Category Archives: Case Studies

$2,300 Month Case Study Using Just Free Tools

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Can you build a side hustle that takes just a few hours a month and uses only free tools? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, and here’s how one enterprising new marketer did it.

Sherry earned her first dollar two weeks after she started, and a year later she is earning approximately $2,300 a month. She’s also the first to admit that if she would invest more time in her business, she would likely be earning more money. But still, $2300 a month for just a few hours of work isn’t bad.

Here’s what Sherry did, and as you read this, see if you can notice the one thing she DIDN’T do that would easily double or triple her income.

1: She went to Clickbank and spent an hour deciding what program she wanted to promote first. She also could have gone to JVZoo, Digitstore24, CJ Affiliate or any other low-barrier-to-entry affiliate network she chose.

In choosing her first product, she thought about what was important to her, what her interests were and what she loves to talk about.

She settled on marketing programs because that’s where her interests lie, and for her first affiliate product she ironically chose a course on how to do affiliate marketing. This allowed her to promote something she was deeply interested in while also adding to her affiliate knowledge by taking the course.

In this case she was able to get the course for free by connecting to the product creator. But keep in mind most product creators won’t give out their product for free unless you can prove you’ve got some experience at affiliate marketing. Then again, it never hurts to ask if you’re sincere.

2: She built a free landing page by going to sites.google.com. She kept the page simple and clean with a very clear call to action that took visitors to the affiliate sales page.

3: She went to ChatGPT to generate content ideas. She wanted ideas to make YouTube videos that were all about how to do affiliate marketing.

Then for each of these ideas, she continued to query ChatGPT as well as doing her own research to create video outlines.

4: She then recorded videos for YouTube, making one video for each topic. She followed a detailed outline rather than a script so that she could sound natural. And she continued to record and post these videos at the rate of 3 or 4 per month.

For each video she pasted her landing page link on the first comment so that her viewers could click the link, and at the end of each video she asked viewers to find and click the link.

She also did plenty of research on how best to optimize her videos to get traffic from YouTube.

5: In addition to the videos, Sherry made posts on Pinterest and Instagram. She did this by going to Canva and using the Pinterest template to make eye-catching visuals targeted to people who wanted to learn affiliate marketing. Again, these were linked to her landing page.

She posted on social media about trendy topics such as new affiliate programs and news, and always used one of her visuals to grab interest and get the click.

And that’s it! Her efforts drove visitors to her landing page, who were then directed to click the link to go to the affiliate sales page. Now then, did you notice what Sherry did NOT do that could have greatly increased her income?

Sherry didn’t capture the email addresses. While she did use the landing page to monitor where her traffic was coming from, all she had on that page was a headline and bullet point list with a button that sent people to the sales page. It works for her and she does make sales.

But I would have instead created an irresistible free lead magnet and given that away on my landing page, directing traffic to the offer only after they signed up for my freebie and corresponding newsletter.

Of course, that is more work because you’ve got to create a lead magnet and write emails, but it’s also far more profitable in the long run to build a list that you can continue to send offers to.

You’ll notice that all of the tools Sherry used were 100% free, so her only investment was her time. And she readily admits her first few videos weren’t all that good. But like anything else, practice allows you to improve, and her income is steadily rising over time.

Oh yes, and she’s creating a dynamite lead magnet so she can start building her list, too.

$6,000 From Ready-Made Oto’s And Bonuses

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Now here’s an interesting case study.

It’s about someone who profits from something I’ve bought a lot of in the past, but finding good quality ones today is getting harder.

Which is why a coaching student of mine who makes around $6k a monthly from selling these ready-made, plug in and forget OTO and upsell pages, and bonus packages.

Why do I buy these?

Well I test out a LOT of squeeze pages to see what conversions I can get.

And sometimes I don’t have anything that ‘fits’ as the OTO so I want something I can just ‘plug in’ to collect any sales and help cover my traffic costs

Years back the most common upsell or OTO was a huge bundle of ebooks with PLR rights.

They usually converted pretty well and you could buy a ready-made OTO package that you just put your own Paypal button on and uploaded to your site

Creating the product yourself would have been a NIGHTMARE because you had to find maybe 100 ebooks, make sure you had the rights to sell them, list them all on the sales page with nice graphics, descriptions and the rest.

It could literally take days to build an OTO site like in this way.

Whereas for $97 you could buy the whole thing, rights and all, do a bit of linking and upload it to your server in minutes.

Bung it behind your squeeze page and BOOM – instant OTO sales

You don’t see them much today although the premise is totally the same

Creating a product is hard enough for many people so creating an upsell as well is just too much for them.

But NOT having an upsell in any funnel is crazy because you’re leaving money on the table, I’m sure you’ll agree

The answer?

A ready-made OTO or upsell that you can just plug in at the back of your funnel to make sales from.

Which is what my student does.

He doesn’t mess around with ebooks, he find plugins instead (much higher perceived value) and buys the rights to bundle and resell them.

He usually collects around 8 or 10.

Enough to make it an irresistible deal but not enough to make them look too plentiful

Once he’s found them and bought them he sends the details over to his webbie who builds the sales page for him

He themes them together in different OTO bundles too – social media plugins to complement social media products, traffic plugins to complement traffic products and so on.

He makes around $6k a month from these and from the ready-to-go bonus packs he offers too.

You know the bonus offers you see at the bottom of many sales pages?

Grab this now and get this bonus pack worth $197 or whatever – he makes those too

Simple thing I know but SO popular still. You’ve opted in to funnels from different marketers but found many of them have the same backend OTO offer?

Chances are they’re buying from my student.

Great idea eh?

$3,000 A Month From Flippa Sites

Posted on by • 0 Comments

This isn’t anything unique because I know of at least 3 people personally (including me) who are currently doing this.

But it works really well, and if it works who cares if it’s unique, has pink spots or drives a Fiat?

AND and there’s room for many more people to get in on the action too

The technique is simply this:

It involves an initial outlay of usually a few thousand dollars to buy sites that other people are selling on Flippa.com

I expect to pay between $2,000 and $4,000 for the sites that I buy.

I expect each site to bring me a residual monthly income of $500 – $1000 depending on the site and how much I paid for it

To give you an example, one site I just lost out on (was outbid and missed the end of the auction) was based in the diet niche.

It sold for around $4,000, was bringing constant monthly revenue of around $900, mostly from an existing ebook (the ebook was part of the sale), Adsense ads on the site and Clickbank ads.

It was getting over 12,000 unique visitors a month and was three years old so the traffic and monthly income was well established.

It also came with around 3,000 followers from associated Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter accounts that came with the sale.

There wasn’t a mailing list included with this particular site but I especially look for sites that DO have mailing lists because they’re very profitable for me because of my existing business set-up.

It was a good deal at 4k because if the monthly income averaged out at $900 a month as it was currently doing I would have more than doubled my investment in 12 months.

So in essence the site would then have paid for itself and I could either continue to take the monthly revenue of to flip it for a lump sum

You might wonder why someone would sell a site making $900 a month for $4,000?

Well me too I but I no longer make the mistake of trying to work out their reasons. I do my due diligence and if the site stacks I’ll buy it.

For all I know the person might have financial problems or need the money for another investment or just might be bloody bored of running the thing.

It only needed a few hours’ work in ‘upkeep’ but that can be easily outsourced.

So you can see why I was pissed off that I lost out on that one – someone got a bargain.

A friend of mine – the 3k income in the headline –  recently bought a site aimed at potential writers (I’ve got one of those too actually) and is currently making around $3,000 a month in revenue from a site that cost him $4500 several months back.

It was making around $600 a month when he bought it but he tweaked it, changed the ads and got an SEO person on board (cost him $250) but it was well worth it

In fact I can’t stress enough that the most profitable skill you can have when buying and developing websites is to look at what they’re lacking.

If the SEO needs work (ask an expert for an appraisal) then getting a pro on the job will increase the revenue

If the ads need to be more targeted then work on that, or if any lists or Facebook page that comes with the site (a lot do these days) isn’t being monetized enough then work on that aspect.

In my experience there’s usually something you can do to increase the revenue you get from any site.

If you have some seed money, buying sites that bring residual income is a really good way to build an online business.

I highly recommend it, although it takes some balls the first time you spend four figures on binary code :)

And if it doesn’t work out you can usually resell it and make your money back on the sale

$28k In Sales In A Week – This Little Trick Helped A Lot…!

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Here’s a great account of how an internet  marketer made 28k in a week in his own words…

“I recently made around $28,000 in sales as an affiliate during a product launch, in a little over a week.

Commission was 50% so I didn’t get to keep the whole $28,000 although I actually banked around $14,000 (not including a couple of thou in competition prizes on top of that) which wasn’t too bad!

I was promoting a product that another marketer had launched and to convince people to buy through MY affiliate link I decided to offer a bonus

I knew I’d be up against other marketers offering the same (and bigger) bonuses so I had to carefully think about how mine would stand out from the rest.

I pretty much reckoned I could guarantee one thing – the other bonuses would be VERY slick looking with polished, professional graphics, probably videos, perhaps cartoon characters or caricatures…

…and all in all would look very salesy and polished.

So I went the other way.

I used a picture of myself in my kitchen taken just a couple of minutes after I got up, still bog-eyed from sleep, hair everywhere, drinking a cup of coffee.

Below that, and to outline my offer I used Courier font, which looks ‘typewriter-ish’ rather than high-tech but more importantly has been proved as one of the best converters with OFFLINE sales letters.

My bonus page was mostly black text on white background but with a few highlighted red lines of text here and there to draw the eye in.

It was rough looking

Scruffy in fact.

Unpolished

The bonus itself was good but the LOOK and FEEL of the sales page was so different that it interrupted the ‘slick’ feel of the main sales message and made my bonus stand out just that little bit more

It worked.

Sometimes a slick sales page can work against you by looking too homogenized, too mass-produced, and you need a little ‘home made’ feel to stand out from the crowd.

The trick is knowing when to use what

Case Study: How He Made $24,872 In Five Days From Following This Simple Little Motto

Posted on by • 0 Comments

“Buy Low, Sell High, Collect Early and Pay Late!”

Here’s the story direct from the marketer who did this…

I can’t remember who said that but what a great quote eh?

If ANY of the above four things are missing from your business you’ll hit problems.

Here’s an example of how I made $24,872 in five days from using the simple, but clever advice in the quote above…

I paid just $197 for some really good PLR. It was a course on how to get free traffic course.

It was clever stuff, and included some aspects of how to drive free traffic that I hadn’t been aware of myself.

It was very well written, included a LOT of content and also came with a high quality sales page (I didn’t want the sales page though)

I knew it was a bargain for $197, but at the same time, this price point was enough to ensure that it wouldn’t be saturated and that most buyers would use the sales page that came with it.

I on the other hand, got new graphics created, retitled and rebranded it, added my own personality to the content and broke it down into 16 part, which would be offered as an 8 week course of how to generate free traffic.

The plan was that for 8 weeks I would deliver two high quality PDF’s per week.

Customers had a choice of how they could choose to pay

I sold this 8 week traffic course for either two monthly payments of $47 OR a one-off $97 that gave instant access to the whole thing AND came with email support.

Guess which price point most people decided on?

Over 200 people bought the $97 package, mostly from my own list (the rest took the two payments of $47 deal although I don’t know why) and after fees and other payments had gone out I made $24,872 in just five days.

So here’s how it worked

  1. I bought low – I paid $197 for some great quality PLR, whereas I would have paid around $997 to a freelancer to write the course for me before I put my own personality into it
  2. I sold high. $97 for full access wasn’t massively high in terms of price-point BUT after testing it against a one-off $27 price point and getting the same conversion rates I went with the higher price. Who wouldn’t?
  3. I collected early. Because I offered instant access for $97 as well as a drip-fed eight week option for 2x$47 I made it easy for the ‘don’t want to wait’ buyers (which is most people including me) to get instant access.

The email support sealed the deal. I collected early via a lump sum from over 200 people rather than waiting for 2 separate payments over two months

  1. I paid late. How does this apply? Well I paid $1,000 a month for email support from a pro. But I only paid them after 14 days which means I’d taken most of my profit by then :)

It’s a great rule to do business by, and if you’ve not tried it in your own launches I highly recommend it!”