
I want to get comfortable with the tracking and building landing pages - the two biggest obstacles so far for me.
Golden advice guys. Love it.
Also Mateen - I work 2 weeks on and off and yes it is very difficult to keep in touch with clients and get things going. I've had many issues with it, and still do.
I forgot who said it here, but to the person said to get a few $2k-$5k a month SEO remote jobs that is pretty brilliant and might be something I do. Very great advice all around!
This is why STackthatmoney is the only internet marketing club/monthly billing place I hang around at haha.
Alright... off to watch Zeno's adobe muse tutorial again...
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