In the post I’m going to start off by sharing some of the questions that you guys have asked so far and give you my responses to them. I know not everybody reads all of the comments so I figured this would be a great way to bring some of the questions to people’s attention as well as give my answers for everyone to see. I’ll get to my latest stats at the end of the post.

Questions:

Richard White asked “What are you charging for the challenge?”

Right now, I’m not planning on charging anything at all for the challenge. The challenge is more for myself than anything else. I’d like to prove that I can quickly build and monetize a list. I thought it would be a cool experience for others to follow along if they wanted so I decided to blog about my experience.

That’s not to say that I won’t ever take what I’ve learned from this experience and package it up as a product… That could happen. I may, at some point, use this as a case study and sell video tutorials or something of that nature to show what I did. As of right now, however, I’m just doing what I’m doing and writing about my experience.

Sergio Felix asked “Are you going to create a new category for this or how are you going to keep track of the challenge and your regular posts here on BAB?”

You’ll notice at the top of my blog, I added a new menu item for “30 Day Challenge”. All of the posts that I’m writing for this challenge will show up under that menu. You’ll also notice that I add “(Challenge)” to all of my posts related to this challenge.

Russ made a great point when he said “Here’s an interesting variable that I’ll throw into the mix just for the sake of discussion. All other things being equal, one guy BELIEVES HE CAN; the other guy BELIEVES HE CAN’T. You’ve done this before with your business and not only do you believe you can, you KNOW you can pull this off. Well, at least you KNOW it’s possible for YOU.”

I got in to online marketing when I lost my job back in 2009. I made it work for me because I felt I had no other choice. My back was against the wall and I had two choices. Make my own online business work or go out and compete with the 1,000s of people vying for the few jobs available. My choice was clear. I knew I could make it work, I stuck with it, and I made things happen. Getting your mind in the right place is way more than half the battle.

I believe I can do it again and, by sharing my journey in almost real time, I’m hoping to change everyone else’s beliefs that it can be done. Maybe this little experiment will turn people in to “believers”.

Eli said “You mentioned several different traffic sources but do you have a favorite one or two that you like to start using in the beginning?”

This is actually quite a difficult question to answer. I personally have favorite traffic sources but they aren’t necessarily the best for people just starting out. For example. I love TrafficVance. It’s probably the easiest traffic source that I know of. However, to get started with TrafficVance, you need to start with a minimum of a $1,000 budget. On the other hand, solo ads are a really great traffic source as well and require much less upfront to get started. However, they aren’t my favorite because I’m forced to rely on other people. If someone forgets to send for you or has a crappy, unresponsive list, you’re out money…

For this experiment, those are my two primary traffic sources… If you want to start down the slower path of finding free traffic, I’d recommend forum marketing. Find a forum that you really like, put your link in your forum signature, and just start helping people in the forum. Respond to questions, create new threads, and become active. You’ll see great quality traffic as a result. Just don’t expect hundreds of visitors per day overnight.

Sandy asked “As for tracking – not sure what I am going to do about that other than Google Analytics. Does anybody have any advice about this?”

I highly recommend AdTrackz gold. It works great and can be installed on your own server. Google Analytics will work but it doesn’t give you everything you’d want to know. It also frustrates me that I can’t reset my stats with Google.

Pauline asked “Can I just ask how often do they do this challenge as I would be interested in joining next time?”

This is the first time I’ve done one of these challenges. I’d like to do more of them if this one goes well. Maybe one every few months. After all, every time I do one of these, there’s potential to add more monthly income to my business…

Latest Stats

I’m up to 104 subscribers. I’m about 1/10th of the way to my goal of 1,000 subscribers.

Not too bad. I was hoping to be a little further along by now. Out of the 7 solo ads I’ve purchased, only one of them has happened. I had to book them all throughout the month and only my first one has been fulfilled. My next one will be fulfilled tomorrow so that should give me another nice spike.

My first solo was a pretty bad experience to be honest. I purchased 250 clicks from the person for $75. So far they have only delivered 199 clicks and it seems like the traffic has stopped rolling in from them. I received only 30 opt-ins from this solo ad. Therefore, I paid $0.38 per click and a whopping $2.50 per opt-in for this swap. My squeeze page only converted at 15% with this person’s list. This tells me that, either this person’s list isn’t very response or my squeeze page isn’t converting well. I guess I’ll need to wait until my next solo ad is fulfilled to really know what the problem was.

All of the rest of my opt-ins have come from my TrafficVance PPV campaign. I’ve received a total of 77 opt-ins from TrafficVance and have spent a total of $72.53 with them. That means that I’m paying a total of $0.94 per opt-in from my TrafficVance campaign. To do this, I continue to eliminate keywords that send a lot of traffic but no opt-ins. Simple as that.

Breakdown:

Total Opt-ins: 104
PPV Cost (TrafficVance): $72.53
PPC Cost (7Search): $34.95 (Paused Campaign)
Solo-Ads Cost: $572.06 (7 solo ads – 2,000 Clicks promised)
Total Cost: $679.54

Current cost per Opt-in: $6.53

If you remember, in my last report, because I hadn’t seen any of the solo ads fulfilled yet, I had a cost-per-opt-in of $19.37. Now that I’ve seen one of those solo ads actually fulfill, and since I’ve managed to continue to drop non-performing keywords from my PPV campaign, my cost-per-opt-in is dropping like a rock! Once a couple more of these solo ads fulfill, we’ll be under $1 per opt-in in no time at all.

Further Monetization Strategy:

Originally, the plan was to put an affiliate link on my “Thank You” page and grab some affiliate commissions from people as soon as they opt-in. So far, my current affiliate offering hasn’t had any sales at all. I would have figured after 100 people passing through it, I would have seen at least one by now.

At this point, I have a couple of options…

a) I can test a different offer and hope that it’s targeted enough and that the sales page converts well enough that I grab some affiliate commissions here and there…

or

b) Create a mini-product and sell it myself as a “one-time-offer”.

Write now, I’m leaning towards option b.

If I create my own mini-product, I can charge whatever I want for it and keep 100% of the sales price instead of splitting it 50/50 with someone. I also have control over the sales page myself.

I’m not going to overcomplicate this either. Like my quick report, I can make a quick little product. As long as it adds value to the readers and is something that they will truly benefit from, I should have no issues with charging a little bit for it. Since this is an upsell after a free product, I’m going to want to keep the price real low. Somewhere in the range of $7 – $17. If the price is really low, people will see it as a “no-brainer” offer and be more likely to take me up on it.

To make things real simple and keep me from having to write another ebook, I’ll create a series of little video tutorials. What I plan to do is walk people through the process that’s taught inside the ebook but do it in video form. I’m sure people will be willing to spend $7 to $17 to actually watch me set the stuff up as opposed to just reading about it.

Again… This shouldn’t be a big deal. This should be kept simple and take as little time as your free report (probably less if you’re doing screen capture videos).

I’m going to get started on this aspect of the monetization and I’ll fill you in on how it goes in the next installment.

Please leave any questions or feedback in the comments below. Also, please make sure to opt-in below to make sure you continue to receive updates on the challenge.

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts and continuing the amazing discussion that’s been happening so far!

More Posts In This Series:
1. Add $1,000 Per Month To Your Business in 30 Days
2. One Thousand Email Subscribers in 30 Days
3. Creating A Free Report And A Simple Squeeze Page
4. Traffic Generation And Challenge Hiccups
5. Your Questions Answered And More Stats 

Just as a quick update so that you can follow along. My new mailing list that I’ve been building is at 33 subscribers as of this posting and I have made $0.00 from my efforts so far. My only monetization tactics up until now are my banner on my thank you page and some affiliate links in the report. With only 33 people opting-in, I haven’t seen any money from these tactics yet.

May 9, 2012

Right before I started sending traffic to my new landing page, I realized that I didn’t have any sort of tracking in place to know where each visitor came from before opting-in. How am I going to tell which sources are effective and which ones aren’t if I have no idea where each opt-in originated from?

Luckily, I purchased a piece of software a couple of years ago called AdTrackz Gold that actually gives you unique links for each traffic source and allows you to see exactly where each visitor that opted-in came from. I went ahead and installed this software on my new server and immediately ran in to my first roadblock… The links weren’t redirecting properly. Every time I tested one of these special tracking links that AdTrackz generated, I was sent to a “404 Page Not Found” page. ARG!!

I probably spent 2 hours playing with the software before finally giving up and going to a service that I’ve heard highly recommended called LinkTrackr. Now LinkTrackr is a $40 per month service that will also give you custom links and keep track of where all of your opt-ins came from…

I purchased a membership to the LinkTrackr service and, literally, within 3 hours, their servers went down. All of the links that I had created stopped working for a good 20 minutes. This made me really nervous about their reliability. I figured this was a fluke and kept the service anyway. A few hours later, after I began generating traffic to the site, I went to check my stats in LinkTrackr… LinkTrackr was showing I had 3 opt-ins while my Aweber account clearly showed I’d had 7 opt-ins. The damn software wasn’t tracking properly! ARG!! (Refund request sent)

I went back to screwing around with AdTrackz for a little while and, as it turns out, I missed a step while installing it and it was totally my fault. The software was working fine now. Unfortunately, in the time all this happened, I’d had several opt-ins that I wasn’t able to track the source of… (Lame)

Here’s what the reports that AdTrackz generates… The blurred areas are the individual keywords I’m targeting.

Anyway, I was back on track now. I installed Google Analytics on to the site so I can watch how many total visitors I was getting and all was good.

Right after I purchased my doomed LinkTrackr account, I set up some paid traffic campaigns. I created a campaign in TrafficVance to send some Pay-Per-View traffic to the opt-in page and, as keywords, I used URLs of some websites that were related to my offer. With PPV traffic, you tend to want to target websites as opposed to keywords. When someone in the PPV network goes to a website that you are targeting, your opt-in page pops up. I set the budget of this campaign to $20 per day and bid my keywords anywhere from $0.01 per impression all the way through to $0.60 per impression depending on how relevant I thought the keyword was and how much competition the keyword had. I then watch which keywords get conversions and drop the ones that don’t seem to convert.

I then jumped in to 7Search to create a Pay-Per-Click campaign. Now, I don’t do much PPC, so I’m really flying blind with this experiment but I bid on some keywords that I thought were pretty relevant. I set my daily budget of this campaign to $20 as well and I bid anywhere from $0.25 per click up to about $0.60 per click depending on the competition. I shoot for the 2nd or 3rd spot in PPC. I don’t need to be in the number 1 spot to get clicks, I just need an attention grabbing ad.

I then went to this site and contacted five people who offer solo-ad mailings and made them offers. Of the five people, two responded. One of them was way too expensive. They want $200 to send 200 clicks. At $1.00 per click, my opt-in page would have to convert and 100% to hit my goal of $1 per opt-in. Not worth it. The other person that replied accepted my offer of $75 for 250 clicks (meaning for $75, they’ll guarantee that 250 people will see my opt-in page). My page needs to convert at only 30% to reach my goal of $1 per opt-in. This solo mailing is going out Saturday, May 12th so I should see a big spike in opt-ins after this.

May 10, 2012

A lot of the people I’d been contacting seemed to have accounts at a site called Safe-Swaps.com. Apparently, this is where people hangout to arrange adswaps as well as sell solo ads. It’s actually a pretty cool site because people swap with each other and purchase solo ads then immediately leave reviews of how things went. If someone doesn’t fulfill their promises, they receive negative reviews and no one swaps with them or purchases solo ads from them anymore. It sounded good to me so I created an account for $29 per month and began browsing the site.

For about 2 hours, I browsed Safe-Swaps and read reviews of solo-ad mailers. I ended up contacting and making deals with 6 more people for solo ads.

Since I’m paying people to mail their lists for me, I needed to write email “swipe” for them. This is basically where I write up the exact copy that they will be sending to their list. When it comes to solo-ads and adswaps, copy should be real short and real attention grabbing. The subject line for the email should really have a lot of thought in to it because, even though someone promises 200 clicks, if your subject line is really attention grabbing, you’ll probably get much more than you bargained for.

Breakdown

Total Opt-ins: 33
PPV Cost (TrafficVance): $32.27
PPC Cost (7Search): $34.95
Solo-Ads Cost: $572.06 (7 solo ads – 2,000 Clicks promised)
Total Cost: $639.28

Current cost per Opt-in: $19.37

Now I know that looks like really big numbers BUT keep in mind that I paid for a whole bunch of solo ads in advance. These solo ads will be fulfilled at all different times throughout the month. I’ve purchased over 2,000 clicks from people over all of these solo ads. Most people will only purchase one solo-ad at a time, wait for it to be fulfilled and then purchase another one. I’m just being really agressive with this challenge. As these people fulfill their mailings, you’ll see my total opt-ins climb and my cost per opt-in drop dramatically.

As of right now all 33 of my opt-ins have come from my TrafficVance campaign. I’ve received a lot of traffic from my 7Search campaign but no opt-ins. I’ve now paused the 7Search campaign to rethink my keywords and try different things. Seeing as all my traffic has come from TrafficVance, if I was to isolate that one source of traffic, I would have actually spent $0.98 per opt-in. Unfortunately, my failed 7Search campaign and my pending solo-ads have driven that cost-per-opt-in up.

I doubt I will purchase any more solo ads after the current ones are fulfilled. I’m not really sure yet. It will depend on the success of these ones. If my page converts at 50% (not unheard of), these solo-ads and my PPV campaign could get me to my 1,000 opt-in goal by themselves. I’ll just have to wait and see. If I purchase no more solo ads for the rest of this challenge, over 30 days, my daily spend on solo ads would only be $21.30.

If you’re keeping score, I’ve basically got a $20 per day budget for PPV, a $20 per day budget for PPC, and a $21.30 per day budget for solo-ads. That’s a total spend per day of approximately $61.30… And that’s assuming that I continue to run the PPV and PPC traffic campaigns every single day (which I won’t). So over the next couple of posts, you’ll see my expenses per day drop and my cost per opt-in skyrocket. I will make an ROI! I promise.

I’ll keep everyone posted in my next update.

I know a lot of what I said in this post was kind of technical. If you’ve got any questions or need any clarification, please make sure to leave a comment below.

More Posts In This Series:
1. Add $1,000 Per Month To Your Business in 30 Days
2. One Thousand Email Subscribers in 30 Days
3. Creating A Free Report And A Simple Squeeze Page
4. Traffic Generation And Challenge Hiccups
5. Your Questions Answered And More Stats 

What I’ve been doing is keeping a little journal (on physical paper) of all the steps I’m doing towards this challenge. I write down everything so that I can make sure I pass it all along to you without leaving anything out. So what will follow will be my journal entries for the last couple days. If you’re following along, feel free to take the same action steps that I’ve taken over the last couple days.

May 7, 2012

I started out by making a few decisions. I had to first pick a niche to dive in to this project with and once I had my niche picked, I had to choose a pen name to use during this challenge. I don’t want to reveal my niche or my pen name just yet because it could taint the results of this project. I do have a little bit of credibility and name recognition in this online world. I don’t want my name to skew the results.

I will tell you that the niche I chose was online related. I am teaching how to do something online that a large amount of people want to learn. This type of training will make it easier to find people willing to do solo ads with me as most people that I follow that sell solo ads have lists that are targeted towards online training.

Once I chose my niche and my pen name, it was time to register a domain. I used NameCheap to buy domain name and I picked a good domain name geared towards my chosen niche. I linked my domain name to my hosting account. If you don’t have a hosting account yet, I recommend HostGator. They are who I used for many many years and still use to this day on many of my sites.

Once I had my domain name and hosting, I installed WordPress on my domain name because I’m going to be creating my squeeze pages and thank you pages within WordPress. If you don’t know how to install WordPress yet, I have free training videos at The WordPress Classroom.

To create killer looking squeeze pages, I installed a premium WordPress theme called OptimizePress. OptimizePress makes it really simple to create really beautiful looking squeeze pages. Since I haven’t actually written my free report yet, this is as far as I got on creating the brand and the site.

Now that I had my niche and I knew what I was going to teach, I decided to create a little flowchart of the process I was going to teach in my free report. I used a free service called Gliffy to create an awesome looking flowchart of the process. Having this flowchart gives me a visual to use on my squeeze page that grabs attention and makes people want to learn more. I can also include this flowchart inside my free report to further solidify the concepts that I’ll be teaching.

May 8, 2012

Today I spent a couple hours writing my free report on my topic. I had intended to write only 5-6 pages on this free report but actually became caught up in the process and ended up writing 11 pages. About 3 of those pages are graphics and the rest is teaching the process. More than 5 or 6 pages isn’t really necessary, I just got caught up in my writing and decided to over-deliver a little. Most people can write whatever they feel best explains the concept they are trying to teach. Quality of Quantity is important here when creating your free report. Throughout my free report I used affiliate links any time I mentioned a resource that I recommend someone uses. I don’t expect this to generate a lot of money but I expect to see affiliate commissions trickle in here and there from this.

I really struggled to get my head in the write place to begin writing. I kept telling myself, “I’m going to go eat lunch, then I’ll start…”. “I just need to grab some coffee, then I’ll start.”, “Let me just check my email first, then I’ll get going.”… etc, etc. etc. It really is difficult sometimes to get yourself to just start writing. But once I finally got that OpenOffice document open, I just couldn’t stop writing. I got in to a zone and just hammered through until the report was perfect.

OpenOffice is a free word processor for both Windows and Mac and it works great for writing free reports. Once I was done with my report, I saved it as a PDF and uploaded it in to my new WordPress site.

Once I had my report finished, I could start building out my squeeze page. I logged in to WordPress and created a new page using the OptimizePress theme. I created my squeeze page using the Squeeze 8 template that comes with OptimizePress. I wrote my headline, my bullets, and added my little flowchart image to the page… The squeeze page ended up looking something like this… (Obviously I can’t show it to you yet)

Once I had my squeeze page finished, I began working on the “Thank You” page and the “Download” page. The “Thank You” page is the page that they will see immediately after opting-in with their email. This is valuable real estate because everyone sees this whether they give a real email address or a bogus one. Therefore, I want to make sure I monetize it. I went to Clickbank and opened up a brand new account. This account has made zero dollars and you can see the account creation date is May 8th. (I blurred out the account name because it would give away my niche)

I browsed Clickbank and found a product that I’ve actually purchased in the past that is very relevant to my freebie and I added a little banner for it on my “Thank You” page. I then added some text to my “Thank You” page that says something along the lines of “Thanks so much for giving me your email, please check your email for details on how to access your free report”.

After creating the “Thank You” page, I needed to create a download page. I created another page in WordPress, linked to the free report that I had uploaded earlier, and added another banner to this page for the affiliate program that I had chosen to promote.

That completed my page creation but I hadn’t set up a list yet. I jumped over to Aweber and created a brand new fresh account just for the sake of creating my challenge. It’s $1 for the first month so if the challenge doesn’t work out, I’m only out a buck.
(List names are blurred to protect my niche)

You’ll notice that in my Aweber account, I have two lists created. I did this so that I can have one list for Pay-Per-View Traffic and one list for all other traffic sources. By doing this, I can track how well PPV traffic converts to other sources.

I then wrote my first followup email for both lists which links people back to my download page where they can access their free report. I created a webform as well. The web form has the “Thank You” page set to the “Thank You” page that I created. I then took the form code that Aweber gave me and pasted it in to my OptimizePress squeeze page in the section where it asks for opt-in form details.

That’s it… That’s everything I’ve done so far towards this project.

To recap, I’ve.

• Chose a niche
• Chose a pen name
• Purchased a domain name
• Purchased hosting
• Installed WordPress on my domain
• Installed the OptimizePress theme in WordPress
• Created a flowchart of the process I’m teaching
• Wrote a 13 page free report (which included affiliate links)
• Created a squeeze page
• Created a “Thank You” page
• Created a “Download” page
• Opened a Clickbank account
• Opened an Aweber account
• Wrote my first autoresponder message
• Linked my autoresponder to OptimizePress

And that’s everything. Taking action is the key to making these types of things work. As you can see, I’ve taken a lot of steps over the last couple days. Despite how many steps it looks like I’ve taken, I really only spent about 2 hours on this project each day. 2 hours on Monday and 2 hours on Tuesday.

Now that I’ve got this whole process in place, I’m going to go experiment with generating traffic to my new page!

Let the fun begin!

Please ask any clarifying questions or add comments below. I do my best to respond to everyone so that I can make sure you can follow along.

More Posts In This Series:
1. Add $1,000 Per Month To Your Business in 30 Days
2. One Thousand Email Subscribers in 30 Days
3. Creating A Free Report And A Simple Squeeze Page
4. Traffic Generation And Challenge Hiccups
5. Your Questions Answered And More Stats 

This 30 day challenge is based around the old saying, “The money is in the list” and the commonly told statement that “one subscriber on your list is worth $1 per month to you“. We’re really going to put these statements to the test this month.

I talk to a lot of marketers and I hang out in a lot of the circles that some of the most well-known marketers in world hang out in. One thing that I’m constantly hearing is that email marketing is getting harder and harder and people just aren’t making as much money with their mailing lists as they used to make.

Over the next 30 days, I’m going to attempt to go from zero subscribers and absolutely no name recognition to a list of one thousand subscribers and an asset that will generate $1,000 per month or more.

I’m going to do this by creating a free product that people opt-in for. I’m going to use a pen name so that no one knows that it’s me giving away this product and I’m going to register a brand new Aweber account so that I can show proof that I’m starting from scratch.

To generate traffic to this opt-in page, I’m going to purchase paid traffic from a couple different sources and attempt to build the list as fast as possible. Once my list passes about 500 subscribers, I’ll talk about how to leverage the existing subscribers to grow the list with a couple free methods but the majority of the traffic will be a result of paid advertising methods.

I will monetize this process in a few different ways.

First off, I’m going to put a couple affiliate links inside the free report that I give out. After reading my free report, if anyone wants to grab any resources I mention, I will receive an affiliate commission.

I’m going to monetize my thank you page, first with an affiliate link and possibly later with my own product. So as soon as someone opts-in for the free report, there will be a screen that says something along the lines of “Thank you for opting-in! Your free report is waiting for you in your inbox. In the meantime, I recommend checking out this product to help you with X.”. If I have time within the next 30 days, I may create my own product as an upsell after the opt-in so that instead of making only 50% of the sale, I’ll take 100%…

Finally, I’m going to monetize the list that I’m building by promoting affiliate products in the followup sequence. So once someone is on my list, they will be added to a daily followup sequence that is a combination between free training and help and an occasional resource that I can use my affiliate link with.

That’s the whole process right there.

To recap… Create a free report to give away in exchange for an email opt-in. Create a squeeze page to send people to. Use paid traffic sources to send loads of traffic to the squeeze page. Make money from affiliate links within the report itself, make money from affiliate links on the thank you page, and make money from the followup sequence once people are added to the list.

That’s the business model…

In theory, if I can add 1,000 subscribers to this new list, I can add $1,000 per month to my business.

Ok… So here’s the step-by-step / play-by-play that I’m going to put in to action.

1. During this first week, I’m going to spend some time creating my free report. I’m not going to reveal the niche to you yet because I want this to work without bias. Within this free report I’m going to include recommended resources and use my affiliate link for those resources. The report won’t be long… Maybe 5-7 pages in total. We’re giving this away for free. We want it to be extremely high quality and give loads of value but we don’t need to write an entire book. It’s going to be great detail and great quality but very “to the point” as well. I recommend picking a niche that works online for the traffic sources we’ll be working with. (i.e. WordPress how to, coding, graphic design, traffic strategies, the basics of how to use the internet, etc… Something that shows how to do something online). Make sure you have knowledge in this area. Don’t go attempting to teach something you know nothing about.

2. During this first week, I will also generate a squeeze page for this free product. The squeeze page will be very simple at first but I will do some split testing once we start sending traffic to it (more on split testing in a future post). To make things really easy, I will probably just use Optimize Press to make the squeeze page look amazing and have it online in a matter of minutes. You can also use The WP Cash Cow method that I’ve taught in the past and that I teach inside The WordPress Classroom to create your squeeze page. If you don’t want to use either of those, you can always do a search on Google for “Squeeze Page Template” and work with you find. For me, I love Optimize Press. (Note – You will also need hosting and a domain name to get started. I recommend using Hostgator if you are just getting started.)

3. During this first week, I will create a “Thank You” page. This will be the page that people see immediately after opting-in to my mailing list. On this page I will inform people that their free report is on its way and to check their email. I will also use this space to promote some sort of related affiliate product. Everyone who opts-in to my list sees this page (whether they use a garbage email or not). This is valuable real estate. When I dive in to split testing, I will probably split test the offers on this page as well and see what makes the most money. Again, for this page I will probably use OptimizePress but really, any WordPress page will probably do just fine.

4. During this first week, I will create a brand new Aweber account that’s 100% empty. I will create a “Thank You” email that links subscribers to where they can download their free report. (I’ll upload the free report in to my WordPress installation and just direct link it in the email). I will also write the first two or three followup emails that subscribers will see the first few days after joining the list. They will probably be helpful hints and tips to make the subject of my free report even easier to grasp but I will also throw in some affiliate links in here and there.

5. After this point, I will begin generating traffic to my squeeze page using paid traffic methods. My preferred paid traffic methods are 2nd tier PPC networks like 7search, Ezanga, and Adbrite, PPV networks like TrafficVance and LeadImpact, and solo ads (paying to mail out to someone else’s mailing list). I will attempt to keep my costs below $1 per opt-in. If we are assuming that one opt-in is worth $12/per year ($1 per month) we can probably actually allow leads at a cost higher than $1 per opt-in. However, to keep the math simple and to maximize profits as much as possible, I’m going to work towards a goal of less than $1 per opt-in. This will make more sense as I start showing examples of my tests and campaigns.

I may spend upwards of $100-$200 per day on some of these campaigns with the idea that I will generate more than $100-$200 per month from the leads that these campaigns generate. $100-$200 per day in theory should add an extra $1,200 – $2,400 per year to my business. Spending this kind of money on traffic can definitely be scary when you’re first starting out. Feel free to build upon these theories and methods as slow or as fast as you’d like. Personally, I’m willing to spend $1 to make $12 back as much as I possibly can…

6. Once I’ve built my list to 400-500 subscribers, I will experiment with Adswaps… Adswaps are basically leveraging your existing list to grow it even further. What I’ll do is I’ll find other people that have similar list sizes to mine and ask them if they’d be willing to mail their list and tell them about my opt-in page in exchange for me mailing my list and mentioning their opt-in page. We are essentially sharing each other’s leads and growing both lists even larger. I’m not a huge fan of adswaps because there are a lot of people out there who offer really sub-par quality products for free. If you start doing adswaps, make sure you opt-in to the other person’s list first and see what they are giving away. If you promote other people’s freebies and they are complete crap, you’ll start to hurt the relationship that you are building with your own list which will do more longterm damage than it will do good.

7. Towards the end of my 30 days, I expect I will have at least 1,000 subscribers. At this point, I will pick one product that I really like and support and do a large promo for it (2 – 3 mailings about 1 product). At this point, hopefully my list is responsive enough that I can generate a good amount of sales from this promo. I will tally up the sales from this promo as well as all the affiliate sales along the way and report back. If I made over $1,000 from all of this in the next 30 days, we can call this a success. If I don’t, we’ll play it be ear whether or not we call it a success or failure…

I’m going to have to be real careful with my reports over the next couple weeks. I don’t want to give away my product or my pen name to people following along. This needs to stay completely unbiased so that I can prove that anyone can do this starting from scratch.

It’s going to be a fun journey and, if it works, there’s no reason I can’t continue to duplicate the process. There should also be no reason that anyone else couldn’t duplicate the process as well. It may take a little bit of funding to get it rolling, however, in the grand scheme of things how many businesses can you think of on earth have overhead of less than $1,000 per month and profit margins of over 1,000%?

You can play with SEO and free traffic methods but, for now, I’d like to show people how to create income almost immediately. With free traffic methods, you could be talking months before seeing your first sales… With paid traffic methods, we’re probably talking days (if not hours) before your first sales…

I hope I explained this all clearly and I’ll be posting frequent updates. Make sure you’re on the mailing list (below this post) to ensure you receive all the updates on the progress.

If you have ANY questions at all, ask them in the comments. I’ll do my best to clarify anything you want and to make sure that anyone can follow along.

More Posts In This Series:
1. Add $1,000 Per Month To Your Business in 30 Days
2. One Thousand Email Subscribers in 30 Days
3. Creating A Free Report And A Simple Squeeze Page
4. Traffic Generation And Challenge Hiccups
5. Your Questions Answered And More Stats 

Things that are currently making me money are The WordPress Classroom, The Elite Marketing Foundation, my niche blogs, and some occasional affiliate promotions of products that I think are great to my email list. If I take long periods of time away from my blog, it’s because I need to focus on the places that are paying the bills. (And trust me, after this tax season, I needed to focus on those things for a bit)

I’m currently knee deep in three projects at the moment and, with this blog post, I’m about to add a forth…

The three projects that I’m working on are:

Beyond The Hype – My partnership with Josh Bartlett. With this project, Josh and I are gathering some of the smartest minds in business and personal development and bringing them in to our “hype-free” zone. We’re getting them to unload as much knowledge as we can possibly squeeze out of them without letting them pitch anything and without any ulterior motives.

The WordPress Classroom 3.0 – The WordPress Classroom is getting a complete facelift. I’m bringing the site in to the modern era with a new intuitive layout and a new sales funnel. More details on this as I make progress.

The Offline Client Method – This is a brand new project that I have not told anyone about yet. I’m partnering with a local San Diego businessman named Josh Grillo. Josh Grillo is the master of the pitch. He’s a guy that can go in to any business and walk out with a service contract. Josh and I are teaming up to teach the business model of helping brick and mortar businesses bring their business online. More details on this one later this month.

The Challenge

I’ll be posting more frequently for a little while because I’d like to experiment with some business models and share the results. In my next post, early next week, I’m going to introduce you to my first (of many) $1k per month challenges.

In these challenges, I’m going to discuss a business model and then give myself 30 days to take that business model from nothing to adding an extra $1,000 per month to my business.

I’m not talking about making an extra $1,000. I’m talking about adding $1,000 every single month to my business. I’m talking about giving myself a raise of $12,000 per year.

Now, with these challenges, I’m giving myself some restrictions and rules. I want to prove that my current status in the industry will have no impact on adding this extra $1,000 per month to my business. I want to prove that my existing lists and websites will have no factor either.

The rules will be:

1. Open a brand new Aweber account… I don’t want to use any of my existing mailing list for these challenges.
2. Use a pen name… I don’t want people to actually know that it’s me in my promotions because this can skew the results if people purchase something because of my name.
3. Keep a diary of everything I do so that I can share it here on the blog.
4. Don’t mention product names or website addresses in the blog posts until the end of the challenge because this can skew results.
5. If the project isn’t profitable within 30 days, drop it completely and move on (but still share the results on the blog).

Now, I’m going to do several of these challenges and I will share the steps I take along the way. The idea being that you can follow along with me as I show you what I do and you can do the same or you can wait until I’m done with a challenge, see how it did, then backtrack and try it yourself.

My first challenge will start early next week and it will revolve around e-mail marketing and purchasing paid traffic. I’ll give you the action steps that I’m going to take and then create followup blog posts along the way to give you results of my action steps.

That’s the idea and the first challenge will be revealed next week. Make sure you check back often because I will probably be posting several shorter blog posts on a more frequent basis to keep you up to date with my progress.

Get ready to learn a really cool business model that I’m confident can add an extra $1,000 per month to ANYONE’S bank account.

More Posts In This Series:
1. Add $1,000 Per Month To Your Business in 30 Days
2. One Thousand Email Subscribers in 30 Days
3. Creating A Free Report And A Simple Squeeze Page
4. Traffic Generation And Challenge Hiccups
5. Your Questions Answered And More Stats