Guest Column by Rick Butts
Did you start your blog to make money?
As Dr. Phil say’s, “how’s that workin’ out for you?”
Most people start their web site based on a topic without any idea if they can really make money with it.
Here is a sure-fire plan to guarantee you’ll make money – BEFORE you put all the time and energy into creating a high traffic site.
1. Choose 3 different products that you would potentially promote. If you will be selling your own product – just choose items that would appeal to your target market. To make it easy – we’ll use 3 Clickbank products.
2. Create an AdWords campaign and drive the traffic through a tracking URL that will take each visitor to one of each of the Clickbank products.
3. Run the test until you get a pretty good idea of what the loser is – eliminate it – and run your test between the two survivors.
4. Run this test until you get a clear winner. This would be the one that sold the most.
Keep good records, take notes, and take this test seriously. The information you get will give you critical information abou your most valuable keywords, bid costs, and so much more.
Part of the reason you want to run the test a while is to make sure you find a good click-thru rate on your AdWords campaign. Keep all the ads you write and split test. You’ll be glad you did.
That’s it!
Now you have some real live fire-tested market information!
Let’s say you were testing 3 products around a health market.
Now you know what headline, URL, copy, and offer, at what price point and what the sales letter looked like that turned people in your exact market into CASH.
Armed with this information you can confidently purchase a URL around your keyword research and test results.
You will already know what types and price points you can begin to build your business around.
This will also reveal a failed idea in a hurry. If you can’t figure out how to get traffic – or how to get that traffic to buy something – you can either solve those issues, or abandon this niche no matter how sexy it looked going in.
Building an authority site that gets tons of traffic is a labor of love that requires time and patience. There is no reason to do all that work and end up with a high traffic site that can only make small AdSense pennies.
Now you can begin to build your high traffic site around a profit path that you know will be successful.
-Rick Butts
Guest Columnist Rick Butts is the Editor of Online Marketing Monthly and Visitors2Cash. For more information about making your web site make more money get his FREE audio.