Dan The Internet Man

Howdy howdy!

Time to dwell on a topic I think is very important. I want to discuss whether it’s best to follow or to lead, and it probably isn’t what you think either.

From my experience online so far, I personally think it’s best to do both, and I’ll explain what I mean by that.

When you should follow

When you are first getting started - A lot of people make the mistake of trying to lead when they first start out. I personally recommend you follow first. Look at what successful people in your niche are doing and copy it. I’m not saying rip their content, but copy what techniques they are using. Look at how they get traffic, how their sales funnel is set up, get on their mailing lists and see what they are doing. It’s a really easy way to get a crash course introduction into what is work.

A good way to spot successful websites is to track PPC advertisements. If you see an advertisement up there for more than a few weeks, chances are it’s a working promotion.

Proven Business Models - Product creation, memberships, product launches, affiliate sites, etc. are all so popular for a reason. Because they work.

SEO - This is another example of when following is advantageous. Look at what websites are getting ranked highly for your keyword, then dig through their link portfolio. Comment where they comment, submit articles and content where they submit content!

Copywriting - When you are first starting out at writing copy, I recommend you find a sales letter that you know converts and try and model your own sales letter off that (That does not translate to ripping off their sales letter). To find a product with a good sales letter, check out the Clickbank marketplace and filter by gravity.

Traffic sources - If you see people migrating to a certain traffic source, following them is generally a good idea.

When you should not follow

• “I am looking to buy this program, but is anyone here making any money with this yet?” <- Translation: I am too lazy to try things on my own so I want to someone else to do that work for me.
• When you are going through a product DON’T COPY THE SITE OR THE NICHE THEY USE AS AN EXAMPLE. You are begging for failure. Quit trying to take the easy route and apply what you learn in the training and build a website without copying the example website or niche!
• The horde - If everyone is pitching how to make money with Clickbank, you might have a better chance going after networks the masses aren’t talking about.

When it’s the right time to lead…

Alright, the idea of leading…

First of all, you have to realize that basically any idea that you can come with for an online business has already been tried before, so that’s not what I mean by lead…

With both my online businesses that I have run for a year and a half or more (my web hosting and IM niche business), I have noticed that as time goes on, you naturally start to shift from a follower to a leader. I’ve also noticed that there is a specific point in your business that you will start to notice this happen. It’s starting to happen to me with my IM niche business.

I feel like I’m ready to take my business to the next level - which is coming up with new ideas of my own, trying things that haven’t been tried before in my niche, making products that haven’t been done, and going where the majority of other people in my niche are unwilling to go. Yes, there are plenty of people out there better than me at this IM thing…but I truly believe that if I stay focused on my goal, I keep innovating as much as I can, and I keep pushing my business further, eventually I will be a leader in my niche. It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow, hell it may not even be 3 years from now, but it will happen eventually.

You have to realize that this is a gradual process. You don’t start out as a leader. You can try, but chances are if you haven’t followed first, you are going to get rolled.

Hopefully this all made sense. It’s 5:40AM in the morning right now, so thoughts are scattered lol.

-Dan Brock

I’m getting quite ambitious these days…and now I’m dead set on building a brand new niche business from scratch which I am aiming for 7 figures a year profit after 3 years. I wanted to share my blueprint with you - I was also hoping you would give me your thoughts on my plan by commenting below.

First off, you probably know by now that I am also involved in the Internet Marketing niche (no kidding! haha). I fully expect my IM business will be a 7 figure earner by my third year, however I don’t want to become one of those ‘IM only gurus’ - you know the type. The people who only make money online by selling how to make money online products (there’s a lot of them!). While I’ve made most of my money by working in niches outside of make money online niche, I want to keep it that way so I wanted to build a new niche business to keep my income distributed.

Here is My First Draft Blueprint to Developing a 7 Figure a Year Niche Business

As my skills improve, I’m seeing how important it is to go after the big fish instead of the little guppies. Here is why:

When you go after the little fish (we’re assuming the little fish are the easy catches), you can only go so far. You will make money A LOT easier, however your potential is limited. Your business is also very insecure because you don’t have a brand. An example of going after the little fish is building affiliate sites. I’m not saying affiliate sites are bad (in fact, they are a key component in my blueprint), they are just limited.

The big fish is what I want now. Going after a type of big fish would be creating your own products - however it goes way beyond that. The biggest fish is developing a brand and becoming a leader in your niche. That is the big fish I am after.

I’ve also been noticing that you are much better off focusing on one niche at a time - ideally something you are very passionate about. My passion is martial arts, and it just so happens to be a very big niche online, so this is what I am targeting.

This is how I am going to hunt down these big fish in methodical order:

First order of business: move into my office building. I now officially have office space that I can go to to get some serious work done. I’m noticing that working in my bed room is only hurting my business. Over the past like 9 months I’ve been unable to get more than 1 hour of work done per day and it’s really starting to get under my skin. If I want a 7 figure business, I need a place I can go to work at least 4 - 6 hours per day with no distractions. No video games to suck my time away, no bed nearby to demotivate me, etc.

Alright, on to the actual action steps.

Phase 1: Build a network of affiliate sites (there’s a twist)

Ok. Since I tore my ACL a few months ago, I physically can’t make the products I want to make, so I have to compromise. I need about 3 more months before I can do anything physical, so in the meantime I am going to build up my assets as best as I can.

You know how I said going after the little fish (affiliate sites) is limiting? Well, that is not entirely true if you use the little fish as bait for the big fish.

What I want to do here is build Amazon affiliate sites around buyer keywords. My goal is to build sites around buyer keywords for equipment, books, DVDs, etc. I will have no distinction on price point. Normally with physical product sites you want to sell items priced at $100 or more to make a good commission per sale. I am going after EVERYTHING no matter what price point. If it’s a $5 item, it doesn’t matter, and here’s why.

Think about this: When someone types a buyer keyword like ‘Top Flight XL golf club set’, what are they telling you? You know that they like golf, but most important you know they are someone who is willing to buy something online.

Now think about this: What if you were able to get this person on your mailing list so you can market products to them in the future?

It doesn’t matter the price of the item they are searching, as long as I am able to qualify them as a buyer. That’s the entire goal of my Amazon affiliate sites for this application. I don’t really care about making money with them by selling physical products as an affiliate (although that will be a side-effect), what I want is to get those buyers into my mailing list.

If you get 1000 buyers to your network of sites per day, and you can convert a very small amount of them to your mailing list - say 10% (average for opt-in conversion from a blog), you would add 100 buyers to your mailing list every single day. That is extremely valuable.

Phase 2: Build opt-in freebies and a basic product

Once I have my network of affiliate sites running and my ACL gets a bit more time to strengthen up, I am going to proceed to phase 2 where I will create my first freebies (training videos) as well as a basic product that I can sell for $19.95 (the average price of info products in my niche).

This is more of a test than anything else. I want to make sure that the type of product I want to sell (an info product) will take in this market. There’s no reason to invest insane amounts of time in making a product in a niche if you have no clue whether it will sell (I made that mistake with my first product I made).

So I’ll build my opt-in page, filter my Amazon traffic to it until I have an initial list of say 1000 buyers. I will then promote my basic product to them to see how it takes. From that test, I will be able to determine if that style of product is something martial artists are interested in buying online. If it doesn’t take, I will create another product with a different twist and repeat my test.

All in all, it will take me about 6 hours to create my opt-in freebies and my first test product. No sweat if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason.

Phase 3: Build out my sales funnel

Once I determine what style of product sells, I will then start building out my sales funnel. One key piece of the funnel is a monthly membership program (this is going to be my big fish later on). Why is a membership site important? Well two reasons: Once they sign up, they won’t cancel if the price is low ($10-15/m). The reasoning is like this: ‘If I cancel this membership, I am giving up on my health and my martial arts. I am a failure if I quit’. It’s like a gym membership. If you quit your gym, you give up on yourself. No one wants to do that.

The second importance of this membership program is that it will lay the ground work for my ‘big fish’ later on. I will be able to use this membership to start building up my community and brand.

Phase 4: Map out paid traffic sources

Once I have a converting sales funnel, I will start pumping in the paid traffic to my opt-in list. The good thing about the martial arts niche is that you don’t have to worry so much about the guidelines of the sites you advertise on. A martial arts business is seen a legitimate subject, so you won’t get declined or slapped. Things like make money online, weight loss, forex, etc. are considered shady to these networks, so it’s very hard to get paid traffic to niches like that.

I’ll be using Facebook, Adwords, and Yahoo PPC for this. I will also contact some of the bigger martial arts sites and get some media buys going with those niche sites.

The importance of using paid traffic is that not only can you build a list really really fast, you don’t have to do any extra work once the traffic gates are open. No need to spend time on manual traffic generation.

Phase 5: Tackling the big fish!

Once I have a massive list of people who are interested in martial arts, I am going to make my monthly membership program my front runner product. I don’t want to give too many details away on this, but this membership is going to be my 7 figure a year baby. Eventually I want to make it the go-to site for anything martial arts related. A big free community with a paid membership as the back end. And once I have my big list, I can do a real ‘launch’ for the membership site. At this point, I also plan to have some JV partners I’ve worked with prior so they can help me get the word out.

The big fish is my big dream idea. It’ll be a truly unique idea that no one has ever done before. While it will be based off of proven principles, the overall concept I have in mind is so unique that I will be the front runner in this niche. I don’t know if you read my post about not going after the ‘big dream’, however in this case it will work since I will already have a large subscriber and fan base, and will also have all the knowledge I need to follow through with my idea. It also helps that I am extremely passionate about martial arts, so I will always have an interest in pushing my business further.

So there you have it! This strategy, in my opinion, is the way to go (at least for me) for now on.

What do you think? Leave me a comment!

I’m interested in knowing what you think about my plan! Feel free to comment below with thoughts, tips, suggestions, etc.

Thanks!

Dan Brock

Hello Hello

As I’ve been working online more and more these days, I’ve noticed that there are a few profitable activities that will make you the most money. I’ve also noticed that it’s very easy to get caught up doing the non-profitable activities instead of what you should really be doing, so I wanted to list all of the activities that are profitable, and all of the activities that are non-profitable.

Non-Profitable Activities

• Checking email
• Checking affiliate stats
• Customer support for your business <- important, but not profitable
• Spending hours on the Warrior Forum. For the most part, WF is a major time suck and will not contribute much to your business. There are a couple sections on the WF that are worthwhile like the WSO and JV section. Even if you are using it for list building, you can find better and more profitable ways to do it outside of the WF.
• Buying products that don’t contribute to your overall business plan
• Learning how to web design or program <- the reason I say this is not profitable is because by the time you learn how to do them adequately, you gave up like 3+ years of your time. Might as well just pay someone a fee and have them do it for you and be done with it.

You will notice that all of the non-profitable activities have one thing in common. They are the fun things to do. Wonder why you never make money online? I’m betting it’s because you are spending most of your time doing the things above.

Profitable Activities

• Article writing - Profitable in the beginning when you have more time than money. Will be less profitable as your business grows and your time becomes limited.
• Link building - Profitable but deminishes as your time gets more valuable.
• Manual traffic generation <- it can be profitable, but just like writing articles and link building, the value deminshes as your business grows.
• Outsourcing - that is how you make the three above activities profitable again once your time becomes scarce.
• Building new websites
• Building up an existing website
• Building up your mailing list
• Creating excellent content - Always profitable
• Product creation
• Automatic traffic generation - Traffic generation is VERY profitable if you go for mostly automatic traffic or bulk traffic which can be acquired without spending a lot of your time.
• Relationship building - VERY VERY Profitable if you are doing it with the right people.
• Conversion and split testing
• Search engine optimization
• Market research - very valuable when done right
• Copywriting <- without good copy, forget about making a lot of money online.

You’ll notice from the list above, that the most profitable activities also tend to be the ones that require actual work, and/or are boring and tedeous. What does that tell you?

Also, I wanted to point out that depending on what stage your business is at, some of the above profitable activities might not be as valuable to you. For example, if you are JUST getting started online, doing something like product creation and relationship building might not be as profitable for you because you aren’t ready for it yet. If that is the case, things like article writing, link building, SEO, etc. would be more profitable for you because that is something as a beginner you can see immediate results from.

But anyway…

Moral of the story here is that if you find yourself having fun, chances are you are doing the wrong things LOL. I think it’s a natural thing to get distracted by the fun things - from time to time I find myself spending time on the Warrior Forum because naturally you want to try and avoid doing work. You need to identify that feeling when it happens, and correct it when possible.

Pop Quiz For You

Out of the the 15 or so profitable activities I listed above, which 3 do you think are the most profitable? Comment below with your answer. I want to see what you know…