Selling Traffic
by James D. Brausch
http://www.QuitThatJob.com
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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