Ryan Moran

Regretfully, I admit that my expectations of the Traffic and Conversion Summit were very low. When they said that we would leave exhausted after each day, I didn’t believe them.

I don’t like to do this… but I must admit that I was wrong!

The last week has been one of the most fun and rewarding experiences in my life. Spending four days each in Austin and San Diego left me feeling refreshed, renewed, and excited about my business, and I feel confident that I am equipped to succeed far beyond my current level.

Pizza Shop - First Night

My Room Was On the Top Floor

Prior to this week, I was caught in a plateau, and for the first time in a long time, I felt scared to grow. As a full-time college student, it was easy to hide behind the fact that I could only work on my business occasionally. It was easy to be comfortable with my success.

Now, as a full-time internet marketer, there is a challenge ahead of me, and it is scary. It’s like being new all over again, because I have so much opportunity.

Therefore, getting away for a week was extremely rewarding from a business and a personal standpoint.

The first four days were spent in Austin, TX at the Traffic and Conversion Summit with Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher.

My friend Brian and I knew it was going to be a good week as soon as a bum accused us of not working. I think there’s a headline in there somewhere…

We then ate at this janky but delicious pizza shop (seen above)…

After the first ten-hour conference session, my brain was fried, my body was tired, and I was filled with new knowledge. After the first day, I said to my good friend Brian Owens, “We get so caught up in how to generate traffic, but if you have an offer that converts well, traffic is no longer a problem!” It was like a revelation.

Because I’m mainly an SEO and PPC marketer, I’ve ignored Facebook advertising, the content network, media buying, demographic targeting, and buying banner ads. If you have an offer that converts, then there is plenty of traffic that you can buy. Which leads me to my second revelation…

I love being an affiliate. I could be an affiliate marketer until the day I die. But there is an entire new world that exists in having your own products. As an affiliate, it’s impossible to test different offers, colors, headlines, and pricing points, because you are not in control of the offer. Of course, you can do the tracking to maximize your affiliate sales, but you still have to send them through another offer to the vendor.

While I have no plans to stop being an affiliate, the conference was a kick in the butt to get my own products out there, as well. While TAG is still in recreation (and boy oh boy is it awesome), there is so much more that I can do. In addition to the affiliate promotions that I do and TheAffiliateGod.com, it’s time for me to start teaching some things to offline business, as well.

After the three-day session of learning copywriting, follow-up sequences, offers, traffic, and testing, I headed to San Diego to see my good friend Matt Bredel of Tru-Guru.com.

Immediately upon arrival, Matt began to make a list of things that he wanted to do in order to corrupt me. They included: eating beef, getting drunk, going to a strip club, using a PC, gambling, cursing, and a host of other things.

I’ll give him credit – he did pretty well. He didn’t get me drunk, but he did buy me a Coors Light one day. He didn’t get me to eat beef, but we did have some awesome fish tacos. He didn’t get me to gamble my life savings, but I did have a blast at the horserace (I lost a total of $8).

I brought two Apple laptops, but unfortunately I must admit that I DID use a PC once.

All kidding aside, hanging out with Matt and his family in sunny San Diego was the perfect way to cap off a week that provided much needed refreshment and energy. As we took a ten-mile bike ride around the bay, I was reminded why need to move a beach.

Being near the beach also reminded me of some wise words from Jason Moffatt in a recent blog post regarding maximizing your free time (it’s worth watching if even for the best F-bomb I’ve ever heard at 2:40): Taking Time Off

Together, the trips to Austin and San Diego were educational as well as refreshing. Now, I feel armed and ready to absolutely kill it in my business, and I’ve put together a few goals of what I need to do with what I learned:

- Take more vacations.
- Sell, rent, or ditch any websites or ventures that distract me.
- Get business cards.
- Create a product for offline businesses.
- Be more aggressive.
- Read more books.

Since I’ve been home, I’ve already begun this process; I’ve completed a case study in which I recorded myself creating a website that went from $0 to $100/day in about a week. I also began reading “Atlas Shrugged” and the latest Robert Cialdini sales psychology book. I’ve begun seeking buyers for the websites that I want to sell, revamping my autoresponder series, and I’ve been putting together videos for the new TAG, due out… sometime.

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On the beach in La Jolla, CA with my buddy Matt from Tru-Guru.com.

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Step Six: Scaling

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been detailing my six-step process to dominate a niche, and it was way more popular than I ever imagined. People posted links to the posts on Twitter, the articles were featured in internet marketing newsletters, and as much as fifty comments were left on a single post.

While I covered a lot of ground in these posts, it was impossible for me to get to every question that arose from them. For that reason, I’m going to be holding a very special webinar with two of my smartest friends, Matt Davis and PotPieGirl on THURSDAY, JULY 30th at 8 PM EST.

With as popular as these posts have been, and with PotPieGirl and Matt Davis having some of the most popular products online right now, this webinar could fill up fast.

Head here and claim your spot:  http://www.IM-Webinars.com

(PS, there’s no pitch planned at this webinar. We’ll be taking questions, working with people one-on-one, and giving some much needed TOUGH LOVE to cap off this series.)

Now, for step six…

I believe that you can turn just about any niche of buyers into a six-figure a year business. After you have tested a niche with PPC and have traffic funneling from articles that you have written, you have enough traffic to be able to tell if the niche has buyers.

This does not necessarily mean that you are cranking out $500/days. At this stage, revenue is more important than profit, because revenue will tell you if the niche is hungry. If you have $500/day in revenue, but your Google adspend is $300/day, and your hosting, outsourcing and other fees run $200/day, it may feel like you are doing a lot of work for nothing, but in reality, that is an awesome beginning.

That is because the real money comes when you start to scale your business with SEO, list building, your own products, and joint ventures/metworking. Of course, you can make plenty with just PPC and the traffic that comes from the articles that you write, and it’s nice to focus on the cash that comes quickly with those methods, but real sustainable profit comes when you scale your business.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but my favorite way to scale is through search engine optimization. I’ll shy away from diving into how I optimize for the search engines for now, but it comes down to on-page friendliness and link building (lots and lots of link building).

The reason I put so much value into search engine optimization is because my traffic is tested with pay-per-click. If my website is profitable with PPC, then similar traffic from organic rankings are going to be just as effective, if not more so, and they will be free. Therefore, once I know what terms are going to turn into sales, then I aim to get those pages to the top of Google. Doing these two things alone (PPC and scaling with SEO) has made me a top three affiliate for several million dollar companies.

At the same time, I begin to build a list. It’s okay to start building a list before this step, but I like to know that the niche is going to be profitable before I start to invest my time into making follow-up sequences and building rapport with my list. Usually, I use my index page as a sales-type letter in order to get the opt-in, and I use my sub pages as reviews, comparisons, articles and content.

On my sub-pages, I put an opt-in in the top right corner of every page, as this seems to bring in the maximum eyes to the opt-in. I don’t hard-sell the opt-in on every page, but it’s available everywhere.

Here’s something to consider: when giving something away in exchange for an opt-in, it’s much better to give a video or short ebook than a minicourse over several days. I discovered this by accident, as I realized that many of my readers got frustrated that they had to wait three to ten days before they got all of their content. From now on, I’ll always offer things up front on my niche sites.

Having traffic from SEO will build your list, so the two go hand in hand very well. Having a large list will also serve as your launching pad to promote a new product or launch your own…

Which leads me to my next point…

If you want to take a niche to the ultimate level, and I only do this for your MOST profitable niches, then create your own products. You can simply switch out your autoresponder messages to promote your own site, and you put your own product as the top rated program on your review sites.

If you understand the niche well at this point, and you know what the other products offer, then it will be easy for you to create something that is more attractive to the market. Sometimes, making a video series instead of an ebook is enough to do it. Sometimes, it’s just giving better information.

But the most important part of this process is getting the product to CONVERT. The easiest way to track this is to use Google’s own tool. Put a piece of code on your site, and you’ll see what your conversion rate is, as well as where the sales come from. Because you’ll have articles, reviews, autoresponders and pay-per-click campaigns ready to send traffic to your site, it will be easy to test the site. As traffic starts to come in, change the header, the videos, and other pieces of the sales letter to see what converts the best.

I’m starting to head down a rabbit hole here, because it would be very easy for me to now dive into getting affiliates, holding product launches, and using upsells on your own products, but that is for another lesson… or series of lessons.

What I want you to take away from this post is that the real money is in building a sustainable business instead of chasing quick cash. You can make plenty from just PPC and writing articles, but you can take your business to the next level and beyond when you begin to scale the pages that are already making you money, building autoresponders, and creating your own products.

Today, I want you to find your most profitable website and find which terms are bringing in the sales. When you do that, decide that you are going to be in the #1 position for that search term on Google, and then get to it.

Then, add an autoresponder to the site and begin a follow-up sequence that bonds with your list. You can sell stuff in the emails, but focus more on bonding than anything else.

Once you’ve done that, grab your spot for Thursday’s webinar, and bring your questions.

This series has been a blast for me, and I’m very excited by the feedback that I’ve received. Based on the questions that are asked at Thursday’s webinar, I’ll prepare the next one.

Thank you for the inspiration, the comments, and the support.

GET BUSY TIME!

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