Selling Traffic
by James D. Brausch
Are you an affiliate of Commission Junction, Clickbank or another
network or individual program? If you are, you are already in the
traffic selling business. You are selling traffic in return for
commissions when a sale is made (or a lead generated).
So, why should you expand to selling traffic directly? There are
several reasons:
1. You get the email address of any customers who buy directly
from you. You don't get the email address of the customer you send
the traffic through an affiliate link. The merchant does. With
that email address (and the customer's name), you can send them
other offers in the future. Your customer list is priceless for
this reason. You can never have a customer list unless you sell
something yourself.
2. Selling traffic is residual. Once you make a customer happy,
they will pay you month after month and you never have to do any
more work. Residual income is very nice!
3. There are a limited number of affiliate relationships that are
possible within your market (ie: the subject of your site) using
just affiliate programs. So; how can you expand? By selling
traffic directly.
4. You don't have to wait for a sale. Generally, you will be
selling traffic on a flat rate basis (flat charge per month) or on
a PPC basis (pay per click). So, you don't have to wait for the
merchant to make a sale; you just have to deliver what you
promised. It is up to them to convert the traffic (although you do
need to keep your traffic very high quality to get long-term
repeat customers).
5. You will be building a customer base which just happens to be
other webmasters in your subject area. Once they are your
customers, they will be very open to joint ventures with you.OK; so you agree... You should be selling traffic directly. Let's
get started. First you need to decide how you want to sell
traffic. Here are some options that I recommend (in order):
1. You can sell links at a flat rate every month. A popular way to
do this is to sell a link at the very top spot in one of your
directories for $5/month. If you have 100 directories, your
potential monthly income from this type of sale is $500/month! If
you have 10 sites, that's $5,000 per month. An advantage to this
type of traffic sale is that you don't need to track the traffic
you send. You just put their link in the top spot and leave it
there as long as they pay $5/month (or whatever rate you decide to
charge monthly).
2. You can sell links in your directory for a flat rate per click.
We do this for 10 cents per click. To do this, you will need a
tracker program. We have used OrbitCycle.com and highly recommend
them.
3. You can sell your home page for a flat rate per month or per
click. We do this for 15 cents per click on our sites.
Now, you need a way to collect the money. I think the easiest way
is PayPal. They have a subscription program where they will
automatically deduct the $5/month (or whatever you want to charge)
monthly from your customer's account.
Another option is to get your own merchant account and shopping
cart. I recommend this long-term because a higher percentage of
webmasters will purchase from you if you have a real merchant
account and shopping cart. For now, PayPal is fine.
That's all there is to it. Before you carry on with the rest of
today's work... Get a page on each of your sites offering to sell
whatever forms of traffic you decide.
The author, James D. Brausch, is the coach and webmaster of
QuitThatJob.com, a site dedicated to providing step-by- step
instructions to start your own profitable Internet business and
Quit That Job! For more info, please visit: http://www.QuitThatJob.com/
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