Internet marketing is really a numbers game.   All you have to figure out how to do is to make more per lead that it costs you to acquire that lead.

SEO Doesn’t Really Matter

Lots of people focus on SEO, but they put too much focus on it.  Sure its important.  Free traffic is nice, except…

Its not really free.

You spend a lot of time checking keywords, optimizing pages, building links, and other activity that is there solely to try to create traffic.  You can spend that same money just buying traffic.

You need to be writing articles, that’s for sure.  Articles help develop your reputation and your authority.  Its hard to get people to buy from you if they don’t believe that you have special knowledge and if they don’t have a connection with you.  Your articles help develop that connection.  And articles will help create organic search traffic.  That’s a great benefit, but the energy you put into developing free traffic from that could change with the next Google update.

Forget about SEO.  Focus on writing high-quality helpful articles for your readers.   Links will develop over time, especially if you have readers.

Now to get readers, rely on paid marketing techniques and email to bring them back.

“But wait,” you say, “that’s going to cost me money!!”

Yes.  It is.  This is a business.  In a business, you pay to get potential customers and then you make sure you can make money from them.

Marketing Math

The general rule is:

Lifetime Value – Cost per Lead = profit

Lifetime value may be very hard to predict though, especially in the beginning.  You would like to reduce your cost per lead to zero.  One technique is to use an acquisition funnel with a tripwire that pays the acquisition costs.  You want the liquidated cost per lead as given below to be less than zero.

Cost Per Lead / Conversion Rate – Tripwire Offer Price * Tripwire Conversion Rate  = Liquidated Cost per Lead

Now, here is where it gets interesting because many of the factors are dependent on each other.  They are also heavily dependent on the offers made and the copy.   Obviously the better the copy and the more targeted the offers, the lower the conversion rate needs to be to be successful.

An Example

 

Suppose I can buy a solo ad CPA offer for $0.50 per click.  Suppose it converts at 20% (or 0.20)  That makes my actual addition to my list cost $2.50.  Now suppose 10% of those will also buy my tripwire offer which costs $10. My total cost per lead is $2.50 and the tripwire reduces my cost per lead by $1.00 so my Liquidated Costs is $1.50

By optimizing my copy I manage to increase my initial conversion rate to 40%  I also drop the cost of my tripwire offer to $7 and together with the improvement in copy that increases my tripwire conversions to 20%.  Now the total cost per lead is $0.50 / 0.40 or $1.25.  My tripwire offer reduces my cost per lead by $1.40 my liquidated costs are now less that zero.  Everything else I make from the list is pure profit.