These days, the target most often in the head of an individual who wants to start his own online business is $1Million.
How can they reach that magic $1 Million in the next 1-2 years…nearly everyone we help on their journey at InfoMarketer’sZone has that either in the front or back of their mind.
Reaching the Million Dollar milestone means not only that worry about debt and bills are a thing of the past, but it also means you can upgrade your life, exit your job, take care of your family financially, buy that BMW or Mercedes you have been eying, zip down to a private resort on an island of your choosing and become part of the exclusive $1 Million club (something pretty sweet by itself)
Frankly, these days $1M is shooting fairly low in that there are many role models who have taken their online business well beyond that point into the double digits to the point where they begin to hire a few employees or at least contractors they maintain on retainer.
Having built several businesses online over the years, I wanted to share the path that most realistically has and can lead to making $1 Million from your own internet business.
1. Select A Niche Opportunity And A Market
Many people start by trying to pick a market and hope magically that some brilliant idea comes to them…those same people typically are still dreaming about making money the next year, and the year after that.
A better approach is to pick a market that has proven demand, hungry buyers already eagerly spending their money such as health, personal development, fitness, technology, business opportunity, relationships/dating…by choosing one of these markets you remove a very important variable in the equation for making profit – DEMAND. You know it exists, there is no question.
Your objective is to research that market until you come up with irrational passion and desire for transformation.
People who want to lose their gut before summer will spend BIG money on solutions to help get them there.
People who desperately want love and to be loved will spend BIG money to help them overcome shyness and learn new ways to get a date.
People who are suffering painful health or emotional challenges will spend BIG money to move them toward healthy and happy…Billions are spent every year.
Inside InfoMarketer’sZone we outline several methods for finding these golden nuggets and even help coach people to fine-tune their niche markets and ideas…discussion forums, blogs, Amazon, Google Trends, Google Alerts, etc…are all great ways to tap into highly profitable niche markets.
2. Create A Digital Information Product
When I first started out online there were two ways to make BIG money online…both involved creating content that addressed people’s desires. The first method was publish all of your content for free and make money off of advertising (Google Adsense, CPA, Ad Networks, etc…). The second was to publish your best content into paid products, either ebooks, books, courses or for-pay private membership sites.
Today you really only have one model left.
The series of changes Google has made to large-scale, free content sites has largely relegated all but the very largest content sites a mere shadow of what they used to be.
I know people that were well on their way to making $1 Million with 1000’s of pages of free content by placing ads on those pages who were virtually wiped out over the last 2-years…who now publish ALL of their content as paid information products.
There is much to be said about this, but here are the main points around creating your own products:
- Start with a very specific solution guide to the most urgent problem in your niche market…30-40 pages is often enough
- Create your product as a training system rather than informational guide, this will make it more valuable and useful
- Give them your best (the content can come from research, interviewing or partnering other experts or your own experience)
- Price it according to the value it will bring…instead of a $10 guide you will likely have a $27 or $37 “system” or “course”
- Have an aim to produce back-end products that you will upsell and cross-sell (this is how you will get to $1M faster)
Let’s do a quick, back-of-the-napkin calculation here to see how this may work…
Assume you have 2 $37 basic products in your niche market and for each you have an upsell option for $47/month that converts 35% of the time someone buys your basic product.
You want to be selling between 300-350 ebooks per month with approximately 110 new membership signups at $45/month (or alter the numbers slightly if you have a less or more expensive recurring membership fee).
Is that possible?
Absolutely – many of the top ebooks on Clickbank sell $1M or more on their own with a single title, add in the back-end and you have a surefire winner.
Even better, when you get the hang of launching your own products in a new niche, repeating that success and fine-tuning conversions on your existing products makes $1M that much more certain…obviously you have to put the work in and not everyone will stick with it to see this through.
3. Traffic
Ok, so to make these kind of numbers, you need lots of highly targeted traffic. You can get that traffic in three major ways:
- SEO/Content – blogging along with syndicated content works best for us, but promotion in relevant discussion forums and social networks also works extremely well
- Partner/Affiliate Traffic…my favorite is to seek out authority website owners around your niche and get them to promote your products for you. Our entire initial launch in new niches is typically centered around partner traffic and it works extremely well – and it’s fast!
- Paid traffic…once you know your metrics (conversion rate and cost of customer acquisition) you can make decisions on getting paid traffic from Google (adwords), Microsoft, Facebook or other solo or list buys Testing each one lets you tweak the campaign until you see profit, then you can really go big quick. This is how many of the $1M + information marketers now operate their businesses
4. Sales Pages and Landing Pages
A couple of important points to be made here:
- Your sales copy is the #1 factor in how well your product sells, you MUST learn (at least) the basics of writing copy AND get used to paying copywriters. Factor in $2K-$3K to get a decent copywriter, even more (upwards of $10K) to get a superstar with a proven track record, to write your sales letter…it makes a huge difference in your sales.
- Be wary of copywriters who charge $500-$2K, most will be a complete waste of money and time…I know, I have suffered through my share of them
- A good technique if you want to take a crack at it yourself is to learn the basics, make a stab at writing your sales letter or video script, then pay a top notch copywriter to critique it for you…this will be less than writing the letter from scratch and can work out just as well
- Know the value of a sales funnel…in other words the process of which pages you want your traffic to land on, what action you want them to take first, then what action do you want them to take next.  For example, you want them to land on your basic product sales page first, you want them to buy, if they don’t, then you a) Collect their email address by giving them something of value and b) Offer them a downsell (discount or added bonus). If they do buy your basic product, then you want to upsell them on your back-end where a good percentage will give you even more money because they want everything. Having a proper sales funnel can mean 2-3X the profit over just a standard sales page
Finally, keep this in mind…think about higher-end products in addition to your basic products.
Create a coaching program, seminar, monthly “insider’s club”, weekend seminar, etc… for $1,000 and you only have to sell 1000 of them to make $1M – you could easily achieve that in the first 1-2 years keeping in mind the traffic and sales page conversion tips given above.
Are you looking to build your own $1 Million online business?
What goal do you have in mind, leave us a comment and then let’s make it happen together.
