Build It and They Will Come - Or Not!

The old “build it and they will come” content creation strategy is completely outdated.

Just because someone has a popular forum about a TV show or one of your friends has thousands of pages listed in Google under “stock trading” doesn’t mean that you can duplicate it or that it is actually profitable.

As an internet marketer or online business, your sole task is to make money with the web properties that you create such as:

Content sites
Info products
Membership sites
Services
Software and digital products

You will have problems!

With any of those models, you will have to deal with a number of problems:

Membership retention
Flame wars
Site scrapers
Comment spammers
And lots more!

Over the years I have created many info products and operated content sites that generated up to $1,000 per month on autopilot, so I have seen all the issues that can happen.

You need to know that many people that make more from AdSense and CPA offers have a lot of content and a lot of traffic. To run an authority site or popular forum needs a heap of traffic to keep it running and a lot of time moderating.

Just flip the switch…

It’s not just simply as easy as flipping a switch and then sitting back on the beach collecting money.

You would need to generate new fresh content every month and split test your content, ads and traffic sources.

If you determine you can get an average of 25 cents per click and a 10 percent clickthru rate on a particular page, this means that you have a 2.5 cent visitor value.

Now if you can get traffic from an ad source that only costs you 1 cent per click, you can arbitrage 1.5 cents of profit for every visitor you get… or $15 for every 1,000 visitors.

Create an income stream

That might not sound like a lot, but it’s $450 a month or $5,400 per year doing almost nothing. Rinse and repeat that a couple of times and you have a full-blown stream of income.

Be aware that 99% of the content and sites you create won’t come close to those numbers, but when you actually measure your traffic in this way, you can figure out which direction is most profitable for you.

For a content site, build a list with a free bribe. If you have an info product, put a squeeze page in front of that sales letter and build a list with a free ethical bribe (like a sample of the info product). Make sure to build a list after someone makes a purchase so you can promote your other offers or even related affiliate offers to those buyers on your list.

Let do some maths

Say you are building a list using AdWords and paying $1 per lead.

You have two offers which are:

$7 product that converts at 12% (with a $47 upsell that converts over 1%)
$47 product that converts at 3%

After some calculations:

Offer #1, each visitor makes you $7 x 0.12 (or $0.84 on the frontend) and $0.47 per visitor on the backend, for a total of $1.31
Offer #2, each visitor makes you $1.41

Depending on which niche you are in, you can turn $1.00 into $1.31 or $1.00 into $1.41… over and over again.

When you do these calculations, you can see right away how much money you can make out of your website / products.

Take Action!

Don’t assume that if you build it they will come.
Create lots of content and products.
Test, track and tune to weed out the content that doesn’t make you money so you can act instead of react.
Offer an ethical bribe to build a list… whether you have a sales site or a content site.