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How To Make Money Generating Online Leads For Local Companies

One of the few drawbacks to affiliate marketing is the intense level of competition that exists online. Because it costs practically nothing to get started, there’s no barrier to entry. That means anyone can jump in and start promoting affiliate products. You have probably seen this in your own niches.

Today, I’m going to reveal a way you can make money online by generating leads for local businesses. Think of this strategy as affiliate marketing on a local level. Here’s the best part: this model is automatically insulated from most of your competition. Very few marketers are doing this. Instead, most of them are taking the path of least resistance and focusing entirely on Clickbank and CJ. With a little planning and careful execution, you can slip under the radar and generate thousands of dollars in commissions each month.

Here’s a basic blueprint for getting started…

Identify Local Businesses To Approach

You’ll find the best opportunities with companies that sell a product or service at a high price point. That usually implies that each new customer is valuable to them; each one drives a lot of profit. That means the business will be willing to pay you generously to send qualified leads their way.

Avoid retail businesses. They’re a poor choice because the average transaction is usually small. Chiropractors, plastic surgeons, auto dealerships, and cosmetic dentists are more appropriate. For example, did you know dentists charge up to $600 for teeth whitening? Most of that is profit. Imagine how much you can charge local dentists per lead.

Determine The Value Of Each New Customer

Before you can create your compensation schedule, you need to know how much each new customer is worth to the local business. Don’t be afraid to ask the business owner. You might be surprised by how well they know their numbers. For example, a cosmetic dentist should be able to tell you how much each client is worth, depending on the services that client needs. An auto dealership might be able to tell you how much each incoming phone call is worth to them (they usually know their metrics well).

Once you know the value of each new customer, ask the business owner about their conversion rate. How many teeth whitening leads does the cosmetic dentist convert into paying clients? Multiply the value of each customer by the conversion rate to identify the value of each lead.

For example, suppose the dentist makes $300 on each teeth whitening procedure. If he converts 15% of his leads, each lead is worth $45. Your compensation will be based on that figure.

Figure Out How To Track Leads

There are a few methods you can use to track the leads you generate for local businesses. The easiest way is to collect the lead information yourself and then forward it on to the business owner. A small content site that supports a landing page with a multi-field form works perfectly. When visitors complete the form and submit it, their information can be emailed directly to you and the business owner.

You’ll find that some businesses have a staff of salespeople whose sole job is to convert incoming calls (auto dealerships do this a lot). In that case, establish a unique telephone number that routes directly to the business. Drive traffic to a landing page that qualifies leads and encourages them to call the number. Get paid for each call and let the salespeople do what they do best.

Drive Traffic

While you can definitely use the search engine optimization strategies I’ve explained in past posts, drive traffic with PPC and social networking sites. You can generate traffic quickly with PPC, and as long as you’re converting visitors into leads, your backend profit will cover the expense. Plus, you can refine your targeting on PPC in a way that is more difficult with SEO.

Social networking sites are great because they let you drill down into specific demographics. That’s valuable. For example, if you’re generating leads for an auto dealership trying to move a particular muscle car, you can target males in a certain age group.

Focus Your Efforts

If you have never worked in the local marketing space before, start with one type of business and one product or service. Focus your efforts. For dentists, generate leads for a specific service. For auto dealerships, focus on a specific model. It’s too easy to spread yourself thin and become distracted and less effective in any given category. Once you become more comfortable with the process, and have established systems that automatically drive the traffic, move into other niches.

Affiliate marketing is growing more crowded each day. However, with the right marketing strategies, you can generate leads for local businesses and enjoy a territory that is largely your own.

P.S.  You should review my show with Rachel rofe on how she makes money with local companies in her area. Good Stuff!

• Interview with Rachel Rofe on local Marketing
• How  to get local companies to give you work newbie guide
  

Creating A Profitable Online Business

It’s so easy to become excited about the opportunities to build online businesses that we often forget about the mechanics involved with making them a success. Forget the mechanics and you’ll dig yourself a hole. Get things right in the beginning and the income generated by your websites might grow to quickly outstrip what you’re currently earning.

Creating an online business that generates a dependable income stream is not complicated. The trouble is, few marketers line up the necessary pieces before they start. Today, I’m going to give you an internet marketing blueprint. You’ll be able to apply it to any type of online business you create. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling information products, building membership sites, or promoting affiliate offers. If you address the following three factors, you can create a business that will continue to generate income for years.

Your Product

You must have a product to sell. This includes anything that adds value to someone else’s life. Don’t become bogged down by thinking only of information products and software. “Products” can include affiliate offers, services, and even seminars. Your “product” can include your blog posts, newsletter, or the information you give visitors on your content sites. All of these represent value to somebody.

Most marketers create their own products. There are advantages to doing so, such as being able to maintain exclusive control of the quality and price point. It also gives you the opportunity to raise your own army of affiliates. And few things are more powerful than a large group of people happily promoting your products.

If you don’t want to spend time creating your own products, you can acquire them from others. For example, you might hire a writer to create an ebook for which you own the copyright. Or, you might hire a voiceover expert to produce your CDs. You might contract a programmer to design a piece of software your customers will find useful.

Ever notice marketers who sell dozens of items under their name? They rarely create them on their own. As I’m writing this post, I’m thinking of one person in particular who does this and generates $500,000 a year.

Motivated Traffic

The best products will die on the vine without a stream of targeted traffic. Creating an online business that generates a reliable income depends on producing this traffic. You can do it with search engine optimization strategies, pay per click advertising, feeder sites, squeeze pages, and social media marketing. You can also do it with blogging, video marketing, email list building, and small-scale media buys.

Each of these traffic-building strategies deserves its own post (its own book, really), so I’ll leave the details for later. Suffice to say, if you can control the traffic, you own the key to a profitable online business.

You should read Joe Marsh’s “How to get to the First Page of Google” it hold some Valuable material on getting quick targeted sustaining traffic!

Conversions

Let’s suppose you’re selling the perfect product. You also have a healthy traffic funnel through which you’re sending a large stream of motivated visitors. The last piece of the marketing puzzle is your ability to convert those visitors to buyers.

Similar to developing traffic, there are many ways to increase your conversion rate. The good news is that you can test everything, collect data, and make changes quickly. For example, does adding a picture of a smiling female adult on your sales page increase the percentage of visitors who purchase your product? Does including another free bonus have an impact? How about offering a more generous guarantee? Would audio testimonials influence conversions?

The number of elements you can test to increase your conversion rate is limitless. And you’ll be surprised by the things which can influence it.

A Seamless Income-Generating System

If you have a product that adds value, can generate targeted traffic, and are able to convert visitors to buyers, you have everything you need to build a profitable online business. Each factor is crucial. Controlling two of them without the third is a recipe for failure. But, if you invest the time to line up these three factors in the beginning, your business can generate an ongoing income.

In past posts, I’ve described ways in which you can create or acquire products. I’ve also explained some of the most powerful marketing strategies you can use to generate traffic. I’ve also touched upon copywriting. We’ll be revisiting each of these areas soon to prepare you for creating your online business.

How Kaizen Marketing Can Catapult Your Online Income

There has never been a better time to launch your online business. In fact, many of you have launched several of them, including membership sites, blogs, info-products, and sites that promote affiliate offers.

With the online resources and tools at your disposal, managing several businesses at once is easier than ever. Yet, I’d be willing to bet that many of you are not squeezing as much income from your online businesses as possible.

Today, we’re going to look at your business through the lens of kaizen marketing. Kaizen simply refers to continuous improvement. Toyota popularized it within their production lines decades ago, but in a moment, you’ll see how you can leverage kaizen marketing to dramatically increase your online income.

Setting The Stage

At Toyota, Kaizen was used to improve processes by getting rid of waste. If a worker in the plant knew how to do something more quickly without sacrificing quality, he was encouraged to do it and document it for others. Over time, thousands of tiny improvements led to higher levels of efficiency.

Think about that in the context of internet marketing, including the PPC and search engine optimization strategies you’re using. If you made one tiny improvement in a single area, it may not have a significant impact on your income. But, what if you made dozens of small improvements? Month after month, your clickthroughs would increase; your traffic would surge; your conversions would jump; your refunds would decline; your email lists would swell.

That’s kaizen marketing. And it can have a dramatic effect on the success of your online businesses. Below, I’ll describe how to use the concept within your search engine optimization and PPC campaigns.

Kaizen In Search Engine Optimization

Your goal with SEO is to rank your sites’ pages at the top of the search engines’ organic listings for your main keywords. The higher you rank, the more traffic you’ll drive to those pages. You can apply kaizen to your search engine optimization efforts to gradually increase the volume of traffic you receive.

For example, add two or three keywords to your list each week. If they warrant the time, create individual pages that focus specifically on those keywords. Then, build a few high-quality links to those pages. The key is to do these things incrementally. Over a month, you won’t notice a large jump in traffic, but each page represents a new stream of visitors. Three pages a week equals 156 pages in a year. As those pages climb the search engines’ rankings, your overall traffic volume will surge.

Kaizen In PPC Marketing

Kaizen is especially powerful in PPC marketing because there are countless opportunities to improve your results. Some PPC advertisers use the kaizen concept to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in income each month. It doesn’t happen immediately; it happens gradually through making continuous improvements to their campaigns.

For example, they’ll methodically test ads against one another. If one ad outperforms the other by the smallest fraction, it becomes the new control. Then, the under-performing ad is eliminated and a new test is immediately performed. You can conduct this type of testing to identify the most profitable bid prices, ad positions, and landing pages.

Integrating Kaizen Marketing In Your Business

Let’s pull the lens back for a moment and consider the impact kaizen marketing can have on your online business. Suppose that you’re promoting your membership site through search engine optimization. Further suppose that you’re receiving 1,000 unique visitors each month with a conversion rate of 1% and an average subscriber lifetime of 4 months.

What would happen if you gradually increased the number of keywords that are driving traffic to your site to the point where you were receiving 2,000 visitors each month? What would happen if you improved your landing page and bumped your conversion rate to 1.2%? And what would happen if, through better service, content, or more interaction with your subscribers, you extended their lifetime to 6 months?

What would that do to your income over time? And imagine the growth you would see if you continued making small improvements on an ongoing basis.

That’s kaizen marketing. That’s how successful marketers slowly transform small online businesses into wildly profitable companies. It starts with one small improvement.

Short-Term Money Makers Versus Long-Term Businesses

Making money online is simple. Identify what people want, figure out a reliable way to reach them, and position yourself between them and the product.

The basic process of generating income is the same whether you’re launching Adsense sites, selling information products, promoting affiliate products, or managing membership sites. The opportunities you can leverage to make money online are only limited by your imagination.

Having said that, a lot of online entrepreneurs make a devastating mistake: they focus entirely on short-term money makers. To be sure, there’s a lot of money involved and its scent can be seductive. The problem is that such opportunities offer limited long-term potential. There are scores of people who have gone from making over $100,000 a month to scrambling to pay the mortgage.

Today, I’m going to make a quick case for exploiting short-term money makers. But, more importantly, I’m going to explain why you need to focus your time and effort on building long-term businesses.

The Case For Short-Term Money Makers

There will always be fads that offer the potential for a quick payday. If you can identify them and act quickly, you can make money – often, a lot of it. For example, PPC marketers immediately jumped onto the acai berry phenomenon, building keyword lists, designing landing pages, and creating ads for lucrative affiliate offers. Similarly, entire websites have been built around specific celebrities who dominate the popular media. Their owners use search engine optimization strategies to drive thousands of people to these sites each day.

The income from these short-term ventures can be staggering. The top affiliates are making hundreds of thousands of dollars each month. But, one day, the income will dry up completely. It’s already happening in the acai berry space. And it happens to nearly every short-term money maker.

Advantages Of Building Long-Term Assets

When you build an online business as a long-term asset, you insulate yourself from market volatility. The income generated from such assets is sustainable. It’s rarely buffeted by unpredictable legislation or haphazard media coverage.

For example, suppose you’re building an information product business in the dating and relationship space. It’s an evergreen market. It will outlast us all. Most online marketers might create an ebook or two, using free internet marketing methods and hoping for a quick burst of cash. In doing so, they waste an enormous opportunity that can produce sustainable income. There are a number of info-product businesses in the dating and relationship space that are generating high 6-figure – and in some cases, 7-figure – incomes for their owners. What’s more, they have been doing so for years.

That is the nature of long-term assets. Their income potential cannot be matched by short-term money makers.

Creating Your Exit Strategy

There is another important reason to focus your time and energy on creating long-term businesses: they can be easily sold. While money makers can generate high levels of income, they don’t fit well within an exit strategy. Their immediate inherent value is questionable. For example, acai berry websites have been selling for a measly 2 times monthly earnings, a pittance compared to the multiples paid for more sustainable businesses. In a year’s time, it’s doubtful whether those sites will even be able to attract that much.

At some point in the future, you’ll want to sell your business. Whether you want to retire or funnel the capital into other promising ventures, having that exit strategy is critical. But, it is practically impossible to plan your future exit from short-term money makers.

Here’s the bottom line: exploit money makers if you can identify them and act quickly. But, focus your effort on building long-term business assets. Years down the road, you’ll be glad you did.

Resources to Consider Click here: