Yesterday, I spoke in short detail about why you need to focus on breaking even on each project that you undertake, which in good part is done by testing your market and looking for signs that the market has commercial potential. Today I am going to share with you a few ways that you can to that as easily as possible.
First thing that you need to understand is that all markets behave in different ways. For example, this blog has a steady stream of new subscribers to my list, and receives upwards of 1000 unique visits every single month. However, on the other side of the table, my year old WordPress theme directory has the same level of traffic, and only receives around one opt in a month, with income being generated more from affiliate sales from posts promoting themes. It is in this sense that you need to understand your market, what they are responsive to, their behaviour patterns, and what will motivate them to take that commercial action. From here, you can break even.
What Will Motivate Them To Buy?
Yesterday, David Jenyns said something interesting to me that really struck a chord. WordPress, being a free open source product, is associated with free content all over the place, so in a sense, you would think it would be hard to monetize a website that is within the WordPress niche, right? This is the level of depth that you need to base your thinking on initially. Of course, you can go much deeper, but this is all we need for the moment.
For example, on my WordPress theme site, the way that I tested the potential of the site wad to find a few offers, rank pages promoting those offers for keywords that are specific buying phrases that I had identified as being winnable and offering potential using Market Samurai, and once I had sent a few links to these pages, sales started to come in. Before I knew it, I had broken even without even realising it.
Now, I have done a lot of testing on that site before, and I will share with you today the results that I have achieved from that particular site over the past year:
- AdSense Income late 2009 was around 1$ per week
- Mailing list optins hover at 1-2 per fortnight
- Affiliate income from themes is around 50-100 per month
Using the above stats, I can say that the easiest way to break even is to go hard on those affiliate sales, and continue to add more offers that I can rank for buying phrases.
This Is Not The Only Way
This is not the end all of it though, I could have also taken the path of creating valuable content that doesn’t sell, but instead is valuable enough to generate a strong following which results in the ability to sell paid advertising slots. A longer approach, but more worthwhile in the end, and can also be backed up by some basic affiliate promotion.
As with any other monetization methods, how responsive it is to your market is entirely dependant on your market itself.
How Do You Put This Together
For the real golden nugget, here is the process flow that I use. I take my idea, and research my market, whether it be forums, twitter, youtube, or wherever my market seeks information. I look into Google to see how many people are using Adwords to bring in traffic as there is no clearer cut indication that people are actually spending in the market than this. I tailor my own strategy depending on what the market responds to. This could be affiliate products, list generation, or paid advertising. I then, and only then, purchase a domain name and set up a site. I create content, I build backlinks plus arrange all of the social media accounts that I need. I then site and wait and measure potential based on the results that I get.
It all sounds simple, but it takes some practice, and a hell of a lot of discipline to do right. So, why not give it a go, and let me know how you go.
The last important thing to note is that this is my method, this is how things work for me. How things work out for you may be a little different, so try and spice it up a little, and let me know how you go by commenting below.
