Archive for Online Sales
Online Income Results – December 2009
Posted by: | CommentsHappy 2010! The total online income for December 2009 is $466.37. This breaks down into:
$234.67 my guitar lesson sales (http://onlineguitarcoaching.com)
$36.93 adsense (guitar lesson videos on youtube)
$89.10 wishlist member (membership site plugin for wordpress)
$5.00 sponsored tweet (get paid to tweet!)
$8.91 ryan deiss (internet marketing)
$91.76 learn and master guitar (affiliate guitar product)
This is less than November but last month I was paid over $400 out of nowhere from Ryan Deiss’ internet marketing products (I’m an affiliate) so I didn’t get another one of those this month 
I’m building a Facebook fan page for guitar students and I have over 900 students already so I’m really happy about that. They are responding more so it is building momentum. I’m expecting this grass roots effort to pay dividends down the road as I provide lots of helpful tips to them on a regular basis. I am building ‘whuffie’ right now.
The amazing thing is that I have already reached close to the amount of email subscribers I have and that took me a few years to build (very inconsistently I might add). These email subscribers typically join to get access to my guitar lesson TAB (sheet music). Many of them are not engaged at all, whereas the Facebook fans are responding to my posts and questions which is awesome. So for 2010 plan to use social media marketing in your business!
Plans for 2010:
-continue to build Facebook fan page community
-more regular blog posts on http://willkriski.com and this site
-daily content creation and post to social sites
-focus on social media marketing
-smaller micropayment products (under $10) for guitar lessons – easy to consume
-visit forums and google blog reader on regular basis
-make more offers to fans
Online Income – Case Study October 2009
Posted by: | CommentsIn the month of October, I accepted a part-time work from home IT contract. Unfortunately, while I made a good chunk of change from this, I didn’t put as much effort into my websites.
The results were $398.99 for the month of October, so about $200 less than the last couple months, mostly due to less sales of Learn and Master Guitar.
This came from $57.89 from Google Adsense (YouTube video ads) and $341.10, mostly from guitar lesson related sales (Metal Method, Learn and Master Guitar and my own guitar lesson products from Online Guitar Coaching. No sales from Amazon and internet marketing materials (Ryan Deiss was minimal as I did nothing to promote them).
On the positive side, other than making WAY more on my IT contract (5 figures for about 5-6 week of half day work), I got re-inspired to add some new continuity programs – these will be some fixed-length modular courses (eg. Blues guitar level 1) that might last for 6 months as a membership program. Others will be ongoing such as a live video streaming guitar lesson each month, Guitar lick of the month, Song of the month (where I transcribe and analyze a guitar song and/or solo).
So I’ll be testing some new product offerings and seeing which ones are more popular. I’ve also focused on creating and expanding a Facebook fan page – and getting people to sign up by offering them a free live guitar lesson.
Another cool tool is the Wibiya toolbar that you can find at the guitar coaching site I mentioned -shows up at the bottom and I hope it increases the Facebook fans and I can also send them notifications on new webinars, sales, offerings, etc. Lots of exciting cool stuff happening!
10 Million Songs That No One Bought
Posted by: | CommentsIn a recent Seth Godin post, he quotes a statistic that says “of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.” From this Seth concludes that the likelihood of you selling 0% of your products is quite high. It’s easy to put stuff out there and so the long tail is pretty crowded these days.
In a related post, Derek Sivers talks about a guy who just wanted 1% of the viewers of his advertisement to buy his cd. He pressed 10,000 copies ahead of time but only got 4 sales after a few weeks. Another depressing statistic outlining the fact that it is possible you won’t sell any (or much less than 1%). His point is that the math can be deceiving and difficult to achieve in reality.
If you’re trying to sell music or any other product or service, these statistics can be extremely discouraging. So what can we learn from this?
Sell what people are buying. Millions of people are buying things online every day. Find out what those things are and sell those products. Check the Amazon best sellers list for your category, check the better selling products for your favorite affiliate network of choice. Use your content (music, blog posts, tutorials, etc) to sell these popular products rather than try to sell your own products at first. Use ‘free’ to gain attention and draw traffic to your site.
Focus on a small niche. The long tail is crowded. Part of the battle will be just getting enough traffic to your site. Pick a really specific niche, find keywords that you can reasonably compete with and target those lesser competitive keywords. By lesser competitive I mean keywords that have around 10,000 pages in the search results, but still get enough daily searches. Find the cost per click for your keyword and multiply it by the number of daily searches to get a relative sense of the value of the keyword. If people are spending money on ads then it is a good indication that there is a market there. Market Samurai is a great tool for this type of research.
Making Your First Dollar Online
Posted by: | CommentsI can’t think of any better way to learn everything there is to know about internet marketing (for free) than to go through Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge. You also get to take lots of action as you work through your favorite niche. I’ve been doing internet marketing and learning a ton about it over the years, but still managed to find great nuggets in that challenge.
Some of the key points are:
- Make Your First Dollar – You can’t make a million dollars without making a dollar first. If you can make a dollar then you can scale up these efforts to make more money
- Understand Your Market – you can learn a lot about your market using free tools like Google Reader to pull in articles, videos, blogs about your market niche
- Find a product that sells – before expanding too far into content creation make sure your product sells (or find a converting affiliate offer).I wouldn’t create my own product until I can sell a large quantity of someone else’s product.
- Dominate Your Market – become a market leader by understanding the market and adding to the conversation. Add videos, articles, blog posts to your market niche. In other words, add value
So go make that first dollar online! And let me know how it’s going.
Amazon Textbooks
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve recently been adding Amazon associate/affiliate links, an Amazon search bar and an astore to one of my guitar blogs. I was surprised to discover this morning that someone had bought 5 engineering textbooks from Amazon (and third party within amazon) yesterday giving me a commision of $22.09! (New textbooks are currently on sale up to 30% and used books up to 90% until February 14, 2009). And my referral rate was bumped up to 6% (from 4%). Not enough to break the bank but something tangible to report. And these weren’t the guitar links I had provided but still got the commission since the customer bought via my site.
Be Your Own Long Tail Aggregator
Posted by: | CommentsWhen Chris Anderson coined the term ‘The Long Tail
This is great news for Amazon, but how can the long tail benefit us? The common wisdom is to have a niche, and find 1,000 true followers which is great advice. But you can also be your own long tail aggregrator, selling hundreds of products to your following. It’s certainly less sexy than selling millions of copies of your new CD, but is much more practical.
For example, I teach rock guitar lessons and am building my own following of guitar students. While I attempt to get them to sign up for my online guitar coaching program, I also use Amazon to build my own long tail of products related to the topics I teach. People are buying from Amazon every day, so why not get a piece of the action for recommending quality products to your following? Instead of just focusing on broad terms like ‘teaching guitar’ or ‘learning guitar’ there are so many smaller niche products within the guitar lesson niche such as:
- -books/DVDs for specific keywords such as ‘chord tone soloing’, ‘CAGED system’, ‘soloing over changes’, ‘fretboard mastery’, ‘guitar scales’, ‘pinch harmonics’
- -music gear – guitars, music software, amps, effects
- -backing tracks or drum/bass loops for sale
- -third party lesson products – eg. Jamorama, Learn and Master Guitar (be an affiliate and earn commissions).
Imagine having hundreds or even thousands of products for sale and making just a few sales of each product to hundreds or thousands of website visitors!