Well, it has been about two weeks since I did a trial launch of my first product, Niche Adsense Themes for WordPress. As you may know from reading my about page, I started working on internet marketing in November of 2007 as a part time hobby. The goal of this blog is to tell people about my experience. So, I think that it is important to let you know what I learned launching this first product, and how it went.
There is a lot to say, so this will be delivered in several parts. This is Part 1.
Where Digital Products Fit In MY Plan
The first important question to address is why I am interested in digital products. So far, my internet-marketing strategy has been to work on four things:
- Passive AdSense mini-sites following Josh Spaulding's $5 Formula
- Affiliate mini-sites using phpBay and other affiliate offers through CJ and Pepperjam, etc
- Building email lists for direct marketing
- Creation of digital products.
As a part time internet entrepreneur, I am very interested in creating streams of income where I can scale revenue without significantly increasing the time needed to support that income. That why passive income streams like AdSense sites and think affiliate site are so attractive.
Once the sites are set up and marketed, the only remaining issue is traffic and some low-touch maintainence. For traffic, long-term strategies like SEO and article marketing can be used in combination to drive traffic over the long haul relatively easily.
If you work hard at AdSense sites, for example, you can earn high four (even five) figures per month just like Tim Gorman. It is reasonable to expect to make a few dollars per day from a passive AdSense site – so you can do the math.
Why Sell Digital Products
Digtal products are different, and a lot more exciting. If you can create something digital that someone might want (an eBook or software for example), you can then create a sales page and sells that product and start taking orders. In some sense, this is similar to AdSense sites and thin affiliate sites: you are converting traffic to dollars. However, there are some critical differences:
- Revenue per action can be very high with digital products. While an AdSense click might get you a dollar, the price of digital products can range from free to thousands of dollars. A typical price for an ebook might be $27.
- You can have an army of affiliates. This is not actually unique to digital products, but it is different from AdSense and affiliate sites. With those business models, you are the affiliate. When you own your own digital products, you can have affiliates working for you.
- You can upsell. There is no better time to sell someone something than when they already have their credit card out and have decided to trust you with it.
- You can capture email addresses and sell on the “back end”. This is perhaps the most powerful idea. Once someone has purchased from you once (and has given you permission to contact them), you can sell to them again. In this case, they already know that you provide quality products, so trust as high. This relationship can last a very long time.
Most of the truly rich internet entrepreneurs have digital products as a central part of their business strategy.
Selecting The Product
There are lots of things to consider when selecting a digital product. Most guru's will tell you identify a market first, and then build a product. You need to do market research and lots of other things prior to launch. Honestly, I was much more random about my product selection.
During my work on AdSense sites I heard a lot of people say that WordPress was not a good choice for AdSense mini-sites because of two issues:
- The resulting sites looked like blogs and not “information sites”
- It was hard to control the placement of AdSense ads
I wanted to use WordPress, however, for lots of good reasons
- Speed of deployment (easy to crank up a new WordPress mini-site
- Lots of good plugins for things like sitemaps, SEO, analytics, etc.
- Easy to update with fresh content
- Support for pinging, etc.
So, I did the obvious thing — I worked with an AdSense min-site guru to understand a perfect site, and I built a WordPress theme that copied the layout of that exactly. In fact, I actually hired out some of the theme code and the graphics. More on this later this week.
Then, I put myself in the place of the customer. What would I want in a package if I was trying to get started with AdSense and WordPress? I settled on the following five things
- Several themes — not just one — with good generic graphics that could apply to lots of different niches. For example, a medical graphic could apply to any mini-site on any medical topic. I thought that these “specific” graphical templates look more authoratative than generic templates like ProSense, for example (I love ProSense, by the way — I just think my stuff is better).
- The same templates in HTML. I wanted to get past the “what if I don't like WordPress” objection that people might have. Many gurus recommended static sites. I think WordPress is a better answer. Including a static HTML version of the templates reduces the risk of trying WordPress for the customer. If they don't like WordPress, they could still use the HTML templates.
- Some free reports about how to make money with AdSense. For the complete new person, I wanted to include instructions on how to use the themes to make money.
- Some free content. Again, for someone getting started, having some PLR content that they could “slap” into their site allowed them to get going quickly.
So, I now had a digital product. I needed a mini-site to promote it, a price, affiliates, a way to take money, a way to handle support, etc. More on all this later this week.
Best regards,
Mark
Well,good about sharing your experiences!!! more over by selling the digital products it will be more beneficial than the others it is also a good advertisement of the product.
Hi Mark, Very informative post – my brain works alot like yours. So, here’s my question……
Let’s say I’ve found a potential niche, which, for the sake of this discussion is…. Getting rid of Age Spots. I would use your medical template and good kw research to hopefully generate some adsense revenue. But, am I not leaving money on the table by not also offering a digital product of my own on this site, or, offering an affiliate product on Age Spots, or at least capturing an e-mail?
I think we would all agree that throwing up a site with one article on Age Spots won’t do much, if anything long term. So, how do you correlate sites/actions between a site you hope to generate a couple of bucks a day and developing a true, bona fide passive income stream based on the action of writing, in this case, several articles on Age Spots? Thanks Mark!
Kent — very concerned that your brain works like mine. Recommend that you seek professional help immediately. 🙂
Seriously, I think of this in the following way — I have 5 page niche sites strictly for AdSense and full blown authority sites with multiple streams of revenue. In between, there are lots of little things that you can do to add revenue to a small AdSense sites — selling an eBook and collecting email addresses are two great examples that you mention. In fact, if you have popular AdSense sites you can grow them to authority sites and vice versa.
These themes have the express purpose of maximizing the AdSense CTR. One of the ideas central to that is limiting the “other stuff” that people can click on. If they want more information than is in the site, they get more info by clicking AdSense.
But, in the right circumstances, you can make even more money doing it your way. Let’s think about an eBook. Let’s say you had an AdSense site that was paying an average of $1/click at a 10% CTR. That means that every 1000 visitors would generate $100. Then, let’s say you added a banner for a $27 eBook with a sales page that converted at 3% and paid $15 for each sale. Say that 100 of your thousand visitors left the site through the eBook banner. That would cost you $10. But, 3 of those visitors would buy the eBook and you would get $45. So, in that case, it is a great deal.
But, if you are in a $2/click niche at a %15 CTR and selling a $7 eBook converting at 1% you get a different answer.
So, you need to know your numbers — but in general your point is exactly correct.
In any case, it is “pretty easy” to add banners and email opt-in forms to the themes, and I am happy to help people do that if they are interested.
@Erica — Thanks. On Wednesday, I’ll get more into the detail of what I did to get the sales page out there, what I wish I had done, and what I plan to do.
Regards,
Mark
Just announced a request for input on this thread with a prize. So far, Kent is int the lead.
http://www.masonworld.com/products/need-input-on-next-post/
Regards,
Mark
Somehow I don’t think this will win for “best question” but the truth is, besides wanting to know what you wish you had done differently and why (which you’ve already alluded to telling us) I want to know something about your advertising channels and results – what has been working and what hasn’t and what is on your agenda to try next?
As an aside, did you give yourself a pat on the back after watching John Reese’s third video about creating traffic with digital products? If not, remove hands from keyboard and do so now. 🙂
Annie
Well, winning the themes won’t do me much good, I already purchased them. The e-Book by Josh does a great job of detailing the methods to creating the $5 a day site. I’m always curious how much time people spend. For instance if it takes 20 hours to create the site, write the material, and get the traffic (on average) and I know I have 2-hours a day, then I know it will take me about 10-days. That is about $7.5 an hour for the first site. However, there are some costs, such as hosting, some tools such as Adsense themes :O) , Keyword research tools, etc. If I do that 10 times, that is 100-days or about 3-months of work and about $1,500 per month (which is my initial goal, btw). That is a good part-time income, but not full-time. What is the next step to “pump up the volume”? and what is a realistic time-frame for doing it?
Great post Mark and has certainly got me thinking. I am still a little bit confused about how big to grow an adsense site and how much information You should put on it. Have I understood you correctly in the post above where you said you have a number of niche sites that are 5 pages? Is this the optimum size of a site keeping in mind your comments about having people leave through clicking to obtain further information. I suppose what I am asking, is there a certain style of writing and presentation for an adsense site that is more successful than another?
A realistic hands on approach to making the web 2.0 environment friendly is to do exactly the same principles of combinations as illustrated. The effectiveness can produce stimulating results that flow through with consistency and duplicate content, will surge with a much higher level of generated leads back to your web site. The same could be said for parked domains, the application process can be done in a semi-automatic fashion with high paying dividends. Supplying the search engines with targeted related keywords then having back links that support the framework can have dramatic cash flow rewards.
Following through from those who are experts within this field is not “Rocket Science” but it does tend to sway towards a more uniformed approach.
@TOP CD — Well, all I can say is “Tim Gorman.” Tim works from 9PM to 1AM every night (4 hours/day, 28 hours a week — just over 100 hours/month) and makes $10,000/month (about $100/hour).
The secret? Sites that he never works on continue to generate money. So, this is very much like investing. Start small and build your internet empire.
@Murray — you can make money from a 5 page site. I think the best sites have a home page and 5-6 “main pages” that are linked from the home page. They then get a constant feed of articles (1/week or 1/month) that support the 5-6 main pages. Internal linking of these pages is important. This means that the supporting pages should like back to your main pages via your keywords.
Bottom line is that 5 pages is plenty to start, and once you get 30 or so pages on a site, you can probably leave it alone. Or, you can keep growing it and build an “authority site”.
Regarding style — be informative and helpful. Keep your articles on topic. Keep your paragraphs shorts. Put yourself in the shoes of the person that just clicked the link and write what you would want to read. Keep articles to 300-500 words. Those are some rules of thumb.
Regards,
Mark
@Frank — Really?
Mark
I see you are a big fan of Josh Spaulding also. I agree with your ideas but just a thought for you. I would think about building your sites all in a couple of adjacent niches. That way if you get one of two of your sites to start getting significant traffic then you can do a bit of linking together to gain juice on all of them.
Rick
Rick — I agree completely. Even better if these sites are on various class-C subnets.