Building Audiences
I’ve been studying this one for a while, but I’m convinced that once you have invested in this, you will never have to worry about making money again.
Monetizing reach is nothing new, people and companies have been doing it for decades. But never has there ever been a better time for normal people like you and me to gather a following and use that influence to make money.
You can use social media platforms to find people that are interested in what you are doing, or what you are offering, and use them to generate traffic and sales for your business.
The most valuable audience, which has been for a while, is an email list. But other platforms, like Snapchat, have so much engagement it’s much easier to convert followers into buyers.
To give you an example, Brian Dean from Backlinko (who is really really good at what he does, SEO and backlinks) turned a 2000 person email list into an over $100k course launch in a week’s time. Can you imagine generating $100k in a week? Granted, he worked really hard on that course, and he had a high quality following that had a need to be met. His course cost buyers $1k, so that means he only needed to convert 100 of the 2000 to do this.
That’s a 5% sales rate, but most people see about a 1% sales rate from email marketing. You have to be really good at what you do, and offer things to your audience that they truly need. But I’m convinced that once you build the audience, you can generate money from them on almost a monthly basis.
It’s much easier to sell very-high priced items ($1k to $2k) because you only need to sell a few of them to make good money. If you only make $5 profit on what you are selling, then it would have taken you 20,000 sales to make the amount that Brian did. You would have had to have a massive audience to be able to pull that off. It’s better to sell ultra-premium or give your stuff away.
Speaking of giving your stuff away, that’s exactly what you should do as well. In fact, I would argue that you should give away some of your best stuff. People love to follow people that are putting out good quality content, and it makes them feel better about buying from someone they know is an expert.
I could go on for a while about building an audience, but I’ll cut it off there. You can talk to me if you want to find out more!
Facebook Ads
I’m finding more and more that proper targeted advertising is the shortcut to building an audience. Granted, you do need some upfront capital to invest. But, you can start testing ads on Facebook for about $10 a day and get somewhat decent data that will show you how you are performing.
The crazy thing is — when you find an ad that works, and you have a product to sell, you can literally turn $1 in advertising into $2 in profit. Meaning, if you do advertising properly, you can basically print money. Then you can go from spending $10 a day and making $20 a day, to spending $1000 a day and making $2000 a day.
There’s definitely a lot more to it, and there needs to be a lot of different things in place. I’ve been dabbling with it recently on my Blacklet launch, and I have seen some good results (just looking for traffic and email sign-ups).
I’m actually thinking about doing my own pre-order launch instead of a Kickstarter if I can figure out the right formula. If I can create a cash-generating machine, it’s something that would work well beyond a Kickstarter launch, and it could propel my business for a good while.
Affiliate Marketing
You put links to products and you get a commission.
Just like the others this is much more complicated than that, but it’s actually that simple once everything is implemented.
Amazon has the most popular affiliate marketing program. Often times, if you’re reading an article or watching a YouTube article about a product, there will be an Amazon link to that product. It might seem like a harmless link, but in the background, that person makes a certain percentage of the cost of that product if you actually buy it (say, 3% — 7% depending on the product).
Often times, people will start blogs or YouTube channels that are built around the fact that you can make money doing this. It’s not hard to make a lot of money once you build an audience like I talked about above.
So if you want to support a content creator, click those links. If you don’t want to give them a cut, don’t click those links. But, keep in mind that this is a great way to make money in 2017.
Drop-shipping
Drop-shipping isn’t anything new, but you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s super simple. You list something on eBay for slightly more than it is listed for on Amazon, and you get a small profit when you sell. When you sell, you buy the product from Amazon and put the eBay buyer’s address in the Amazon shipment address.
Okay, it’s definitely more complicated than that, but that’s the basic gist. There are many other factors like competition, pricing, and SEO for the listing on eBay that play into the success of your drop-shipping venture. Being able to do this is called taking advantage of arbitrage, which is making a profit from a difference in costs.
The benefit of drop-shipping is, there is no upfront cost to get started. The profit margins are low, but if you list hundreds of products and sell 1 a day of each, that lands a few hundred bucks in your pocket everyday.
The disadvantage of drop-shipping is the buyer experience. You have no control over what gets sent to the customer. So, if / when there is a complaint from the customer, you have to relay that to the amazon seller and it becomes a big mess.
Also, if eBay found out you didn’t have the inventory you were selling, they’d probably shut you down. But lots of people do it, and eBay profits from it, so I doubt they are too aggressive about shutting people down.
So if you’re looking for some extra cash, this might be for you. I think I will get into this heavy either after my Blacklet launch or in the near future.
I’ve been learning a lot — and even things not on this list. But I wanted to tell you guys about what I am interested in, and what I will be exploring in the future!