Allright guys, so I had a great week with clickbank. Total income this past week was $127.31

Screenshot:

Total sales this week: 8

Goals for this week:

• Make 18 Sales (2-3 sales per day)

Where did sales come from?

• 4 came from Mailing List
• 4 came from SEO

Now that I have a better understanding where my sales are coming from, I can create a better plan of action. I recieved a total of 2,827 hits this past week. If 2,827 hits brings me 8 sales, then I need around 6,360 hits to bring in 18 sales.

My conversion rate is still around .2-.3% Still pretty bad, but I’m not sure what else I can do to find a more targeted audience. So, I’ll focus on amazing content, and increased traffic.

6,360 hits per week is equal to around 908 hits per day. In essence, I’m trying to double my traffic. How? SEO. My SEO is powerful, so I’ll be pumping out a ton of content targeting some brand new keywords.

I’m not dealing with article marketing anymore. Lets focus on what’s working.

I haven’t updated in a few days, pretty much because there’s not much to say. This past week was the worst sales week ever. I only earned $35.

Last night I made a huge change to my blog. I put any blog post that resulted in a sale on the front page. How did I do that? I just looked at my CB transactions, and matched the dates with the blog post.

Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a blog post resulted in a sale, becuase I didn’t start putting tracking codes in until very recently. However, it’s a clue.

I also made sure those posts were actually decent. So, I think I have a nice spread of posts on the front page. By the way, there’s 50 posts on the front page.

This should be magic for SEO. In fact, I woke up this morning and found a sale. It wasn’t from my email list, so someone probably found my site through search.

The sale was from my side bar. Meaning that someone clicked on the product through the side bar and purchased it. That’s the magic of tracking codes – You know exactly how the customer got to the product.

But what you don’t know is what triggered the sale. My cousin asked me the other day about this. He gave me some ways to track this, but it didn’t work.

I’m not an expert in google analytics, and I’m going to spend some time to try and find an answer to this questions – “What actually results in a sale?”

- Is it a series of posts that they read?

- Are they looking for a review of that product?

- Where they already searching for that product?

A lot of my posts that are made through my email list can be easily traced back to a particular post. However, when it comes to search traffic – it’s difficult.

It’s going to be search traffic that’s really going to allow me to live the type of lifestyle that I wish to live. This thing needs to be hands-off.

Right now I’m putting in around 30-40 hours per week. Eventually, that number should go down to 4 hours. Most of the tools have already been set in place:

- High Traffic blog

- Targeted Maling List

- A selection of affiliate Products

So, it’s only a matter of time. I need to be smart, patient, and willing to experiment.

Last night I started a screenplay. It’s been over a year since I’ve written anything that is not related to Shah Training. It felt really good. I forgot how therapeutic scrpt writing can be.

Future plans are naturally to just keep working on Shah Training. The goal is to optimize the site for search. I want to see at least 10 sales per day just through search.

I just looked at my analytics and notice 33 hits from Google already. It’s 8 am so far. That’s not too bad at all. I usually so only 20-30 hits overall in the morning. RIght now my total hits are 87 from a variety of sources.

Alright, lets see what happens the rest of the day.

I’m exprimenting with autoblogging with FatLossPrinciples.com.

The plugins I’m using are FeedWordPress and Twitter Poster. FWP is a powerful syndication plug in, which can pull content from almost any blog out there.

Twitter Poster tweets all your blog posts automatically. Hence, you get SEO and Twitter traffic almost immediately. Well, at least that’s the idea.

I’ll let you know if this actually works, as it’s only been up for around 50 hours.

My goals for ShahTraining.com have changed steadily since February 2007, when I first started blogging seriously. At first, I wanted to create a website to promote myself as a personal trainer. Then I decided I wanted to focus on Online Personal Training.

But somewhere along the line, and partly due to me reading “The Four Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferris, I became addicted to Internet marketing. I loved the idea that I could be making money with limited to no work.

Of course, this is a long term goal. But the money making potential is what’s keeping me going. The goal is not to become a millionaire. A million dollars is nothing if you have not time to spend it. I do not want to work 100 hours a week for my money.

As I mentioned a while back in another post, people measure success as how much they make per year, month, or week. When in fact what you need to be measuring is how much you make per hour. So lets say two guys are making a $100,00 per year.

One guy works 100 hours per week, or 5200 hours per year. The other guy is working 40 hours per week, or 2,080 hours per year. Guy 1 is making around $20 per hour, while guy 2 is making around $48 per hour.

So guy 2 probably has the weekends to spend his money, plus he may have less travel and Starbucks expenses than Guy 1. But, we want to be Guy 3. Guy 3 makes $60,000 per year, but works less than 10 hours per week.

He makes $115 per hour. The rest of his time is spent doing things he loves: practicing martial arts, hanging out with friends, trying to learn a new language, working out, starting up other projects, visiting his parents, etc.

So, what are my goals for ShahTraining.com now? Really simple: develop my site to a point where I’m making a steady $100 – $300 per day. Then I can finally start living the life I want to live without listening to anyone else.

Right now I’m make $16.25 per day through my website (which is more than most people make online). It may seem like a huge jump between $16 and $100, but it’s not. The thing with Internet Marketing is that it’s easy to scale, once you realize what’s working for you.

I seem to see two different sets of marketers on this site: a) People are making consistent sales, and b) People who’s sales are sporadic.

I’m not an expert, but I did some article and PPC marketing, and I must say it’s a lot harder than sending out an email to someone. I see it to be really strange that people are not generating a mailing list. I send out mailings on a daily basis.

Most people get into this because they want “freedom.” I don’t want to work 9-5 and make some other jack**s rich while I toil away at making HIS company successful. No, I want to be successful with my own project.

That’s the first reason. The second reason that I’m personally doing it is because I need a way to finance my lifestyle. There are lots of things that I want to do with my life that will not be possible if I end up in somedead end job.

So here are 2 reasons why your CB sales suck. And I hope this helps people out:

1) You’re not retaining potential clients

Do you really think people buy on the first visit? How many times have you gone to a mall, or store, or looked up a product and said, “Hey! I need this. I’m going to buy it!” Never. I’m not an impulse buyer. I’m really really frugal. But at the same time, I purchase at least one fitness product per month. Why? Because I’m interested in it. Which brings me to my second point -

2) You’re not attracting the right clients

What you want is someone who needs that product. The people that come to my site are people that already workout. I’ve had people buy multiple times from me because I showed them a need through my blogging. I had one guy buy 5 products from me!

So in conclusion, what you need to do is start an opt-in list. Don’t do bum marketing. Instead, write your articles and target keywords that arespecifically for your target market. Make the articles really good so they click on it. The idea is to win their trust as quickly as possible so they sign up to your list.

I had one guy buy from me 2 days after he signed up after my email list. Now that’s how you convert people. Not by sending people to a vendors site and hoping for the best. Yesterday I spent around 6-7 dollars onPPC and didn’t get a single sale.

I realized this morning that I need to what’s working and stop listening to all these people are supposedly experts – but I’m making more sales than they are. I’m officially putting a hold on allppc marketing.

It’s going to be solely about growing my list as quickly as possible with relevant people. Don’t be afraid to send out email everyday. The only people that will unsubscribe are people that will not buy from you.

Hope this helps people out!

Its been 3 weeks since I decided to take the next step with my blog and actually start making money with it. It’s already changed dramatically in terms of goals, content, and design. Here are my results for the past three weeks. Today starts the new week:

I want to thank everyone for their help and support. Here are some goals ‘m working towards:

# Get 100 email subscribers in a day – currently doing 20-30
# Make $100 in a day – average daily income is around $20. The most I’ve made in a day is $88
# Make $400 in a week -Most I’ve made in a week is $241

Whats been working for me:

- Create email list
- Send out emails with product recommendations at bottom of post

Things I been working on that are starting to work:

- PPC marketing of a product with best conversion rate. – There is a product that I no longer carry on my site, however I noticed a sale yesterday from PPC alone. I have yet to look at the hop data, but I think it took around 20 hops to make a sale for around $8. So if I’m spending 5 cents per click, thats $1 in PPC. My profit is $7. Not bad. Better off spending money on a low-commission, high converting product, then a high commission, low-converting product.

- We’ll see what happens with this

Things I did that did not work and won’t be working on again:

- Writing ezine articles and sending traffic to a landing page. Apparently I suck at writing landing pages. I sent a lot of traffic to these landing pages, but did not get many sales. Actually, for one product I recieved one sale out of 200 hops. Not good.

So, these were just some thoughts – things that are working for me, etc. I hope to achieve that $400 per week mark soon, but of course I feel I need to be able to grab at least 100 subscribers per day, and finally reach a point where i can make $100 per day before I reach that ultimate weekly goal.

Once again thanks for everyone’s help!