And here’s the (shocking) story of how I almost gave it up entirely.

Earlier this year, I could feel things were coming to a head with erica.biz and me. My relationship with this blog wasn’t healthy. I have a fantastic audience full of fans and supporters, and the time had come to figure out how to turn my blog into a full-time income.

“How to make money with your blog!”

I didn’t like my options. There are those people who treat their email lists as if they are not real people. Those marketers (most of whom view blogs as “a waste of time”) constantly email their lists with the latest “make money online” product of the day. “Buy this!” they say. Then next week: “What you bought last week didn’t work? Try this week’s special!”

I know several of those people, and they encouraged me to send more product offers to my email list. But I couldn’t do it. It felt…so yucky to me. And, despite my huge background in sales and being a personally huge advocate of learning sales…it still didn’t sit right with me.

It didn’t help matters when my then-boyfriend, now-fiance Brian tried to help me with it. “Okay,” I told him one day. “Go to Clickbank and find the top-selling products in the make money online niche. Surely there has to be something good there. Watch all their sales videos. Here is my business credit card. Buy whatever you want under $100. If something’s good and will actually help people, I’ll email my list about it.”

He spent 30 minutes on the task and then resigned. “I can’t watch these sales videos,” he told me. “I looked at two or three different products–and they’re just awful. They feel dishonest to me.”

“I know,” I sighed. “I understand.”

And so that route (with the exception of a handful of products that are actually worth it) closed to me.

“Help! Help!”

In the meantime, my email inbox was bursting with people requesting help. Stories poured through the digital wire. The grandmother who just wanted to retire. A guy from Nigeria who wanted to show people in his country that there was a real way to make money–rather than trying to scam people via email or Facebook. A disabled woman who felt that working on the Internet was her ticket to getting off of disability for good. An enlisted officer who wanted a better life for his family. The stories went on, and on, and on. I wanted to help. But what could I do? This blog wasn’t making much money–but not because it couldn’t, given my traffic numbers and awesome fans. It wasn’t making money because I couldn’t bring myself to promote utter crap at the expense of my audience.

And sure, I could have taken the easy way out and sent the disabled woman and the military guy and the Nigerian dude and the grandmother some get-rich-quick product link. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. But I didn’t know what to do. These were real people. They needed my help. And I didn’t have any solutions that wouldn’t involve working for free for them, when I could not afford to work for free.

So I did one of the things I do best: I sat down and cried. I just lost it. Here were real people who needed my help. Not faceless “traffic” or “email list members”. Actual individuals. And I had nothing for them.

Then I decided to give up on email for 30 days. I needed a break. I needed clarity. I needed to retreat from the stories from a bit and focus on a solution.

Digging myself out of the email hole allowed me the clarity I sought–but I fear it might have come at the expense of some people, who got upset that they couldn’t reach me. Still, in that 30 days, interesting things happened.

My “No Email” Trial Turns Interesting

A famous author of a best-selling book that has sold more than 500,000 copies (if I tell you his name and the name of one of his books, chances are you will have read it) contacted me. And when he found out I wasn’t checking email, he had his assistant freakin’ track me down. His assistant contacted me via Twitter, Facebook, and Skype.

He wanted to meet me in person. Surprised, I obliged. And it was then that he said something that rocked my world. He said, “I’ve written one of the most famous books on running a business. I found out about your blog, and read every word. I read your article on how to hire an employee, and I was stunned. It’s some of the best advice I’ve ever read.”

Then: “I know this may seem out of left field, but can you help me hire a new assistant? I could really use your help. I loved your step-by-step process. I’ve never seen anything like it, even having read basically every business book that’s been out in the past 30+ years.”

“What If…?”

That encounter started some thoughts bubbling in my head. I didn’t want to bombard you with advertisements (and we both know those aren’t really the path to a full-time income via blogging, anyway.) I didn’t want to bombard you with affiliate links for products that suck (yuck!) A grain of thought planted itself in my head. What if I wrote something myself? Something that would really help an individual who didn’t necessarily have technical experience start an Internet business? Some step-by-step videos?

I mind-mapped. I charted. Then I started recording videos. I named the course Step by Step Business. I figured once it was done, I’d figure out how to find the people who needed it and get it to them/you at a reasonable price. I knew the content was worth $1000, or more. But I wanted to find a way where the average person would afford it.

I spent the entire month of July recording videos. I did a small speaking gig then, and sold the first few “beta” copies. (Two people out of the tiny group who took the first course have already started making money online.) It was a breakthrough. I finally knew how I was going to make money with my blog–by actually helping people. (It seems so obvious in retrospect!)

Meanwhile, I had quietly ended my 30-day no email trial (which had stretched on past 60 days) and was receiving and replying to email again. Several people asked me what had happened with that, so I decided that would make a good blog post. There was a voice in my head that said “Don’t post it!”, but I didn’t understand why it would say that, so I posted it anyway.

The comments were immediate, and negative. I had set up a (pretty harsh) autoresponder. I was sick of getting bombarded with PR requests and basically, a bunch of crap. That was 90% of my incoming email. The other 10% was people who actually wanted help. I wrote the autoresponder for the PR jerks, not realizing it would hurt the people who sent me real emails.

Called out on my blog, I saw the autoresponder for what it was and quickly realized my commenters had a point. Looked at from the lens of someone who wanted help, it sounded cold and distant. I changed it immediately, then dropped it entirely a week or so later.

Yet one commenter wouldn’t let up. “Make no mistake, Erica is in it to make money. There’s nothing wrong with that, I do the same, but there is no need for her to be so superior and rude,” he wrote. (That was after I changed my autoresponder and admitted I’d made a mistake.)

What made it more devastating was that this comment was from someone who’d actually purchased products from me in the past–someone I’d talked to personally, 1-on-1, who I thought would know me better than that.

I Considered Shutting Down My Blog Entirely

Shaken, I reconsidered everything. I’m still not sure why that comment dug so deep. Maybe it was because I thought he knew me, but mostly it was because I really wasn’t “in it to make money.” Heck, I’d gone to great lengths to treat you as a real person, not just as someone to be marketed to. All the people out there who just spam their lists with crap–and he couldn’t see the difference between me and those other people?

That day, I couldn’t see myself ever blogging again. I seriously considered pulling down erica.biz entirely. Why waste my time blogging for free here when I could just run a business and be free from the hateful personal attacks? What was I even doing here? Whatever I was doing, I was apparently doing it all wrong.

I threw myself into Whoosh Traffic, and here we are. Four months later, and I’ve only written two blog posts since that fateful day. It took me four months to get over that comment.

This blog post is me closing the door on that and looking forward. I’m still angry about it, but I’ve decided I don’t want to give up blogging. Besides, who would I be to let one asshole get in the way of helping people? That’s not really how I want to present myself to the world. So I’m shaking it off…slowly.

I switched over to Disqus comments after that, although it wouldn’t have made any difference with that comment, as that commenter used his real name. But I figured it might help some other anonymous attacks I’ve gotten in my comments. Instead, my blog filled up with spam comments. Apparently the spammers exploit Disqus. I am looking for a better solution.

And Now, For my Most Surprising News of 2011…

I wanted to make this a separate blog post, but it seems fitting to add this here. It’s going to surprise the heck out of you, I think!

A few of my personal friends know the hassle I’ve gone through trying to get a mortgage over the past year. The banks just do not want to give mortgages to self-employed people. I moved to Austin, Texas, and am ready to buy a house here (especially given that a mortgage here would actually be cheaper than the rent on an equivalent place–the way it should be!)

In case you’re self-employed and haven’t tried to get a mortgage lately, first, the banks will only count W-2 income (salary) from your business, not dividends you pay yourself. I pay myself in dividends as well as salary, so that reduced my income dramatically. Secondly, they want 24 months of W-2 salary from your own business, and then they take the average of those 24 months. If you’re like me, and just learned that you have to have W-2 income, sorry, it’ll be 24 months before you can qualify for a mortgage.

I even had one bank pull all my tax returns directly from the IRS, which showed that I made plenty of money to afford the mortgage, and had for years. (We’re talking a $200,000 mortgage here.) No go. Since over half of it was dividends, I didn’t get to count that income. And they didn’t like that I had seed-funded Whoosh Traffic out of my personal savings, instead of getting investors.

Tired of fighting, I raised the white flag and decided to beat the banks at their own game. So I went out and got a job.

Yep, you read that right! I’ve had a whole lot of job offers over the past few years, but I knew what I wanted to do–make a real difference at a startup company. So the first person I called was Jason Cohen over at WP Engine, which does WordPress hosting. I told him I was on the market because I needed a mortgage and W-2 income, and I’d help them get more customers for their hosting business. They’re located here in Austin, and Jason had been after me for a while about doing some consulting with them.

So now I have a job. A real W-2 pay stub with a boss and everything! (I called my dad and told him, and he almost dropped the phone: “That’s something I never thought I’d hear you say!”) I’m having a blast designing landing pages, helping them set up ad campaigns, and tweaking their website for maximum conversions.

And now I can get a mortgage! And I have health insurance.

I announced this on Facebook recently, and the questions poured in: “Does that mean you’re no longer doing Whoosh Traffic? Is Whoosh Traffic okay?” The answers are: Whoosh Traffic is doing great, and I’m still working on it! I’m happy about how this turned out anyway, because now we can use Whoosh Traffic’s income to hire more people and do some marketing, instead of having some of its income diverted to my salary.

I’m stoked because we may be able to hire another programmer even sooner than I originally thought! We are really rocking it out with our rank tracker, and even had a Fortune 500 company sign up recently for it. (And they love us!) We plan to go deeper into the SEO tools niche in 2012. But I suspect I’ll have another, goals-related blog post to talk about that in!

As we close out the year, I’d just like to say thank you for your support. 2011 wasn’t the easiest year for me. But coming into 2012, my resolve to help you get started making money online has only deepened.

Oh yeah–and about that Step by Step Business product? Stay tuned. It’ll be here very soon, in an extremely affordable fashion. I’m ready to start 2012 with a bang. I’ll be busier than ever, but I feel more energized and motivated than ever!

The truth about how to make money on the
Internet–minus the hype and BS.

Too many of us have completely forgotten how to work for a living.

I can’t count how many emails I’ve received that say something along the following lines: “Erica, I need to know how to make money on the Internet. But I need make at least $100,000 in my first year or it won’t be worth it for me. Can you suggest something that would help me do that?”

You–yes, you, the person who writes that–do you know what you’re called in the Internet marketing world by all the “gurus”?

They call you a “buyer”. And it’s not a good title to have.

How They Rope You In

Here’s what happens. You send an email like that to a “guru” marketer. And, of course, they (or their assistant) will write back. The return email to you will have some affiliate link in it, for some course that promises you the sun, moon, and stars.

And you’ll buy it. Because you’re a “buyer”. You’re exactly the type of person they love to have on their list, because you buy every $2,000 product out there and never refund any of them. You buy every coaching, consulting, and “big ticket” money-making product available that promises to show you how to make money on the Internet.

And a year later, you find yourself $50,000 or more in debt (or your savings account $50,000 lighter–take your pick.) But you still haven’t made any money.

And somewhere in there, you transition from “buyer” to “bitter.” “This Internet marketing industry stinks,” you say. “What a waste of time.” And you haul your “buyer” attitude to some other industry (real estate was the hot one a few years ago), and proceed to invest your money in all those courses and “guru” products, beginning the cycle yet again.

The one thing you never admitted to yourself is that it takes real work to make money on the Internet. The one thing you never did was actually hunker down, set up a site, learn how to drive traffic to it, create a product, and sell it. You know–the stuff that actually makes money. The stuff that could actually help you set up a real business.

You gave up too easily. You had the attitude of “Actual work? Screw that!” And yet you were the one who got screwed. And until you accept that it takes 90% real work and 10% investing in courses to make real money online, you will never make a dime.

There sure are a lot of courses out there promising you $30,000 in a month, or $27,126.59 (love those weird numbers!) in a week, or whatever the hot flavor of the day is. Sometimes the sales letters are outright lies. Sometimes they are real–but the person writing them has real experience that you don’t. Sometimes the course is complete garbage. Sometimes it teaches you everything you need to know, but you bail when you find out it requires real effort.

So, what’s a “buyer” to do?

The Real Way to Make Money on the Internet

Here’s my advice (it’s free, and it’s definitely going to be worth every penny you paid for it.)

Let’s break it down. There are three things you need in order to make money on the Internet:
1) A website.
2) Traffic.
3) A product to sell.

Do you have all three of those? If not, start here…

First, commit to a single path. Stop trying to set up 23 different websites in 23 different niches. Yes, I know Guru XYZ did that and is now making [FLASHING RED TEXT]10 Billion Dollars A Day!!! But even Guru XYZ probably started out with one website in one niche. You will never get anything done if you have your hands in too many pies. So stop working on all your websites except one. Pick one, and make that profitable. (That goes for all those worthless domain names you’re holding on to, as well. Let a good amount of them go, and stop registering new ones.)

Then, pick ONE source of traffic and learn it inside and out until you’re consistently profitable with it. Put up a squeeze page on your site, then learn SEO, PPC, Facebook ads, Plenty of Fish, guest posting, Twitter, heck, even direct mail. Pick ONE of the above. Then learn it. (As a bonus, if you purchased a course on one of those, now’s the time to actually put it into use.)

Again: Learn only ONE traffic method right now! I mean it. Entire empires have been built from a single source of traffic. Until you’ve got one source of traffic profitable, you’re wasting your time learning other sources of traffic.

Next, learn Google Analytics. Got traffic coming to your website? How is it converting? if you don’t know the answer to that, it’s time to learn Google Analytics and its Goals feature to find out your conversion rate. This will take you a day or two to set up. Invest the time and learn it inside and out. Analytics is powerful, but you need to know how to use it. Don’t even think about outsourcing this. You–YOU!–need to learn something in order to make money online. This is as good a place as any to start.

Tweak your offer. What should you offer to people who land on your landing page? A free report is a good place to start. Don’t be lazy and outsource this. If you’re not a strong writer, record something and have it transcribed, or have someone interview you. You can also use a program like Camtasia to talk over a slide show presentation. Take action and get something out there now.

Tweak your landing page. Is your landing page converting at 10% or less–meaning, are fewer than 10% of your visitors actually typing in their name and email address to get more information from you? You can do better. Aim for 40-50%. Now’s the time to learn split testing. Tweak your headline, your opt-in box placement, and especially your offer. What works better? What doesn’t? Give it a shot.

Now, keep writing good content and offering it to the people on your mailing list. In my case, I write a blog post every week. It’s well worth it for me to carve a few hours out of my week to write a post that will attract new readers. You may want to consider doing the same. Again, if you’re not a writer, record audio or video. Be consistent about it. This will help your readers “warm up” to you and feel like they know, like, and trust you.

Then, make an offer to your list. This is the exciting part! If you’re just getting started, you should probably wait a few weeks (and send out some good content to your list) before you make an offer. Pick a product you know your list would enjoy and that you can personally endorse. Then write a sales letter for it and send it out to your list!

If you make even a single sale from this, celebrate! You’ve earned your first dollar online.

Are Your Expectations Realistic?

There’s a 99.99% chance you won’t make $30,000 in your first month online. Heck, if you make a dollar in profit in your first month online, you should be really proud of yourself!

In your first 12 months online, you’re doing well if you have one month where you make more than $500. Yep, that seems low, doesn’t it? But that puts you above 95% of the rest of the world. And if you’re making a few hundred dollars a month consistently, even better. You’re well on your way to making a living online.

In your second year online, provided you continue to work consistently on your business, you should have your first $1,000 month…and possibly more. You may even have a “breakthrough” month where you promote a product or offer consulting and make a few thousand dollars. This is an extremely encouraging sign.

Online business success is like a snowball. It starts small…with just a single sale or click. As you build a relationship with your subscribers, and continue to send them great content interspersed with some sales pitches for products you believe in, your earnings will multiply.

It took two and a half years of me running this blog and writing consistently every week to have my first 5-figure month, but when I did, I shattered all my previous expectations of how much money it was possible to make with a few thousand subscribers. It was incredibly worth it.

But I would never have seen that 5-figure month–and subsequent ones–if I had given up after a few months having only made a few hundred bucks a month (if that.) In the beginning, I poured my heart out and had nothing to show for it. Now, I keep it simple: I write here once a week, and do my best to help you (my subscribers.) I still do buy information products, but because I know where I want to go from here, it’s much easier for me to make the buying decision.

So, my advice to you is: Shoot for consistent earnings. Actually learn all this stuff–especially how to set up a website, how to use Google Analytics, and how to set up an email list. From there, it’s all about finding a good balance between writing good content and promoting products you know your readers will love.

Above all, don’t give up so easily. Put 2 years into this. Even though it feels like a long time now, you may find you actually enjoy getting out of bed and checking your stats, chatting with your customers and clients, and yes, making money. Once the sales start rolling in consistently, you will realize how worth it it was to start building your online empire!

Recommended Reading:

• 20 Scam-Free Ways to Make Money Online Fast. Here are 20 ways I researched to help you start your own online business.
• Why Most Internet Marketers Fail. Wherein I reveal the “dirty secret” of making money on the Internet.
• Top 10 Signs You May Be a Social Media Douchebag. Whatever you do to promote your business–don’t do these things!

This is a great question. Many bloggers–myself included–run promotions for both our own and other products on a regular basis. Some blogs are heavily promotional, with an affiliate link in nearly every post, whereas other bloggers make their money mostly through advertising and only rarely include affiliate links in their posts.

First, let’s look at things from a blogger’s perspective. Then, I’ll give you a few metrics to help you decide which marketers to follow online.

From a blogger’s perspective, affiliate revenue is often the only way to make a full-time income from a blog. My blog, as ranked by Alexa, is in the top 0.1% of all websites by traffic. Yet, as you’ve seen from my revenue numbers, I only make about $83/month from placing Google ads on my site.

So, for 99.99% of bloggers and website owners, ad revenue isn’t enough to even cover expenses, let alone provide a full-time income.

Enter affiliate marketing.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

With affiliate marketing, you get paid when you refer someone who buys something. With ads, you get paid every time someone clicks on the ad. Referring someone who buys something is often a better deal all around: the affiliate gets paid more; the product owner only has to pay when a sale is made; and the customer gets a product that he or she will hopefully love.

There are all kinds of affiliate programs: big ones like Amazon pay 4-8% for any product purchased through their site, and thousands of other ones pay out for anything from web hosting to ebooks to coaching programs. Pretty much anything you can think of that is sold online has some sort of affiliate program.

The reason affiliate programs are so popular on blogs is that the commissions on big products can add up fast. Often, information products that sell from anywhere from $200 to $2,000 or more pay out a whopping 50%–and that doesn’t include bonuses. If you’ve seen Internet marketing websites promoting big $2,000 products from well-known names like Jeff Walker or Eben Pagan, they’re getting paid more than $1,000 per sale!

There isn’t anything inherently bad about affiliate marketing. It allows website owners and bloggers to make a full-time income online without having to drive millions of visitors to their websites every month. And it drives a whole lot of sales for publishers, manufacturers, and service companies.

But affiliate marketing does have its dark side. Take my most recent income numbers, for example. I made a list of the top affiliates for Profit Instruments, and immediately my email inbox got pounded by other marketers looking for me to promote their “make money online” products.

The Big Problem with Affiliate Marketing

Right on the heels of a successful promotion, you suddenly become aware of how much money there is to be made. This is where most marketers lose their integrity. I’ve seen it time and time again. Someone gets a nice list going of thousands of people who really listen to his or her advice. The list owner promotes a good product. All of a sudden, 5 figures of income rolls in.

Unfortunately, that income is mostly one-time income. Next month, the list owner starts back over at 0. So what does he or she do? Promote again, of course! And since he’s been inundated with new offers, it’s easy to promote something in the same niche. Rinse and repeat.

The problem with constant promotion is it “burns your list.” People who were used to receiving good content suddenly get hammered with sales pitches. So they stop opening your emails. And now you, as the affiliate marketer/list owner, are in a race. You have to constantly find more people to join your list so you can continue your sales pitches and make more money.

Internet Marketing’s Dirty Secret

Here is the Internet marketing world’s dirty secret: Replicable success is hard. A one-time success–selling something and making 5 or 6 figures–is easier than doing it repeatedly. Most marketers only see dollar signs and don’t have any clue how to build a relationship with their list. And building a relationship with your list–delivering good content again and again, without constantly asking for the sale–is difficult.

The relationship you have with your list is the cornerstone of building a successful business. As a blogger, it’s about learning to say “no” 99 times out of 100 to people who ask you to promote a product. It’s about giving up some money now in order to build the relationship down the road. And if you want to know why most Internet marketers, over time, don’t make it, this is why: They go for the quick buck over the relationship.

Finding the Genuine Marketers

So, to go back to Richard’s question: How do you tell when someone is all about making money vs. truly helping someone? You have to look at the persona they project. When you opt in to their email list, what sort of emails do you get from them on a regular basis? What percentage of the emails that you receive from them contain nothing but a sales pitch? If it’s 80% or more, I suggest unsubscribing from that list.

Yes, what I just said may annoy some Internet marketers. But if the list owner doesn’t take the time to write real content, deliver free teleseminars or webinars to help you, and if every email is a sales pitch, where is the value? You might as well be subscribed to an email list of the latest Google ads. Unsubscribe from those lists. Let’s collectively raise the bar on who we allow to sell products to us.

A good marketer acts as a filter between his or her audience and the product pushers. He turns down most products people ask him to promote. She promotes only the best products–those she truly believes will help her audience. And his emails to you are mostly good, thoughtful content.

There are thousands of bloggers and marketers who fit this profile. A majority of their content is helpful. Some of their content has sales pitches, but the sales pitches show a true interest in the product, not a copy-and-paste “XYZ made 20 zillion dollars and you can too…by tomorrow!” sort of pitch. They don’t promote every “big” launch. In general, they put relationships over sales–without forgetting that sales is what puts food on the table.

These are the people I encourage you to do business with.

Your Challenge for Today

Your challenge for today: If you’re subscribed to any email lists where you haven’t received any real content in months–just sales pitches–I encourage you to unsubscribe. Yes, even if you like the product or person. Raise the bar on who you do business with. Your credit card will thank you.

And if you’re a marketer: Today is the day you should write some real content, or shoot a video, that has NO sales pitch whatsoever. Maybe you can take the time to publicly answer a reader’s question, or share a quick tip you’ve learned that you know will help your list. Tell your list “Thank you” and let your readers know that you honor them. Your readers will appreciate you that much more.

Recommended Reading:

• Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. Looking to get started with affiliate marketing? Rosalind’s book is the definitive guide. (I’ll be doing a full review soon.) Check it out now!
• How Do All Those “Idiots” Make So Much Money? Does it drive you nuts that some idiot with a terrible product seems to be constantly making sales, when you know your product is better? What’s the difference between you and that “idiot”?
• 20 Scam-Free Ways to Make Money Online Fast. My huge list of real ways to make money online.

Manifest money — even huge sums! Here’s how.

It’s really easy to already be successful in some area of your life and then blog about it, looking back with rose-colored glasses and saying “This is why I am successful.” It’s much harder to blog as you go, trying things, bumping into walls and fumbling around in the dark, and risk looking like a complete fool when things don’t work out as planned.

I wish I would have had the discipline to blog as I was growing my hosting company. Now, though, I have a second chance, and you get to see in from the ground floor as I grow another million-dollar+ business–and learn from my mistakes as I’m making them. This is a rare chance for both of us.

First, something that, as far as I know, I’ve never shared publicly: In 2006, right after watching “The Secret” on my computer, I wrote a check to myself for $1,000,000 and posted it on my bathroom mirror. Every time I brushed my teeth or my hair, I’d stand there and look at that check, and pretty much every day I’d visualize how I’d feel when I sold my business for $1 million. It got to the point where I knew it was going to happen–it was just a matter of when.

This is an actual image of the million-dollar check I hung on my mirror, which I ambitiously changed to $2 million and “or 2008″ when I thought I might not sell my company in 2007.

It didn’t take long: In 2007, I boldly told Bruce, who would soon buy my company, over lunch that I “wouldn’t accept a penny less than $1.1 million” to sell my company. Why $1.1 million? Well, my company had some debt, and I owned 91.5% of it, with the rest of it owned by two loyal employees.

We signed the papers on September 7, 2007, and I remember clearly the euphoric feeling I felt upon receiving Bruce’s first check for $100,000. He said, “How does it feel?” and I didn’t even know what to think. 6 years of work, and it had all culminated in this one moment! Every emotion I could possibly have ran through my head. It was sheer adrenaline.

After My Last Post…

I shed a lot of emotions in my last post. Then I took 5 days off to visit Portland, Oregon, and just got back. During those five days I had a chance to break (gluten free bread with some other bloggers, including J.D. Roth from Get Rich Slowly and Tyler Tervooren from Advanced Riskology. Having good conversations with them really helped me understand that everyone goes through this, and it often happens right before you break through and take off like a rocket. (Similar to the near bankruptcy of my former hosting company four short months before I sold it for $1.1 million.)

Now, interestingly, I have the same feeling of electricity. Here’s what happened:

In June, before I promoted Profit Instruments, I set an intention to make $40,000 per month. I came up with that number based on being able to live on a small portion of my income and having plenty of money left over to do more things I want, like travel–and fly first class! Plus, I want to do really amazing things with my money. I want to become a shareholder of corporations I love, perhaps do some angel investing, and donate to causes close to my heart.

Anyway, after adding up all my monthly expenses and multiplying them out, plus adding in things like first class plane tickets, $40,000 per month was the number I wanted to aim for. So I set the intention.

I kept coming back to it every day. And, in a new twist for me, I didn’t try to figure out how I was going to make it. I simply decided to let inspiration strike.

Inspiration Strikes

And strike it did. The first thing I did was hire a programmer here in San Diego for Best Blogs. Then came Profit Instruments. I kept blogging. Three guest posts of mine ran on other blogs on three days straight (not planned), resulting in a nice influx of new subscribers. I decided I wanted to write a new free ebook for 2010.

Of all that, the most meaningful part for me was Profit Instruments. Buried in the course was an explanation of how to get your sites ranked higher in the search engines by getting links back to them. Doing more research, I discovered thousands of sites that had high PageRank, and a way to add my links to those sites. (Apologies for being vague–it’s probably not what you’re thinking. These aren’t free directories or other “scummy” sites, and this isn’t an “illegal” tactic or something that will get you banned from Google.)

I began compiling spreadsheet after spreadsheet of high-PageRank sites. Then I tested it, first on one site, then another. I watched in amazement as the sites I worked the system on ranked higher in the search engines.

Then, there was a momentous day in late July. My programmer turned to me while we were working together at a coffee shop here in San Diego and said “I know you can only afford for me to work part-time on Best Blogs, but I really need something full-time. I want to give you the first option on that.”

I replied, “Well, I do have an idea for something…” and I started to sketch it out.

I explained the concept. How the sites worked. I showed him the results. (I’ve since started documenting my results on YouTube.)

Changing Direction

I took it to my mastermind group. Out of 6 other people in the room, 4 said they would immediately sign up and try out a beta version. I knew I had something. Excitedly, I shared everything with my programmer. Then I made the decision I knew I had to make: We postponed work on Best Blogs, and went to work on the company I named Whoosh! Traffic.

Here’s how Whoosh! Traffic will work: For a monthly fee, we will build links to your site with keywords you choose, so your site will rank higher in the search engines for those keywords. If you’re not sure how to pick the best keywords that will deliver the most traffic to your site, I’ll have a product for that, too…my new Maximum Clients, Minimum Time will give the complete breakdown of how to get your website working for you and generating leads and sales while you sleep instead of it just sitting there and being a money suck.

My two products–Maximum Clients, Minimum Time and Whoosh! Traffic–will work together. Maximum Clients will take you by the hand and show you how to get your website working for you, and Whoosh! Traffic is a monthly, done-for-you service that lets you have us do the (incredibly boring and time-consuming) procedure of building links back to your site, while being assured we will operate in the highest of integrity and not associate you or your brand with scummy “link farms” or any other below-the-belt SEO tactics that give many SEO firms a bad name.

Here’s How You Can Manifest Money

So, how did I get from meditating on $40,000/month of income to doing it? Here’s what I’ve done so far, and how you can do the same thing:

Step 1: State your goal as if it has already been achieved. I started out by saying “I am making $40,000 per month.” Then I listened to how that felt in my body.

Step 2: Acknowledge, then question, the resistance. At first, I felt a whole lot of resistance. So I asked each part of me that was resisting why it was resisting.

I got back a whole lot of answers! One concern was that I would work too hard and be exhausted. I replied to this concern with, “First, now that I am gluten free, I am not as tired as I used to be. Secondly, I only want to do work that energizes me. I am not interested in money-making ideas that exhaust me.”

Then I asked that piece of resistance if that resolved its issue. If it did, I didn’t feel it any more. (This is hard to explain in words–try it for yourself and see!) If it didn’t, I went back to asking it why it was resisting.

Step 3: Do this consistently. I did this night after night, sometimes spending 20 minutes or more in a question-answer state with my body. After several nights, I no longer felt resistance. I continued every day, sometimes more than once a day, to state “I am making $40,000 per month.” It got to the point where I was really excited to state this!

Step 4: Start making your external reality match your ideal reality. Then repeat all the steps. Once I conquered my internal resistance, I focused on my external world. I asked myself what my ideal reality was when making $40,000 per month. Then, based on that, I started making changes in my reality. My ideal reality included owning a house, so we went and looked at houses. Then I learned that I needed W-2 income to buy a house, so I set up my corporations to do payroll and pay me via W-2 instead of dividends.

I decided I’d be cleaner when I was making that much money, so I started filing papers and getting rid of Stuff. I purged my closet, getting rid of over 2/3 of my clothes. I shredded document after document, scanning the ones I needed a record of into my computer. I donated an entire carload of items to Goodwill. I posted old items I was no longer using on eBay. I donated over 30 books and my entire DVD collection save just three DVDs. I even got rid of Stuff that hurt a little bit, like my Kindle, because I felt inspired to live more simply and purge the house of unnecessary items.

All of this was based in large part at looking at my reality through the lens of someone who is making $40,000 per month. Would I need to hang on to old items, or could I simply buy new ones? I decided it had to be the latter, and acted accordingly.

Slowly, I was pulling my old reality into sync with my new one. And–I wasn’t spending major money to do it. In fact, interestingly, I was making money doing it, by donating so much old stuff and selling items.

Even through the worst times (like the day last week when I wrote my last blog post), my confidence that I would do this never wavered. After I wrote the blog post and took a few days off, I got right back on track, and on Monday I decided to start accepting advertising on this blog. You’ll see a new blog design here soon, with some ads (but not ones that interfere with your enjoyment of my site!)

Is This Completely Insane?

I don’t doubt that some of you think I’m nuts. You might be thinking “Your body actually tells you where you’re resisting financial freedom?” Yep! And yours will, too, if you dare to listen to it.

The real question is: What do you want? Most people fail because they don’t make their intentions clear. Whether it’s money, health, or relationships, anything you can intend can be yours. The challenge then is following through with where your intuition leads you.

It can be pretty scary to go where your intuition says you need to go. You may have to quit your job, move to a new city (or even country!), or break up with a loved one to get what you want. But follow through, and know that even in the darkest moments you are not alone, and you too can manifest just about anything you can dream of.

Recommended Reading:

• Take This Job and Shove It (PDF). Upcoming blog rockstar Tyler Tervooren has written a great free ebook on how to quit your job and live freely (even if you don’t think you can quit right now!) Check it out.
• The Failure Manifesto. My last post…read for an interesting contrast to this post!
• Manifesting a Trip to Tahiti. I wrote about manifesting a trip to Tahiti–and then manifested it, and went to Tahiti!

Increase web site traffic with these simple tips.

If you crank out piece after piece of great content, yet no one reads it, it can be demoralizing. (This, I think, is why most bloggers quit after a few months.)

If you have a great product or service that you know can help a lot of people, but no one knows about it, and you’re on a limited budget, it can seem impossible to get your business off the ground.

I understand. I’ve been in both of those places, and in both of those cases, traffic can help. Today, I’ll take you “behind the scenes” and show you one of the big ways I grew a business in a highly competitive industry to the $1 million mark, and also how I grew this blog to one that gets massive traffic every month–in the top 0.1% of all websites by traffic, according to Alexa.

Then I’ll show you how you can do the same thing…and grow your business by leaps and bounds without killing your wallet by buying advertisements.

The Big Myth: Just Write Great Content, and the Search Engines Will Love You

This big myth gets uttered all the time. It might have been true years ago. The theory behind this is, interestingly, never explained. Basically, it goes like this: Good content gets links from other sites. Those links count as “votes” for that content, which naturally drives your content to the top of the search engines for relevant terms.

There are all sorts of holes in this theory. The biggest problem is that most content creators really haven’t matched their content to what people are searching for in Google or other search engines. You can write a really awesome article about the best hotels for people traveling with dogs, but if your article title is “How Cutesi the Chihuahua and I Traveled the Country In Style”, well, no one will find it through Google because no one is searching for those words!

So, the first step in getting Google and other search engines to recognize your content as “good content” and send you free traffic is to title your blog posts and home page appropriately. Use the free Google Keyword Tool to find what people are searching for in Google, and target those phrases.

The second step is to get backlinks.

Getting Backlinks

What are backlinks? Backlinks are simply a link from another site to your site. You might have heard that links are important, but the real key is the anchor text: the text people use in their links back to your site.

That anchor text on the other site counts as a “vote” in Google for that phrase, for your site. Here’s a real-world example: This site is named Erica.biz. So, when someone links back to my site, they often use the text erica.biz. The link looks like this: erica.biz

Unfortunately, this is nearly worthless for me in Google, because Google is counting this as a vote for the keyword “erica.biz”. I’m already ranked #1 for that keyword. Even worse, people typing in that keyword already know who I am, so it’s not a great keyword to optimize for.

People who have sites named around popular keyphrases have a built-in advantage. For instance, ever wondered how popular personal development blogger Steve Pavlina gets so much traffic? I actually don’t even think he realizes this–either that or he’s pretty coy about it–but he named his site, stevepavlina.com, “Personal Development for Smart People.”

That means a lot of people link to his site with the keywords “personal development”–so much so that he’s ranked #1 in Google for the term! That term gets tens of thousands of searches per month, driving massive traffic to his site.

He’s also ranked #2 for “polyphasic sleep”. Steve’s secret is something I doubt he even realizes: his simplistic blog titles. Instead of some fancy title like “How to get more hours out of your day”, he named his article on polyphasic sleep “Polyphasic sleep.” Then, of course, people linked out to his article, driving it to the top of the search engines.

So, if you really want to rank well in the search engines, stay away from cutesy titles and stick to short, sweet, and simple titles.

By implementing these simple strategies on my own blog, erica.biz now gets over 10,000 visitors a month from Google. About 2% of them opt in to my email list. This means I don’t have to keep posting new content to get visitors and email list subscribers. My “evergreen” content does a lot of work for me.

What If You Don’t Have (and Don’t Want) A Blog?

But what if you don’t have a blog and/or don’t want one? If you just want to sell products online, getting free traffic from Google and other search engines will possibly boost your bottom line by 6 figures or more.

You probably know that I started a web hosting company in 2001 and sold it in 2007. Before that, though, I worked for a search engine optimization company for a few years–from 1997 to 1999. Although my job didn’t require me to understand the intricacies of search engines, I learned them anyway. Back then, Google didn’t exist, and it was mostly about just getting listed in search engines–Yahoo! being one of the more important ones.

I continued my study of search engines and their mysterious traffic-directing powers, and a couple of years into running my hosting company, I decided to run an experiment. I spent 3 hours tweaking my company’s website to optimize for two simple keyphrases: bay area colocation and san jose colocation. Back then, there was no Google keyword tool, so I used the Overture tool to find that these two phrases were searched about 300 times a month total.

Then I started backlink building to my hosting company site using those terms. A few months later, Google did its PageRank update and awarded my little hosting company site a PageRank 7. (For those of you who know how PageRank works, you know how rare a 7 is.)

We ranked #1 for those two search terms pretty quickly.

Keep in mind, I didn’t blog or do anything “fancy” to get those #1 ranks. My site was static HTML, built by hand. I rearranged the text on the pages every couple months, but didn’t do anything else–except build backlinks.

I always asked our customers where they found us, and about 30% of our new customers said “Google”. But the real gold mine was one customer who found us through Google and started out with colocating one server. His company grew by leaps and bounds, and every month, he colocated a few more servers with us to keep up with demand.

When I sold the business, he was our largest customer, paying us over $12,000/month! Including the other customers who signed up with us from that ranking, that’s over a quarter of a million dollars a year of verifiable revenue from the initial 3 hours of work.

Here’s How To Do This Yourself

Here’s a summary of what works when going for a #1 rank in the search engines:

• Don’t overlook “tiny” keywords that get a few hundred searches a month–if you can easily convert those visitors into buyers.
• Backlinks are more important than great content. Good content with great backlinks trumps great content with no backlinks or few backlinks every time.
• What you put in your homepage’s title and what you title your blog posts or site’s pages is of paramount importance.
• Screwing up search engine optimization or not understanding its importance can cost you 6 figures a year or more.

Now, the really good news: I’m set to release what will become one of my flagship products for 2010. It’s called Maximum Clients, Minimum Time, and in it, I explain how you can do the same thing I’ve just described above. It’s designed for everyone who is tired of going to “networking events” and doing endless followup to get new clients. It will work for you whether you have a website right now or not–and no matter what you want to sell online.

For those of you who are still struggling with an idea, it will show you which idea to pursue. And for those of you with a website already, it will show you how to spend a little bit of time and get Google and other search engines to send you leads and clients effortlessly, month after month–without paying for ads.

In short, it’s the same procedure I used to grow my last business to a million-dollar business and the same procedure I’ve used to grow this blog to the top 0.1% of all websites on the Internet by traffic (as ranked by Alexa.)

Once you start down this path, you will realize there are a lot of nuances. For instance: Which keywords do you optimize for? How do you optimize your site for them? Once you’ve optimized your site, how do you build backlinks? I’ll be there to help you, step by step, as you get your business working for you, instead of the other way around. Best of all, Maximum Clients, Minimum Time will be easily affordable.

Look for my product launch later this month. Until then, start with the Google Keyword Tool, and figure out what keywords you want to use with your blog or business website!

Have questions? Want more information? Please leave a comment below.

But today, I bought one. And for some of you, I think it might be the right decision, too. Hear me out, and you may be on your way to making money online, too:

The product first caught my eye because it’s a fairly straightforward way to make a significant amount of money online with small “niche” sites. It’s simple, really, and that’s the beauty of it. Each site he creates is a simple review site of a top-selling product. He teaches you how to get massive amounts of traffic for free by ranking for certain keywords. Then you set up a site, get traffic, and some number of people every month buy that product, making you completely passive income.

What’s awesome about this system:

• Requires no technical experience (he walks you through every step)
• Doesn’t require you to keep writing content every day
• Doesn’t even require you to set up a mailing list!
• Doesn’t require you to have a mailing list

Basically, even if you’re a beginner, you can make money with this system. And the system owner shows some nice proof…he’s making over $20,000 a month with this system. (I checked his traffic stats for myself, and he’s for real. First BS meter test passed.)

Of course, those big numbers are sales letter hype. He’s been running a “pre-launch” for a week, and I’ve watched all the videos, but I wanted to hold off on promoting it until I got my hands on it. I wanted to see for myself whether this was really possible.

I bought his product this afternoon and am already creating my first site. I found a product right under my nose that fits his criteria for promotion. It’s a product I already own and use. This made me excited…I didn’t want to have to promote scummy crap offers to make money.

I’ve already registered the domain name and set up the blog, and I’m looking forward to seeing how well I can rank and how many hundreds of dollars a month in passive income I will make with his system.

So, is it right for you? That depends. My policy is to be 100% honest, so here’s who I recommend this for:

• If you’re ready to make passive income online and don’t have your own product, this is a good fit!
• If you’ve set up a blog before, this is an excellent fit and I wouldn’t hesitate to put down the cash right now…you should be well on your way to making thousands of dollars a month within 30-60 days!
• If you’re looking for a good way to make money without developing your own product, this is a good fit.

Who is it NOT for?

• If you’re down to the last $200 in your bank account and need money tomorrow, do not buy this product. This product will take 30-60 days to return income. (Most affiliate programs take 30-60 days to pay out commissions.)
• If you have your hands full with 100 other products or don’t have a few hours to really dig into this product, don’t buy it.

 I can tell you for sure, despite the hype-y sales letter:

• I paid full price for the product and think it’s worth every penny
• This is a legitimate technique that should work in ANY niche, not just promoting “make money online” products
• He has proof it works in niches as diverse as health and fitness, finance, Farmville and Mafia Wars strategy guides, “how to” ebooks, digital cameras, tour guides, products on Amazon.com…pretty much anything you can think of!

If you know me, you know I do NOT promote B.S. I strive to test every product I promote. This passes my test with flying colors. I decline 99% of the products people ask me to promote. This product is in the other 1%. It’s worth it, and I feel strongly enough about it to stake my reputation on it.

It will work for you (or there’s a double your money back guarantee in case it doesn’t.)

Here’s my thinly-disguised affiliate link:

http://profitinstruments.com/812.html

I make a few dollars when you buy the product through this link. So, in order to thank you for ordering, here’s what I’d like to do for you:

Once you order, forward me your receipt (erica@erica.biz) and I will send you an invite to a free bonus online 1-hour workshop I’ll hold just for people who order through me.

In the workshop, I will reveal to you the website I’m creating as a part of this project. I’ll hold the workshop 30-60 days out so we can see together how much it’s earning and where it is in the search engines. And I’ll answer your questions about the sites you’re building through this product, and help you get them ranked higher in the search engines.

I will also reveal the names and oDesk links of the virtual assistants I’m using to create my site. This will save you hours of time and help your sites rank more quickly. That will be part of the workshop.

If you’re looking to start making money online, this is it. This is the only product in this niche I’ve recommended in months. Again, I’ve paid full price, gone through most of the product, and believe in it. Take action now, and I’ll be here to help you with my exclusive online workshop:

Order now or find out more information:

http://profitinstruments.com/812.html

Important note: This is a launch. This offer will close down in a day or two. DO NOT WAIT. I have waited in the past and regretted it. Don’t make the same mistake. If you’re ready to take a huge step toward earning passive income, and get my personal support and assistance on the workshop, go for it!

One caveat: Once I ordered, for some reason, I didn’t get the download link. If you have the same issue, please contact Ritoban’s helpdesk at http://customerhelp.in/. They responded to me pretty quickly and got everything straightened out, so please contact them directly.

Don’t forget to forward your receipt to me once you order!

Thanks, and I look forward to seeing you on the workshop in a month or so!

-Erica

P.S. Don’t pass this up. If you’re ready…go for it: http://profitinstruments.com/812.html

UPDATE: Wow, the response has been amazing! I sent this out to my email list last night and already nearly 40 people have signed up via my link! I really want you to succeed, so here’s what I’m going to do:

Assuming you buy through my link, I’ll hold not one, but two online workshops for you:

The first workshop, in 7-14 days, will be to walk you through the Profit Instruments method step by step and help you pick your niche. We’ll be going through the system, live, and I’ll answer your questions. (We’ll also record it in case you can’t make it.) In this webinar, I will reveal my own review site and show you what I’ve done so far with Profit Instruments.

The second workshop, in ~45 days, will help you make sure you’re getting the most traction in the search engines. I’ll go over some of my advanced SEO strategies so you can ensure you’re going to make money with this system.

I’m working this system to make money, and I encourage you to join me. I’ll be here to help you via these two workshops. Don’t hesitate…this launch will close down soon!

-> Click here to join us and start making money!

A product roadmap helps you figure out
where your business is going.

Great question, Amy! I’ve shared my goal about creating 10 products in 2010, but I haven’t talked much about how they all fit together…

The Problem: Infinite Opportunities

It is possible to do a nearly infinite number of things to make money online. There isn’t just one “proven path” to riches…witness the huge number of crazy inventions that make their inventors millions. (Ever had that feeling… “I could have done that! I should have done that!” Right? Me too!)

I want to do so many things. I’d love to write a book to help out people who are discovering that they have gluten intolerance or Celiac disease. I know that would be profitable. I constantly have ideas for WordPress plugins, video products, a product on great businesses to start online…

Pretty quickly, I had to learn to focus. I had to think strategically…not only about which products would make me the most money, but how those products would integrate with each other. This is the real key.

Step 1: Test With a Free Product

I started testing the market for blogging success materials by releasing my free Blog Success Manifesto. I went over the top with it as a free product. It’s 62 pages, jam-packed with practical advice on growing your blog faster than you ever have before. I could have easily charged $17-$27 for it, but I wanted the readership growth instead. (And I got it…nearly 4,000 people have downloaded their free copies!)

More importantly, the success of my free download proved there was a market that was interested in growing their blogs. I then launched my Guest Post Secrets product to serve that same market. I edited my Blog Success Manifesto to refer to Guest Post Secrets, and put a big mention about it here on my blog. Now I had two products working together, like this:

Step 2: Go Upmarket

My next step was to present a higher-ticket offer. I created my one-day workshop and offered a free webinar to my list (most of whom joined up originally because my Blog Success Manifesto.) I sold 4 out of the 5 slots right away, and the 5th one closed later. (That means my first San Diego workshop is now sold out! Hooray!)

These products worked in tandem like this:

Step 3: Fill in the Blanks

Now I wanted to create more products. Once you have a couple of paid products out the door, you can start filling in the blanks.

Part of Best Blogs will be a mailing list bloggers can sign up to, so I added that into my roadmap. Then I launched Blog Set Up as another low-price opt-in similar to Blog Success Manifesto:

My next product will be an intermediate product offering an hour with me for $497:

And then, I plan to release a product guiding people step-by-step through setting up their blog and driving traffic to it:

It’s pretty cool to see how these products fit together, isn’t it?

The key here is that once you have a buyer, you need to offer more products to that person. It’s much easier to sell something to someone who has already bought something else from you. If you don’t have the products to fill in the blanks, you should go out there and find great affiliate products that you are happy to promote, and make money that way.

Step 4: Automate

The final step in your roadmap–after you’ve launched some products–is to automate much of the cross-selling. You can do this with an email autoresponder series — something I plan to talk about in a later post. (I use Aweber as my email service, and recommend them.)

Four days after you download my Blog Success Manifesto, my email autoresponder follows up with you to make sure you got the download–and also introduces you to Guest Post Secrets. The Guest Post Secrets homepage allows you to opt in to see some high-value free videos, and over a 4-day period, gives you a special deal on buying Guest Post Secrets.

As I launch larger products, I will integrate these into my autoresponders, too. My goal is to have a defined roadmap of products to create in a “funnel” that automatically rolls people over from buying a low-ticket product like Blog Set Up or a free product like Blog Success Manifesto into buying higher-ticket items. Many of these products will be hands-off on my part, allowing for an automated income stream of thousands of dollars a month.

It is incredibly difficult to make a million dollars online selling one-off products…especially if they are inexpensive ebooks. Here’s a typical example: A person decides to make money online. They sell a dog training ebook, then the next month peddle psoriasis cures, then leap to the “make money online” niche. They now have three different lists, each with only a handful of people. And imagine trying to write content about dog training, psoriasis, AND making money online all in a few days! Forget it.

Multiple products are a good thing. But without a product roadmap, and a plan of action for seeing how they all fit together, multiple products are less than worthless. I vastly prefer becoming an expert in a few small fields and selling products in those fields only. I may pass on the next overhyped “million-dollar idea!”, but I can feel confident that every customer I gain will pay off far more than the people who simply hard-sell one or two items.

Repurposing Your Products

By the way, here’s a roadmap I’ve been developing for my next set of products:

You may see now how some of my existing products can be re-purposed for a different audience. Can your products do that? If not, you may want to consider changing your product roadmap.

Questions, or comments? What’s your product roadmap? Let me know in the comments!

Recommended Reading:

• How To Make A Mind Map. Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed by some of the projects you are working on…like you’ve set an impossible goal? Here’s a video on how to make a mind map and get all that junk out of your head…quickly and easily!
• Creating A New Product. A four-step guide to creating your first product.
• Products I Love. If you haven’t seen this yet, check it out…it’s the full list of all the products I use on a regular basis and recommend!

Blog Set Up.

If you’re new here, I write my goals publicly on my blog every year, then update regularly with new information. My biggest goal for 2010 was to create 10 products and release them. This was a challenge to myself to learn to create and release products quickly.

So far I’ve released:

1. BestBlogs.net (more on Best Blogs in a later post)
2. Guest Post Secrets
3. One-day in-person workshops

And now, my latest creation: Blog Set Up.

One way to get more customers for your products is to create more customers. Guest Post Secrets is geared toward bloggers, and I have another product (not yet released to the public)–video tutorials on how to set up your blog. What better way to sell these two products than to help people get a blog set up?

As part of an “implementation challenge” at a conference I attended, I set up Blog Set Up from scratch in about 24 hours. On Thursday, May 20, I did keyword research and eventually settled on the domain name blogsetup.us.

The site works like this: You sign up for a HostGator account through us, and we set up your blog for you for free. We get paid by HostGator to refer you as a new customer, so that’s how the site makes money.

Once we’ve set up your blog, we send you an email inviting you to opt in to our Blog Set Up email list, which contains a free helper video on how to set up a custom design for your blog (WordPress calls this a “theme”.) Then, we’ll send you some more cool content in the hope that you will purchase Guest Post Secrets or my as-yet-unreleased blog tutorial videos.

Testing Your New Product

By Friday, May 21, I was ready for my first customer. I mentioned it at the seminar I was at, and five people there signed up.

When you launch a site, you’re not going to get it right the first time. Watch others go through it–and keep quiet. Ask them to run through their thought process out loud. Note any questions they have–those are questions your site needs to address up front.

After watching two people go through the process, I redid a significant portion of the site, then launched an AdWords campaign to drive traffic to it. The AdWords campaign is getting an amazing click-through rate, but people aren’t buying, so one of my next steps is to address that.

The good news is that people who do know me are buying, and the site is just about to crest $1,000 in revenue in its first week!

I also shot two quick video testimonials from people at the seminar whose blogs I set up. I’ll add those to the site over the next few days to show some social proof. (Tip: Video testimonials work far better than text ones. Invest in a camera and record them on the spot, then edit and post them!)

Next Step: Outsource the Work

Right now, I am doing the blog setups, but one of my additional next steps is to find a capable person to outsource this to. I plan to use oDesk to find the person, then use Camtasia to shoot a how-to video with my exact process for setting up a blog, and then watch my new employee go through a setup his/herself. That way I’ll know quickly whether I’ve hired the right person.

Want to Launch a Product Fast? My Tips…

I’m proud: I was able to break through a lot of my own barriers and launch a complete website in just over 24 hours! That’s a new record for me, and makes my 10 products goal for this year much more achievable. This website should also boost my income significantly–especially if I can get the AdWords clickers to actually take action and buy a hosting package.

There was no way I could have launched Blog Set Up in 24 hours if I had to write all the HTML by hand. So, for quick implementation, I used WordPress as my content management system–even though Blog Set Up is not a “blog”.

I have to give credit to WooThemes and their amazing “Optimize” theme. It looks fantastic on Blog Set Up. Plus, I found a bug in the theme and they were able to fix it just a few hours after I posted on their forum. Optimize was well worth the investment.

Since I’ve had such great support with WooThemes, I find myself buying from them again and again. (erica.biz runs on their Fresh News theme.) I highly recommend WooThemes if you want to launch a site quickly. Check out WooThemes.

Need a blog set up? Have you been procrastinating on getting started with a blog? Take advantage of Blog Set Up today and get your blog set up by our experts!

Have questions about fast product launches, or about Blog Set Up itself? Ask ‘em in the comments and I will answer! Also, feel free to share your own product launch experiences.

P.S. Stealing this product idea would not be a good idea. Find your own product idea.

Recommended Reading:

• oDesk Review. Is outsourcing worth the effort? Here are my thoughts, plus my step-by-step guide to using oDesk to outsource labor.
• What to Do When People Aren’t Buying. Ever get the comment “I’d love to buy your product, but I just can’t afford it”? Or–how about the even more blunt “That seems expensive!” You probably don’t need to lower your price! Read this for what to do instead…
• How to Read People’s Minds… …and create the product they most desire! It would be great if we could read people’s minds. As far as I know, that product doesn’t exist, but these two methods come pretty close.

At the end of every month, I tally up all my various income sources. I noticed a hugely interesting pattern when I looked at the difference between January, February, and March:

In March, I made more than 7x the income I had just two months prior. Wow. What the heck happened?

It Wasn’t That My Blog Had More Traffic…

I can tell you the secret wasn’t more traffic or more subscribers. In January, I had 22,615 unique visitors to erica.biz. In March, I had 25,703 visits–not a substantially higher number. Same with subscribers–I had a few hundred more in March than in January, but it wasn’t substantially higher.

What was the big difference, then?

Let’s look carefully at the breakdown. I officially launched Guest Post Secrets on February 1, but 3 people found it early and bought it in January. Subtracting that out, without me launching a product, my blog made $537.19 in January.

And that’s with a good amount of traffic–over 40,000 pageviews. No wonder you hear so many bloggers complain that their blogs don’t make any money. Relying on advertising alone would have left me destitute.

Tip #1: Launch a Product

In February, I launched Guest Post Secrets. That launch brought in a significant amount of money, netting me $1801.00. Not bad for a product I can sell over and over again as new people show up on my blog.

So, for February, my blog made $2601.13–a 4x jump from January. That’s tangible proof that surveying your customers and then creating a product that helps them get something they desire is the key to making a full-time income. This is especially true if you have a blog that’s not getting millions of visitors a month.

Ah…but then what happened in March?

Tip #2: Launch a High-Ticket Product!

I didn’t sell a whole lot of Guest Post Secrets in March. I didn’t go after affiliates, and I didn’t advertise it anywhere else. (I’m working on both of those this month.) Predictably, the sales died down a bit.

Instead, I launched a high-ticket product. I promoted it via a free webinar, which I called my first “Wednesday workshop.” As a test, I sent it out only to my email list subscribers, and didn’t even post about it here.

Of my ~4,100 email list subscribers at the time, 137 signed up for the workshop, and 78 attended. I delivered a straight hour of great content, going into detail about my past and answering tons of questions from the audience. (There were over 100 questions…I couldn’t even keep up with them all!)

At the end of the hour, I delivered a pitch for my first in-person workshop–held here in San Diego in June, where I work with just five small business owners on growing their businesses.

How I Decided What to Offer

The in-person workshop came together this way for a few reasons. The biggest reason was that I receive a lot of emails asking for 1-on-1 consulting. I am not particularly interested in 1-on-1 consulting at this point in time–I prefer to work on my blog or on information products. But I thought this would be fun, and heck, if no one signed up, I’d just move on and continue working on products.

After asking for some feedback from others as to how I should set the pricing, I settled on $997.00 per person for the day–and emphasized that each person could bring a business partner for free. The $997.00 price point is realistically about half of where I want to be, but I figured this first group could give me testimonials. I plan to raise the price for the next workshop, and also take it on the road in the future.

I set up a quick sales page for the workshop. (Seriously quick…I started working on it about an hour before the webinar, and finished just in the nick of time!)

Keep in mind, I had no idea if anyone would sign up. This was scary, but I figured it was better than not trying at all. To get over my fear, I kept myself busy–I worked on the sales letter and tested my webcam setup.

A happy surprise occurred when, at the end of the webinar, 4 people signed up!

The Big “Duh” Moment: Are You Making This Mistake?

It was then that I realized what the missing piece of the puzzle was when it came to making money with my blog: I hadn’t made an offer.

Looking back, it seems almost like a “duh!” moment. Sure, I had Guest Post Secrets, and that sold a lot. But some folks who read erica.biz don’t have a blog, and others have a blog and are already guest posting to great effect.

Those who wanted consulting wanted something else: personalized advice about how to break through their own barriers. By setting my price far higher on that, I didn’t devalue my own time, and I also managed to make just under $4,000 in one 90-minute webinar.

Of course, there is another day I’ll need to spend with these folks. But that’s enjoyable time for me. I love helping people, especially in person, and the workshop will be a blast.

The Big Takeaway for All Bloggers

Here’s the takeaway from all this: If you have a reasonably popular blog, you probably have audience members who want more from you. Definitely offer a product–but realize that not everyone will buy it. But also have a high-ticket item or two out there. Whether it’s personal coaching (which, I realize, not everyone wants to offer) or something–like artwork or an “everything package” of all your products–that is more unique and higher value, you need to have that bigger product.

And you need to have that product even if no one buys it…because it can help set a mental anchor that your products are more valuable.

Why Selling Cheap Products Could Threaten Your Blog’s Livelihood

I see far too many bloggers offering ebooks for as little as $2 or $5, and then offering consulting for a “special deal!” of $50/hour or $70/hour. With those prices, you’re doing yourself and your readers a disservice.

Think about how many hours of coaching you’re going to have to sell to make $4,000. You’re going to spend 80 hours of your time to make that much. And since most of those same blogs have the primary option being just 1 hour of consulting, you’re going to have to sell 80 people on the idea of consulting with you.

Since you’re selling yourself so cheaply, that $10,000/month–or whatever your blog income target is–is going to start looking an awful lot like a full-time job. But that’s only because you’ve made it that way. Start valuing yourself more and start charging more. (Hint: You attract more interesting people when you value yourself more, too.)

How to Overcome Your Big “Buts”

One of the most common reactions I get when I write a blog post like this is “But Erica, I didn’t sell a business for $1 million, so I can’t possibly charge what you charge!” First of all, (forgive the rant) but I am so tired of people using that as an excuse!

I started Internet marketing in February 2008 as a complete newbie. At Frank Kern’s Mass Control seminar in April 2008, I turned to the person next to me and asked “What’s a continuity program?” (Turns out, a continuity program is a product that is billed monthly–much like the web hosting company I created previously!)

I started this blog in December 2007. My goal for 2008 was to earn $10,000/month from it. It didn’t happen. In 2009, I was sick for 9 months and offered a coaching program that didn’t work out–mostly because I was too sick to really keep up with it. I still wasn’t making $10,000/month.

Now, it’s 2010, and the $10,000/month goal is in sight. But it has practically nothing to do with me selling my business for $1 million! Very little of my business experience from my web hosting company translates into Internet marketing wealth–otherwise, I would have been making $10,000/month two years ago! Internet marketing is a new world for me. That’s why I’m blogging about it as I go and sharing my honest truths with you.

I can happily sell consulting for $500/hour all day for two reasons:

1. I believe that what I offer is worth that much.
2. I have testimonials that show that an hour of my time is worth 20 times that (or more) to a motivated entrepreneur who is ready to take action.

That’s it. Nothing to do with my past. Stop using your past as an excuse. It’s what you do for others that matters, not how much money you’ve made in your lifetime.

(end rant!)

How to Do What I Did

I got here because I persisted. I doggedly refused to give up when my blog refused to “grant me my wish” of making me $10,000/month. In the meantime, I kept learning. I built an email list. I grew my traffic via SEO and guest posting. I surveyed my readers to find out what you wanted. I wrote great post after great post after great post. And finally, I made an offer…and then, another, bigger offer.

The “make an offer” part was the part I was missing. And, if you have reasonably good traffic and a decent-sized list (500-800 people), you, too, should start thinking about what offer to make. Even if you’re just getting started, start sketching out ideas for paid products, and focus on that as well as writing good content. You can start out with a smaller offer, but don’t forget to have a big offer visible on your site as well.

If you want to make real money blogging, get a product out there and start selling it. And start considering what higher-ticket item your readers will want to buy from you. Then offer it. That’s the fastest way I know of to make more money with your blog.

Recommended Reading:

• You Are Worth More Than You Think. If you’ve ever said “I just don’t have enough time to…”, this post is for you…
• 20 Ways to Make Money Online Fast. Still one of my most popular posts; these 20 ways to make money online fast are legitimate, scam-free, and can get money in your pocket quickly. Check it out!
• Blog Success Manifesto. My Blog Success Manifesto is a 62-page free ebook with 30 tactical tips to help you grow your blog faster than you ever have before. Check it out now!

This is the founding principle behind “lifestyle design”–a term that has become popular since Tim Ferriss released his book Four Hour Work Week. The idea behind a “lifestyle business” is to grow a business that sustains your daily lifestyle while allowing you the time freedom you need to pursue what interests you.

Here’s what my optimal “lifestyle design plan” looks like:

Stage One: Build A Business to Sell

I already did this for my web hosting company. Work your butt off for 5-7 years growing a business that you can sell. Then sell it and let it go fully from your life. In this stage, you have to have a product or service that you can outsource or hire out. This sort of business can’t be a consulting business or something that isn’t saleable 5-7 years down the road.

Concurrently with this stage, practice living as frugally as possible. Track both business and personal expenses down to the penny. Know where your money goes every month. (This is what most people don’t do, so when they get a huge cash infusion, they squander it.)

Stage Two: Sell Your Business

Sell, then take the money and use it as a nest egg.
Here’s what I’d do with the money:

• Set aside 30% for taxes.
• Set aside 30% for “future”. Use this money and learn how to invest wisely. Invest in assets that pay out dividends. Fully fund your IRA if you haven’t already. (I like dividend stocks or Lending Club at this stage. Real estate is another option…but never put 100% of this fund into a single asset class.)
• Set aside 20-30% for a house or as “sustainability cash.” Buy a house outright with cash, or invest this money conservatively in a highly-liquid account with an eye to use it for living expenses for a while. Do not lock yourself into a mortgage.
• Use the bit of money you have left over to buy yourself some nice things. (When I sold my business, I used $60,000 to go on a fantastic vacation, buy a new car, buy some custom hand-made crafts, and buy some art.)

Stage Three: Take Some Time Off

Use your well-worn frugality skills to either travel the world for a while, or alternately settle down and relax for a bit.

Also, use this time to explore other passions and hobbies. For instance, one of my life goals is to learn another language, so I’m learning Spanish. I take a class 1-2x a week and plan to travel to more Spanish-speaking countries in the future so I can learn the language more quickly.

Stage Four: Make Enough Money to Survive

Depending on your exit from business #1, you may not be able to quite live off the proceeds of the sale of your business. Also, I know from experience that you will get bored with “relaxing” after 6-12 months. So, for your second business run, focus your skills on creating a business that will sustain your lifestyle–what you really want to do–while remaining low on time commitment. Just like you didn’t lock yourself into a mortgage above, you don’t want to lock yourself into a huge time commitment now.

Your biggest goal should be to start a business that sustains your ideal lifestyle while you work only a few hours a day.

This is where the Four Hour Work Week starts out, but I prefer having the nest egg of a business I’ve sold.

Four Pitfalls of Lifestyle Design

Most people struggle getting this plan set up in their lives. Here are some of the pitfalls I’ve seen people encounter along the path of lifestyle design:

1. “Magic bullet” syndrome. “Erica, I want a business where I never have to work again and it just keeps generating money month after month!” Well–I don’t call that a business. I call that investing. Whether it’s real estate, dividend stocks, or Lending Club, those investments are out there. I currently have over $26,000 in Lending Club and it returns over $200/month in passive income; my net annual return is 11.75%. Awesome.

   But you have to set up the automatic transfer every month into Lending Club (or dividend stocks, or a savings account) to see the returns. You can’t spend all your money on consumer junk every month and have a huge credit card debt and then whine that you “can’t afford” the transfer. (The folks with “magic bullet” syndrome often have huge piles of consumer debt to go along with it.) Get your financial picture straight, and you will see returns. And get realistic about what it’s going to take to get those returns.

2. Starting a business that isn’t saleable. Many people start out by selling crafts, tutoring, or attempting to turn a hobby into a side gig. If your goal is to earn a few hundred extra dollars a month, that’s fine; it’s just not the topic of this post.

   In order to make lifestyle design work, you have to have a business that other people value even without you working in it every day. It doesn’t matter whether you sell a product or a service, as long as you’re not selling “you.” Selling “you” means the business has no intrinsic value without you in it. (That goes for you bloggers, too, unless you could never write a post again and leave the blog alone for all eternity and it will continue to generate income that sustains your lifestyle. Better create a standalone product with its own URL if you don’t want to blog every day…)

3. Not knowing where your money goes. You need to know what your expenses are, and be able to reduce them as necessary. Learn to distinguish between wants and needs. How much more productive will that new computer make you? What about that new shirt? When in doubt, don’t buy it.
4. Wanting to jump right to the part where you retire. Similar to “magic bullet” syndrome, but this is where you start a business, and because you see a popular blogger or guru bragging about how he or she only works two hours a week, you think you can do the same. You’re over the “magic bullet” at this point, but still fully convinced that it only takes a couple hours a week to make big money. You easily forget all the parts of the guru’s stories where they talked about how they spent two or three or ten years creating content, learning marketing, and figuring out how to sell stuff–and encountered numerous dead ends and false starts.

   Don’t be fooled. Even if they don’t work now, they’re reaping the rewards of the time where they worked a huge work week for little or no gain. And many of them, while appearing to have a “no work” lifestyle, are out there sending emails, working with their employees, tweaking ad campaigns, doing teleseminars, and posting blog posts every day. They just tend to forget that that’s “work”.

Which Path is Right for You?

My plan for lifestyle design isn’t set in stone. There are different ways to approach lifestyle design and be successful. Some people use their earnings from a lifetime of work instead of building and selling a business. I like building a business because it’s far faster.

And some folks go right to working their butt off, but instead of selling their business, they simply use their business as a source of somewhat-passive income. Nothing wrong with that as long as you can achieve it. I like selling the business because it guarantees you will never have to work for that money again, and it gives you 100% time freedom, but if you’d rather start at step #4 of building a lifestyle business, that’s fine.

With a solid financial education, perseverance, and a good understanding of what makes people buy a product, you can reap the rewards of creating your own lifestyle. Don’t be fooled, though; it will take a lot more work than you expect–but the rewards may also be greater than you expect!

Recommended Reading:

• Lending Club. I started investing in Lending Club over a year ago, and many people have asked me how my investments are going. I’m pleased to report I have a nearly 12% annual return. I would highly recommend Lending Club; you can get started with as little as $25 and watch your money pay dividends every month. I really love the whole concept. The link above will give you $25 to get started, so you really have nothing to lose by trying it out! (Note: This link gives me a few dollars too, which I invest back in my own portfolio in Lending Club. By signing up, you’re helping to support erica.biz…thank you!)
• The Complete Guide to Creating an Information Product. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a product that will help you generate passive income online.
• How to Start a Business with No Money. One of my most popular posts; shows how I built a business to $1 million without having a “nest egg.”