Today’s article comes from Duncan Heath, owner of Extreme Sports Trader, a surf clothing and extreme sports website in the UK. His site sells items like Animal backpacks and allows users to trade anything from kitesurfing equipment to snowboards. I love the model and the story of how he got there. I think both are extremely valuable.

If you’d like to feature your successful model, just let me know!

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If you were to ask me to summarise what my website does and how it makes money, in a nutshell I would tell you that it is a price-comparison and classifieds website for extreme sports clothing and equipment, and the main sources of monetization are advertising and affiliate sales. If you were to then ask me for a bit more information on how it was started and how successful it is, I would tell you the following…

Back in 2008 I saw a gap in the market for a classifieds website that provided a platform for the buying and selling of extreme sports equipment and accessories. I figured that with big items such as surfboards and snowboards, people want to see the item in person before they buy, rather than carry out transactions over the internet as you would on Ebay. I also thought that if the site was niche enough I would be able to tap into a captive audience and create a loyal user-base.

After a lot of effort promoting the site (mainly via SEO) I started getting the visitor levels I wanted and people actively engaging with the site (buying and selling). However, I didn’t get anywhere near the revenue I was expecting from AdSense (which actually requires a staggering amount of traffic to make any money from) and I couldn’t start charging people for listing their second hand items (as I had originally hoped to) as it transpired people would only really use the site if it were free.

What I had ended up with then is a website model that brought in lots of traffic, but that didn’t generate much money. I believe that classifieds sites are some of the best traffic-driving sites out there as users are supplying you with free, keyword-rich and unique content on a daily basis. Also, the more popular the site gets, the more people upload their content, and the more traffic you get. But then this doesn’t mean very much at all if you can’t make money from it.

I got to thinking, what if people were looking for a second hand item on my site and either couldn’t find what they were looking for, or found an item but it was the wrong price, in the wrong location, or had been sold already? I concluded that they would probably start looking for best price for that item if they were to buy it new, and thus the price-comparison idea was born!

I found a number of online merchants selling items in my niche and set up affiliate deals with them. The price comparison section of the site now runs alongside the classifieds section and whilst it is the classifieds section that brings in more traffic, the affiliate-based price comparison sections now brings in far more money. I’m soon going to begin cross selling individual items listed in the second hand section with their comparative products in the new section, which should improve conversion rates further.

Right now the site is bringing in a very good salary and actually requires very little maintenance time, so I’m currently looking into other niches where this business model can be applied.
Photo by Bengt Nyman.

Chris Guthrie

As we were talking about it last week, I realized that what he knows could probably help a lot of you so I asked him if he would be willing to be interviewed. Thankfully he was. (If he hadn’t been, I would have had to resort to other tactics. Glad we didn’t have to go that route.)

So, Chris, what made you decide to do an info product?

I got a lot of good feedback from two blog posts I wrote at the beginning of the year that analyzed the money I made in 2009 with Amazon’s affiliate program (over $40k). From this I found things out like the best way to make money with Amazon is text links inside a document and that banner ads, Amazon Astore, etc. are the worst ways.

I got hundreds of comments on those articles and because I legitimately knew what I was talking about (having found something that worked for me to help me make enough money to support my family), I knew that an expansion upon that information would be useful to others because there is so much misinformation online.

So much misinformation. I certainly understand that motivation. How much has the experience met your expectations?

Well, I learned several things about what people are looking for in an information product in the market and what things I could do to improve everything in a second version as well.

I also found out that people were a little more sneaky than I anticipated: ~ 25% of the sales were from people buying through their own affiliate link (even when I hid an affiliate page on the sales letter when I first launched).

This experience has led me to want to do more information products but to branch out into markets besides internet marketing / make money online.

I believe people have the blinders on when it comes to the opportunities on the web. People are drawn to the internet marketing niche because the people selling products in the space are always talking about how much money they’re making with no effort etc. but I also know people will pay for information about how to be a better World of Warcraft Player, teach their Parrot how to talk, etc. etc. etc. but people creating and selling these products tend to be more secretive about their earnings so there is less competition.

That’s very interesting. It’s definitely easy to get so focused on where you are that it’s hard to see other opportunities.

What did it cost you, beginning to end, to get the product rolled out?

This is the software that I used:

Wishlist Member $97 (I got a free one though)
This software handles the protection of the content within WordPress.

Easy Click Mate $67 (I got a free on here as well)
This is the 3rd party affiliate tracking software for use with Clickbank. Very nifty tool and it’s what helped me to see just how many people were buying via their own affiliate links. It also helps you keep in better touch with your best performing affiliates.

S3FlowShield $97
This is the software that helps prevent people from easily downloading content hosted on Amazon S3. My product is a video course so I knew that I needed some way to make piracy a little more difficult (without using this plugin someone simply needs to know the bucketname you’re holding content in and then they can download anything inside).

Clickbank vendor account activation fee $49
One time fee when you’re setting up a new product.

JW Player $100 ish (can’t recall exactly)
Whenever you’re selling a product that uses a flash player you’re technically supposed to pay for a license and so I did that here as well. (I prefer to be a straight shooter whenever and wherever possible — less stress, better for your reputation and it’s often the right thing to do).

So total cost would be around $400 if I didn’t get any of the software for free.

Wow, I definitely wouldn’t have expected it to be that cheap. And it looks like all of that can be used for any future products, too, right?

Yah – I will need to pay to upgrade my Wishlist member license to a multi site option but I plan on doing several more products in various markets in the future and I think video is the format I’ll chose for many of them.

You could make the product even cheaper if you went the eBook .pdf route and pretty much make it for free if you wanted to.

The products you got for free, how did you do that?

I emailed the creators and told them I had a blog in the space and that I’d mention their product and/or do a review on my blog. I usually charge $200 for a review, but on products or services I really see a ton of value in I want to do reviews even if I have to pay for the product because I’m never going to recommend something to my readers to buy that I don’t think is worth it. (In the reviews of course I mention I got a free version.)

Good tip! Has the course been well received by those who have bought it so far?

Yes, inside the course I have a section underneath the videos and customers can ask questions to clarify stuff I talk about in the videos and that’s been a good resource for both new and old members.

I’ve had under a 10% refund rate as well which is apparently pretty good for a Clickbank product. (I talked to a guy that’s huge in Clickbank and he said there are people that just buy products, consume the content and then issue a refund regardless of how good a product is.) At first I was taking it personally but in the end a chunk of people will always try to scam you anyway.

Based on that, and the fact that you’re thinking about doing more info products, I’m guessing that this has been a really worthwhile experience. Am I right?

Yah, I think the one component of my business that is lacking is an element of scalability. With a product you can create it once and then sell it over and over again. In this niche I would need to go back and update content as tactics change but the framework is already there. Half the trouble was trying to figure out what I would want to learn if I didn’t know what I had already been doing for a living.

I still want to continue developing out websites and ranking them in Google though because there is always room to make good money there.

My next product is going to be in a category no one has done a product in before so I’m very interested to see if I can make good money with it. In this case I’ll be using Facebook Ads, Google Adwords etc. to sell instead of using an email list I built from my blog / relationships with other marketers to sell the product.

Following up on that last part: What takes longer in the making of a successful info product — actually creating it or the marketing of it?

With the last product I did I’d definitely say the creation. I spent about 3 – 4 weeks to finish the project and that included research to find the software, familiarizing myself with all of those nuances, working with Clickbank on down to creating powerpoint slides, asking friends that knew nothing about making money online to go through the material to see if it makes sense, filming the videos etc.

The marketing was fairly easy. I sent out 3 or 4 emails to my list and fortunately because I was so worried about the process and if it would work correctly that it all went off without a hitch (technical wise). It’s far more difficult to do the marketing end if you want to do a big affiliate launch because I found that most people don’t want to work with new people in the market. So I just did the launch to my own list and then I’ve been finding affiliates slowly based on my relationships built through my blog etc. to sell with them as well.

What are the biggest things you’d do differently if you could go back and do it again?

I would have found ways to get a bigger email list because although my list is a small sample size it would fair to assume that with 10 times as many people I would have made 10 times as much.

I don’t think I would have done the launch strategy any different though. When you’re new it’s nearly impossible to do a launch with affiliates. I still think one of the easiest ways to make money with a blog that discusses highly specific knowledge (like how to make money online) is to create a product in the area that you know so much about and then sell it to the people that trusted you enough to subscribe to your newsletter.

I’m sure I wouldn’t have had as good of results selling a product teaching people how to make money with niche product focused blogs if I didn’t have the backstory that I lost my job in October of 09 but was already making more money from my “side business” than my day job. I’m earning over $5k profit per month with Amazon Associates (on average) and I know that if that figure was only $500 a month no one would care about a product I created because it’s not enough money to live on.

Very true, but that doesn’t stop most “gurus”   Anything else you’d like to add that we didn’t cover?

The biggest thing I would say is please don’t bother spending time in the internet marketing niche unless you truly know what you’re talking about. (Yes I sound like a hypocrite right now, but hear me out.) You’ll spin your wheels and waste time. I know this because for close to two years I wasted time in the blogging about blogging / make money online niche because I was like the noob that read about people talking about making money online and assumed I could just do the same thing. Little did I realize no one cares about what you have to say unless you know what you’re talking about. So I eventually quit that blog, started building websites in other markets and then came upon Amazon Associates and did well with it. The only reason why I came back is because I’m actually earning a full time income online now and have valueable information to share for new and experienced marketers. I hope that at least one person reads “Proliferation of Misinformation” and decides to quit their pointless blog and/or start something they’re truly passionate about.

Great advice, Chris. Thanks. And thanks, too, for taking time out of your day to sit down with me. I really appreciate it.

Got your own questions for Chris? Ask them in the comments!

(HT: Wildfire Marketing)

In most cases, our efforts to increase revenue center on increasing traffic.  In many cases, in fact, that’s the only method we’re using to increase revenue.  We get so close to our sites that we develop tunnel vision.  Everything is in place, and we think if we can just keep generating enough content, and growing our readership, and if we can just find some higher paying advertisers, surely, somewhere down the road, our sites will be really successful.  We can see the progress, slowly, day by day, so we know we’ll get there eventually.

Quite likely, though, we’re so close that we can’t see the forest for the trees.   Let’s take a big step back for a minute.

On average, what percentage of your visitors performs a revenue-generating action?  1%?  Half a percent?  For the sake of our discussion, let’s suppose that it’s 1%.  That’s probably a pretty fair guess.

Now, how easy would it be to raise that 1% to 2%?  That’s not a very big jump by any means.  Quite likely, you could jump to 2% or even 3% by doing nothing more than tweaking your AdSense colors, ad size and/or placement.  Little tweaks.  Nothing major at all.

Let’s say you make a few tweaks and get to 2%.  What just happened to your revenue?  Well, if you go from 1% to 2%, you’ve doubled your revenue — just that easy.  Twice the revenue from the same amount of traffic in maybe 30 minutes’ worth of work.

Not bad, huh?   In less time than it takes you to go grab some lunch, you’re suddenly generating twice as much revenue every day.

Here are two quick-hit areas to look at.

Advertising

Is your advertising working as well as it could?  Could those ads look less like ads and thus get more of your visitors looking at them?  Are you choosing ads that appeal to your users?  Have you tried different placement?  Different presentation?  Different ad networks?

Are you running advertising at all?  If not, that’s easily the fastest way to boost your revenue.  Sign up for an AdSense account and get some AdSense ads running ASAP.  Then go back and learn more about advertising by reading the articles here and the resources they link to to learn how to tweak your advertising for better performance.

Conversion Rates

What keeps visitors to your site from generating revenue?  Where do they stop short?  Take a good look at your site, and you can probably make some good guesses about where they might get hung up.  If you’re unsure, ask a few friends what they think.

Then once you’ve identified some problem areas, figure out what needs to be done to fix them.  For instance, you may have a form that’s way too long.  How about splitting it into two steps?  Making the first step significantly shorter will lead to more people starting the process, then once they hit the second step, it’s not so much trouble to finish it out.

Fix a few of those problem areas, and you could see a significant jump in your conversion rates.

Conclusion

Does this work?  Absolutely.  In fact, I’ve personally seen it work on countless sites over the past few years, and it was never more than just a few minutes’ work.  And the best part is that I didn’t trade anything to get it.   The users who clicked away were evidently going to leave anyway, because click rates on the rest of the elements of the sites stayed consistent.  So, by giving them some options for leaving the site, I actually got paid when they left, rather than just losing them for nothing.

So spend a few minutes today taking a fresh look at your site.  You’ll be very glad you did.

There are many skills that you can make a living online with — there’s no magic combination — so I think I’ve answered most often that you should just try out several different things and see which you like and are the best at.

However, I have realized that there is indeed one skill that I would recommend over all others — all other things being equal — because it’s both enormously valuable and more difficult to outsource than anything else.  So let me go through the skills that I’ve needed in my own path to making a living online and discuss each in terms of how valuable I think it is.  I’ve listed them in order of increasing value.

Valuable Skills

Pay-Per-Click

This is a really great skill that you can make some very real cash with — both directly and indirectly — but as adept as I was with AdWords, it hasn’t contributed directly to my ability to live online at all.  If you’re good at it and you like it, by all means pursue it, but it’s just not a skill that I personally would rate above these others.

Web Design

Until recently, this was hands-down the one skill I don’t have that I wish I did.  I’m really good at just about everything else I’ve needed, so if I could design my own stuff I’d be wholly self-sufficient and not have to rely on anyone else.

In terms of picking just one skill to have, though, I’d go with something else simply because there are so many really good designers out there who will work very cheaply.  And with the advent of sites like 99designs that give us access to quality designers all over the world, the cost for good design has dropped like a rock over the past few years.

True, the cost for great design hasn’t changed — the upper echelon of designers can still command a premium price — but how many of us really need great design?  In almost all cases, good design is plenty good enough.

Web Server Configuration/Database Management

These are definitely skills that are useful to have, but the bar is pretty low.  Good web hosts make these functions easy, so if you can just handle the basics that may be all you really need.  Being an Apache or MySQL expert isn’t going to provide much direct value, especially when viewed in light of how long it takes to become an expert.

Programming

Being conversant in a particular web language is definitely useful, and it definitely opens up opportunities that you wouldn’t otherwise have.  However, it’s definitely not necessary, and many simple programming tasks can be accomplished by just copying and pasting code, without any knowledge of exactly what’s going on.  True, you would struggle getting software like Pligg up and running without a good knowledge of PHP, but how many of us have to use something like that?

Copywriting

An ability to write great copy can make the difference between a great site and one that never takes off at all.  There are several reasons why I don’t rank it any higher than I do, though.

First, my feeling is while it’s definitely a skill you can work on, you’re largely either born with it or you’re not.  I also don’t think you could achieve wild success with nothing else but the ability to write great copy.  Add in the fact that great writers are more and more in abundance and available for hire for a very reasonable price, and this is one of those skills that’s great to have and can definitely be leveraged but one that I wouldn’t choose if I could only choose one.

HTML/CSS

If you’re wanting to find success on the web, you’re almost certainly going to have to have some level of HTML & CSS knowledge.  You need to know your way around.  Definitely get a good book and learn the basics, but you don’t have to be an expert.

Having this as your only skill isn’t going to take you far.  You’ll always be working for someone else.

SEO

SEO has factored into my success in a huge way — more than was healthy, in fact.  While it’s not the end-all-be-all, you could definitely be quite successful with nothing more than this skill because there are still so few people who are truly good at it.  (On the other hand, you can’t swing a stick without hitting someone who thinks they’re really good.)

Still, it’s possible to find someone to get your site optimized — for a fair price — and spend your time focusing on other things.  Plus, search engines are still only a small fraction of the available traffic out there.  Many sites do great without ever even seeing any meaningful search engine traffic.

If this is something you want to explore, I would definitely recommend Aaron’s training program.

Revenue Generation

You can have the best site on the best topic with 10 times the traffic of your closest competitor and still fail miserably if you have no idea how to generate revenue.  Nobody gets rich by just making change.

But trying to generate revenue with a site that gets great traffic is like Tom Brady trying to get a date — it’s just not that hard to do.

Link Building

I’ve decided now that this is the one skill that I would choose over any other, because traffic is the lifeblood of any site.  Without it, a site dies.  And links not only send traffic directly, but they are also far and away the number one determinant of search engine rankings — which bring even more traffic.  Links make the world go round.

As long as I’m passable at the skills above and contract out to fill holes where I’m not, the ability to build links is like rocket fuel for my efforts.  The better I am at building links, the faster and higher I can go.  It, more than anything else, can be the differentiator between two otherwise similar sites.  It’s the publicity that is so vital to the success of any venture, and it can be far more efficient (and easier, and more long-lasting) than traditional offline PR.

And because it’s one of the rarest skills online, great link builders are both hard to find and expensive to hire — if they’re even available to be hired.  Most would much rather be contributing to their own success than being paid to contribute to someone else’s.  If you’re that valuable, why work on anything where you don’t have an equity stake?

All Other Things Being Equal…

I say “all other things being equal,” but the truth is they never are.  You’ll almost certainly find that you have propensities and desires for some of these skills over others, and you’ll find that success comes much easier if you focus on those.  Plus, this is based almost solely on my own personal experience, which by nature is limited, so it’s likely that you’d have a completely different list — both in terms of skills and in how you’d rank them.

So what do you think?  Do you agree with this list?  How would you change it?

People…live too much in the now. They go for what makes them comfortable right then instead of the future.

His co-author continues:

Whenever he has a business decision, he doesn’t concern himself with the upfront money; he’s thinking three years down the line.

Too many of us fail because we can’t handle delayed gratification.  We want it now — even if “it” is only a few dollars.  We gladly (or unknowingly) sacrifice the long-term on the altar of the immediate and wonder why we’re still not making enough to quit our day job.  We don’t give any thought to the future result of what we’re doing today.

Take some time today to really think.  Are you whoring out your blog to make a few bucks, while in the meantime chasing away readers who would have formed the foundation for a very successful business one or two years down the line?  Are you living on the edge of legitimacy trying not to get caught when, ultimately, you always will?  Have you grown so fat feeding off the free traffic from Google that you’ve ceased trying to make your site more defensible?

If so, don’t start whining a year from now when those who took a long-term view of things are working for themselves, and you’re still having to answer to someone else.

It does still act like beta software, though.  I’m still only seeing ShoppingAds ads in my sidebar (is anyone else seeing something different?), and my stats haven’t updated since the ad went live (about 18 hours ago now).

Still, that’s exactly what I expected out of a beta program, and they’ve definitely worked very hard (and successfully) to create a very nice system, so I’m happy to keep trying it out.

Anyone else had any experience with QuickAds yet?