The SBI Mall

So as promised in my last post about how HARD work is your best way to eliminate competition, I am going to discuss what I feel is the best traffic strategy ever.

The big picture of why we want traffic

So why do we want traffic? No, really. Why?

Because we want to make money, right?

Yes, big traffic numbers make us feel good about all the hard work we have been putting in, but good feelings don’t put money in the bank, do they?

We want traffic because we want money. The more traffic you have, the more money you can potentially make.

This is true no matter what niche you are in. Some niches are inherently more monetizable than others, but in general, in any given niche, your income is directly proportional to your traffic.

Now that we have established that, let’s move on to the next point. Because if you remember from my last post, I said this traffic strategy also doubles up as a monetization strategy. (Actually, this is a monetization strategy that doubles up as a traffic strategy too.) Don’t worry, it will all make sense very soon.

How most of us SBIers monetize our sites

There are several monetization methods listed in the monetization HQ, but the most common monetization method used by most SBIers is affiliate links inserted strategically into content pages.

Right?

So suppose you get 100 visitors a day to a particular page, out of which you send 10 visitors a day to a particular merchant using your affiliate link. And suppose 1 in 10 of those visitors ends up buying that $20 product, for which you get paid $10.

Those are all made up figures, and I chose them only because the math will be easier. (Yes, MATH! Now, don’t get scared, it’s not difficult at all.) I am also assuming there is no other monetization method being used on that page, which is the way it should be anyway. Just one MWR per page.

In the above example, you are getting paid $10 for every 100 visitors to that page, or 10 cents per visitor.

How much do you think the merchant is getting paid?

Well, you sent that evil merchant 10 visitors, out of which 1 visitor bought their crappy $20 product, out of which they gave you $10 in commissions, keeping $10 to themselves.

$10 for 10 visitors, or $1 per visitor.

In case you missed it, let me repeat it:

You make 10 cents per visitor, and the merchant makes $1 per visitor – 10 times more than you do!

Not.

Bad.

At.

All!

So whose traffic is better? Yours, or the merchant’s?

Now, moving on to the next point:

The merchant’s is bigger than the affiliate’s – traffic, that is

So you think you are making good money sending traffic to that merchant, because they convert at 10%.

Guess how many OTHER affiliates are thinking the same thing?

LOTS! And a LOT of affiliates are sending traffic to the merchant.

If the product is good, and the sales page converts well, it’s no surprise to see a thousand or more affiliates trying to send traffic to the merchant.

Even if each of the affiliates send the merchant just one visitor per day on average (some will send more, some less, some none, but let’s say this is the average), the merchant gets 1000 visitors per day to the page that makes him $1 per visitor.

That equals $1000 per day in profits.

Not.

Bad.

At.

All!

Most affiliates don’t make that much in a whole month, let alone one day.

Do you see what monetization and traffic strategy I was talking about?

Of course you get it by now, but for the sake of completeness, I want to say that the best traffic strategy in my opinion is to have your own product, and sign up as many affiliates as you can.

Not only will you get more traffic, but you get better paying traffic too, in terms of dollars earned per visitor. And you will start getting this traffic much quicker than you would by creating content pages and trying to rank in the search engines.

This is not a knock on content as a traffic strategy

No way.

Creating content is a great way to get traffic, even when you have your own product(s), because the traffic that you get this way is traffic that is your own. And you don’t have to pay any commissions or advertising costs for this traffic.

But having your own affiliates will really take it to the next level, and help you reach places, people and markets that you couldn’t have reached otherwise. At least not this quick.

In fact, I suspect that the most successful SBIers (in terms of money) all have their own products or services.

Next steps

Here is the action plan, if you agree with me about this:

1. Decide what you want to create and sell as a product. Make sure it’s something others would want to pay money for.
2. Find a cave to hide in while you create your products, so no one can disturb or distract you. It’s going to take a couple of months at least, so make sure you are well fed all this while.
3. Once the product is complete, the proof reading and the design (ecover as well as the design of the product itself) are done, put it up on Clickbank or some other affiliate network/marketplace.
4. Go hunting for affiliates. Contact other website owners and ask them to promote your product. Don’t just rely on Clickbank for this. The hunting bird gets the most worms. Keep hunting.
5. Keep creating content on your site to pull in more search engine traffic.

Easy, huh?

Well, no. It’s not easy. It’s hard.

Coming up with a good topic for your product is hard work. You want a topic that bugs people so much they want to pay good money for a solution (your product).

Creating the actual product is hard work. You, an SBIer tortoise, would create nothing less than stellar, would you?

And all the other steps involved in product creation and design, writing a sales page that converts well, signing up with Clickbank (or whatever), signing up an army of affiliates, etc. is hard work too.

You need to figure out a lot of stuff and go through a lot of difficulties.

And that is exactly why you should do it. Because it’s hard, most people find it easier to just take the easy way out and become affiliates.

And work hard to make one tenth of the money per visitor they could make and get a tenth of the traffic they could get (meaning they make a hundred times less money than they could).

The choice is yours.

Hard work, or working hard? Which one?

At this point, I could have easily recommended a resource for you to check out, to help you create products easily. But I don’t want to do that. I want to keep this blog free of any ads, affiliate links, and so forth, so I can provide my best ideas to you without any greed on my part. The purpose of this blog is to share with my fellow SBIers, and not to make money.

So will you be kind enough and post a comment below, so I can know if this post strikes a chord with you? Or if you think the post sucked, let me know too. Let’s have a discussion going!

Update: I created a follow-up post discussing how to come up with product ideas that will sell well and attract a ton of affiliates. You can read it here.

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