Thursday 3 January 2013

$1500 In 1 Week with No list, No Traffic & No Money

J-O-B is a dirty word...

In the years I’ve been online attempting to make money, I’ve never really earned a lot. I’ve made some money here and there promoting different programs, and I’ve lost a lot of money buying products and paying for traffic. My best days online have always been short-lived, never generating more than a couple day burst of income and then quickly fizzling out.

In my first 7 days inside of the Empower Network I generated over $1500 in commission with no list, no blog and no money to spend on traffic. And unlike past endeavours, the money I’ve earned isn’t a one-off payment – over $500 of my first week earnings are monthly recurring payments. You see, Empower Network is a little different from other training systems out there and their affiliate structure is just as ‘odd’.

empower

Empower offers 100% commissions on all of their products, some are montly recurring and some are one-time payments. The system is crafted in a way where the products are already built for you, the sales pages are done and hosted for you, you get a blog on an authority domain to help drive traffic, and they will upsell your customers on further products once they’re in the door.

How I Did (Offline)

I started with no list and no money to spend on traffic, so how did I manage to get sign ups? I used what I had available to me. I like to attend local business networking events where I can meetup and chat with other entrepreneurs. Inenvitably, the first question you get asked at any networking event is “so what do you do?” – when you simply respond with “I’m an Internet Marketer, I make money online,” it seems to pique peoples’ interests. The follow up question is typically “how do you do that?”

At any business event you will almost always collect a handful of business cards. Most people put them in a box, never to be seen again, or immediately dump them into the trash when they get home. Business cards are valuable, because they each represent a warm lead – you met each and every one of those people and have some connection to them. As soon as I got home I would start flipping through the cards and send out a short, personal email to each person letting them know I enjoyed chatting with them. At the bottom of each email I would put a link to my Empower Network opt-in page, or if I had talked to them at the event and they seemed interested in what I was doing, I would make it clear “here’s a link to that thing we were talking about earlier.”

From going to 2 events in a 3 day span, I generated over 30 leads into Empower Network and those leads resulted in more than $1000 in commissions. There are much easier ways to generate 30 leads online, but most require some money or some other existing resource like an email list, or highly trafficked blog. When you have no money and no list, sometimes you have to work a little harder, but it pays off.

How I did it (Online)

A small part of my success in the first week was actually because of (free) promotion I did online. Almost everyone has a Facebook and Twitter account with friends and followers. I used my small online lists to my advantage and drove little bursts of traffic to posts on my Empower Network blog – which is already optimized to collect leads for you.

The posts I wrote weren’t all about online marketing and making money. Some of my most successful posts (conversion-wise) were simply about the events I had gone to. I would write a quick post and upload some photos I took at a networking event and tweet it out to different people who were also there. I would target people who spoke at these events and make sure I snapped a photo of and linked to their website. I would then write a quick tweet where I mentioned each of the speakers and thanked them, all while linking to my Empower blog. Almost every single person I mentioned retweeted me, giving me access to their twitter following and dozens more clicks, new leads and new sales.

It really frustrates me to hear people complain about how they don’t have a list, or they don’t have a blog, and how they can’t get any results because they don’t have X, Y or Z. One thing I want to make clear is: everyone started at zero. John Chow didn’t wake up one morning to hundreds of thousands of readers, he started with nothing and they slowly built up. Any online marketer with a gigantic list started with no one in the beginning. I’m the first to admit I was guilty of this type of whining and making those kinds of remarks. I stopped when I realized that the complaining was really just wasting time I could be using to START.

About the author: Michael Yurechko is a founding member of the Team MMO Empower Network Team. He lives in Vancouver.

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