This certainly could be useful

A common theme in the internet marketing community is “dont sell the gold, sell the shovels”.  This means that if there’s a hot trend, don’t compete with everyone trying to get the gold, just sell the shovles and get rich anyways.  However, being prepared for the “next gold rush” has everything to do with the economy.  If you can get a little business going offering opportunities o make money online, now is the best time.  But for many it will take awhile, and they might be a little too late to be super competative with the rest of the field.  However, as people start to make money, and eventually the rates get low, and the prices get low enough, people start buying houses.  soon a rush of house buying takes prices up, and some people start to realize what a great opportunity it is to make money with real estate.  So they start looking to buy houses.  A housing boom is good for the economy, then people start building, and companies start growing.  After this happens, more people consume, and oil goes up.  At this point, stocks and the overall market starts to go up.  Eventually people overbuild, buy too much on credit, and oil gets expensive.  There might be different parts of the economy booming between there.  As people overspend and credit catches up to them, eventually you have the fed trying to combat the lack of ability to spend by the consumer, and you have some people get in trouble financially.  The businesses do as well, and then there’s a credit crunch.  From there, businesses cut jobs, and the cycle repeats.

During these phases… Aside from investing your extra cash in silver, gold and oil… whichever is most undervalued during inflationary cycles, and investing in cash producing assets during deflation… You’re also going to want to market towards certain areas based on the cycles.

Right now, MLM businesses, and businesses that teach people how to make money online will generally be pretty successful.  How to save money will be pretty successful.  In the short term future, how to be a real estate broker, how to buy a house, how to fix a house, and how to garden and landscape, and those types of things will be valuable, as many renters will eventually look to buy houses,fix them up, live in them ,etc.  Shortly after people will want to learn how to fix and flip houses, how to invest in real estate, and maybe how to grow their own businesses with more of a focus on “business” then “quick cash” since at this point, rather than looking to bail themselves out otf a jam, they’re looking to build for long term.  From there, it’s a lot more wide open, and dependant upon what sort of new advancements, and what people are doing.  This time you want to learn what the technological trend is, or any other trends.  “How to GROW your business is also a pretty good topic. After that, you should focus on trading, and investing.  When the economy is good people have money to spend on stuff, and they also want to buy physicial goods so you can look for those, but many of them want to really earn that cash and multiply it, and the stock market is usually a pretty common place that they look. Now when all of a sudden thingss get too hot and the market starts to cool down, “how to eliminate debt” and things like that are good for quite a long period of time.  “how to save your business, and “how to make money in a down market through stocks” and that sort of thing. Even on the way down people are still looking for that dream way to make tons of money overnight despite their debt as well, and from then on the cycle starts over.

If you want to take the time to learn about the economic cycle, you might consider reading one of Jim Cramer’s books, and look at his chart on the back.  One other thing to notice is, you have to get ahead of things and anticipate it, BEFORE it gets hot.  The reason is, because you want to establish yourself as aan “expert” in the field BEFORE everyone starts looking for advice, so when they finally do, your competitors that know to “sell shovels” aren’t going to have the supplies to sell as many shovels as you do.

Not only do you personally have to prepare to allocate your funds, to save money, and to grow your wealth so you can put that money into your business, but you have to understand what other people will be doing, before they do it… The economy is actually pretty predictable over the long term, and you don’t need a chrystal ball to predict the future, you just need to know the overall trend that has always occured for the economy.

A WSO or “warrior special offer” is an exclusive deal involving only members of a warrior forum.  You can sell your own product there, for a small fee of only 20 bucks.  It then gets listed in a member forum that thousands view per day, that nearly 100,000 people belong to.  About half of them are active members that post more than once in awhile.    And the other half at least show their face every now and then, or are there just to buy products.  A member estimated that the number of members would be more like 600,000 if the inactive and banned members weren’t deleted… This massive exposure to this giant list of people, will almost certainly lead to at least a few sales.  

If you’ve ever wondered if there’s a way to start internet marketing for very limited costs, or to promote a product without doing advertising, this is probably your best bet.  If you are starting with a limited budget, most other methods will leave you short on cash , as well as short on time, and most other methods require a huge learning curve as well, leaving many overwhelmed as to how to actually build webpages. 

If you buy a hosting account, and start using adsense, you will have to spend a lot of time building new pages, and money on new domain names, and time or money on building traffic, before you even begin to start to make a monthly profit, let alone cover all your expenses. Many people end up being suprized by the costs that they end up paying with all the things they at first don’t think they really “need”, and they end up in trouble.

But with WSO’s, you instantly gain access to groups of buyers who are interested either in making money online, or in buying unique products in a specific niche which they will have rights to modify and sell as their own. Since Traffic is essential to running an online business, much of the work is already done for you, as you get an opportunity to leverage a massive list generated by one of the most successful internet marketers out there (the forum owner “AllanSays”).

But if $20 is too much for you even, there’s still no problem.  Why? because the warrior forum also has a fairly new feature known as the “WO or “Warrior Offer”.  In a Warrior offer, the deal does not have to be exclusive, and you have to have the rights to sell it, but you don’t have to own the product exclusively.  This costs nothing to post, but IF you receive over $30, you will have to pay a 20% commission fee. So One easy way from nothing to something is to create a product, sell it as a WO, and use that money to create a WSO, and use that to launch your internet business.

In addition to the warrior forums, you are able to buy or sell products and services at the sitepoint forums, and at the digital point forums. 

 And the best part is, creating products can be free, or at least very inexpensive.

If you have money and no time, you can head over to rent a coder, and find people that will do what you want, have one person create the product, another person edit it, and another create the graphics, and another to create a sales letter.

Otherwize, you can learn how to use a free software such as PDF 995, you can do some research, type out your entire ebook, edit the fonts to make them look nice and big so everyone can read them without squinting, and print it to a PDF file.

However, my favorite option is to just create an audio file.

The reason audio files are so in demand is that ipod is the most popular item on ebay… okay, so Ipod is no longer the top item, the iphone is… but people can simple use an MP3 file, transfer it onto their ipod, and listen to it when they workout, run, eat, or sleep.  Audio products stand out a lot more, and because of all these bennefits, they’re perceived as more valuable. In addition, audio files make it easier for you to conduct interviews with gurus and record the conversation.  The person you interview gets the brand recognition, (and perhaps some percentage of the profits and/or the right to sell it himself), and you get to leverage his or her knowledge, without having to learn all of the secrets that often takes years to really understand and be able to teach propperly.

If you have a microphone laying around, or if you want to head over to target and pay 40 bucks for one, you can go ahead, but with microphones, interviews don’t work well because you have to actually invite the person over to conduct the interview with, so if you don’t live next door to some award winning expert, it can be kind of difficult to make money on an interview.

However, there’s a solution to all of this.  The solution is a method that is probably the eaisest, and quickest, completely free way to make some money online.  It is a way to use what you already have to generate instant audio products for free. 

Many WSO’s are raking in thousands of dollars.  That doesn’t even include all the personal branding, traffic building, trust development, joint venture deals, membership signups, and backend sales that can result after the deal is done.

I will be revealing how to make completely free WSOs in an audio book that I will charge for. I have pretty much finished up, but I still want to edit it, and do a few things first.  You can expect it out at least within the next month.

Now the situation would change if it wasn’t guaranteed, but still gave you a very high chance of coming close, or if it might take longer, but you’d still be willing to pay $1000, wouldn’t you?

No, this is not some guide I want you to buy  for $1000 that teaches you how, in fact, it’s much simlper than that.  This method can be used by anyone.

How’s it work?

Well lets say you have $1200 plus you have your emergency cash on the side, and you understand this is $1200 that you can risk.  I know I said $1000, and it’s pretty much true, but if an extra cost comes up, you’re going to want to be able to afford it without having to dig into the emergency cash. Your emergency cash should be based on current expenses, and although you’re increasing your income, you’re also increasing expenses.  You use that $1000 on buying an already established web business. 

You can do this simply by going to sitepoint.com and clicking on marketplace.  Sitepoint is not the only place.  There’s digital point forums, and there’s a few others. I prefer Sitpoint, but that’s just me.  So you check the “established websites”, and you notice that there’s one website availble for $1000, and it gets $200 of cashflow a month.  If you plan on running this website yourself, I reccomend, actually being interested in the topic and liking it, but if you are willing to outsource everything, you don’t have to like it. If you just know enough to know whether or not someone is making quality informative useful points on it that should be enough.  You will simply be going to elance.com or rentacoder, or whatever freelancing service you prefer.

Now we’re going to assume you need to pay a few bucks to keep the website running.  Lets say from that $200 cashflow that you’ll be getting, you’ll spend $50 of it paying people to keep your website going for you.  That leaves you with $150 bucks.  You also have to pay for $10 in hosting to host all the accounts before you need to upgrade to a better hosting account.  You might get hosting for free when you buy the website, but maybe not.   Now it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that if you continue to have someone add content to your site, and you pay for traffic, or build the traffic streams in your free time, or have someone else do it, that the revenue would actually INCREASE.

There might be a few times where it doesn’t go right and the sites revenue falls, but for the most part, you can at the very least make $150 per site.

If you would just let the income come in the first month, and then use that to pay to have someone add content and things like that to your site so you would ONLY invest the initial $1000 into this (plus $10 per hosting for one month),  and only use the cashflwo from here on out to buy, you would have over $5000 per MONTH from these websites coming in every single month at the end of 28 months.  This is calculated based on fractions of months, but in many cases the checks won’t come in until the end of the month… However, you would be able to buy 2 websites in one month at some point, or you could buy websites for OVER $1000 in some months, so it really wouldn’t be too far off.  So you have $5000 a month with 2 month s to spare until 2 and a half years.

 It might not take money to make money.  You may be able to create your own WSO on your own for free.  But it certainly will make you a lot more, if you focus on reinvesting your traffifc to grow it, as well as an reinvest your money to increase the ability to grow.

Here’s what your monthly earnings will look like

Month 1 190 (paid for hosting)

Month 2 140(paid for someone to help run it for you)

Month 3 140

Month4 140

month 5 140

month 6 140

month 7 140 (now use money to buy 2nd site)

Month 8 290 (after paying to have site maintained

Month 9 290

Month 10 290

Month 11 290 (buy new site)

Month 12 440

Month 13 440 (buy new site)

Month 14 590

Month 15 590 (buy new site)

Month 16 740

Month 17 740 (Buy new site)

Month 18 890 (Buy New site)

Month 19 1040( Buy New Site)

Month 20 1190( Buy New Site)

Month 21 1340( Buy New Site)

Month 22 1490( Buy 2 New Sites)

Month 23 1790 (Buy New Site)

Month 24 1940 (Buy 2 New Sites)

Month 25 2240 (Buy 2 New Sites)

Month 26 2540 (Buy 3 New Sites)

Month 27 3440 (Buy 3 New Sites)

Month 28 3890 (Buy 4 New Sites)

Month 29 4490 (Buy 4 more sites)

Month 30 5090 (Buy 5 More sites)

END of 2.5 years 

Month 31 5840

etc

Now what do you think would happen if you continued this for 4 years?  In 4 years, if you can manage to keep this up, you will crack $100,000 a month.  Of course, it will get harder and harder to find $1000 websites, o you’ll be forced to take a look at the more premium websites with a slightly lower return, and/or get a team of people to buy the websites for you, which will cost you more money.  You also will not be able to use any of that money you gain if you want your website to really grow as fast as possible.  The question becomes, how much do I want to make before I start spending.  I also think you should make sure to have more and more available cash aside because if something goes wrong, you might have to deal with missing out on ALL of the incomes sources.  Make sure to back up all of your files as well, a server crash can kill your business.  You would need to spend more time on this, and you would need to continue to buy more and more hosting account as you get more sites, or at least pay $30 a month for one of those superlarge reseller hosting accounts.

As you can see, it’s really not that difficult, and  being able to actually own a cash producing asset that you can reinvest, will lead to a much more valuable return than any stock.  Is it likely that you’ll see a 500% return in a stock in 2.5 years? Probably not, and if you do, once you sell it, the money stops coming in.   Tour return is limited. Not only that, but if there’s inflation, you will generally take in MORE cash to adjust for it.  While saving has your cash going down, and investment cashes in for dollars that aren’t worth as much as they were before you started, cash producing assets produce more cash. In addition, when cash assets produce more cash, they’re worth more money to the buyer.  So if you can buy something for $1000 that brings in $200 a month, and you can increase the monthly income to $400, what do you think someone would be willing to pay for it?  Twice as much cashflow, is at least twice the amount of value.

Now if you’re smart, you’ll track your income, and you’ll learn which sites have more potential.  The lowest profit sites you can work on to increase the income for a few months, then you can sell it. Then you can use the cash to either replace it with another one, or to increase the advertising and value of another website.

Don’t have $1000?  You can easily start with a $250 website that rakes in $50 a month.   Of course, you won’t make much money on it, especially if you have to use all $50 to automate, but you can at least have the price of the website gain in value so you could sell it later if you want, and you have the potential to make the revenue go up as well.  Websites are like fine wines, they become worth MORE as they age.  People like the domain names better, and there becomes more demand for certain domain names.  They usually naturally gain backlinks as well, making them more valuable.

I’m not saying jump in right away,  I’m saying understand it’s a possibility, use it to dream big dreams, and motivate yourself to learn what you need to.  When you are completely ready, and have everything ready, and have the finances the right way, go ahead and give it a shot, and let me know how it goes… I love success stories

In The world of the internet, It works the same way.  The only difference is, referrals come in different kinds of ways, and are harder to come by.

You should absolutely NEVER sacrifice the possibility of a referral in order to save time or gain money.  Cutting shortcuts like these can destroy your business, and absolutely limit it before it ever gets a chance to get going.  Of course, if you are persistant, and willing to keep building your site, even when challenged, and put down, or told you can’t do it, you will eventually succeed, but why choose a bumpy, windy path everyone else is following when there’s a path that’s already been cleared away for you?

When other websites were focused on selling their services, and profiting youtube was focused on building content.

When other people were trying to create overnight success, amazon, was building it’s foundation.

When people were trying to make the quickbuck on ebay, or the next hottest thing, the founder of facebook was creating his own network just to keep in touch with his friends.

When people were becomming overnight successes in the stock market before the dot com bust, Warren Buffett was sticking to his principals of finding  undervalued successful businesses, and slowly, but surely, growing his wealth.

Myspace did no advertising, but they had a commitment to excellence, and remained focused on generating referrals.

Legendary consultant Jay Abraham focuses on referrals, and being so focused that you do every possible thing you can to get the word out.

Steve Pavlina didn’t listen when people said “choose a small focused niche”, and was too busy focusing on adding as much value to the reader that he could.

When you focus on growth and referals in your own unique way, you will continue to experience rapid growth, and your potential for earning will become that much greater.   Once you can no longer grow your potential at the same rate, now your goal becomes either finding new ways to grow your potential, or living up to the massive potential that your site has.

The important thing is not always noticable or something that you can track.  What happens AFTER someone comes on your site? Do they tell their friends? Do they run away and never come back? Do they come back every day? Do they go and search for you, do they add you on a social networking site?

I think it was Brian Tracy that said when you start to ask yourself the right questions, you will start to get the right answers, you want better results, ask better questions

If you make a committment towards growing your site and increasing it’s value, you will start to see some serious results.

Recently I made a post at the warrior forum listing over 30 free linkbuilding and traffic building strategies.  In the future, I will be creating posts that go into more detail about each method.

For now, I’m sure you will at least be able to generate some “starting points” and some ideas to get started.

Here’s the list:

1 social networks

2 social bookmark (social media included)

3 Video Submission

4 classified ads

5 article directories

6 forums

7 related blogs

8 related sites

9 press releases

10 ebook reviews

11 rss feeds

12 podcast directories

13 search engines (submitting your url to them)

14 question and answer sites like yahoo answers

15 top alexa 100 sites (for example, use various ebay feature to get your website url on it)

16 link directories

17 FFA

18 traffic exchanges

19 safelists

20 ebook directories

21 free ezine ads

22 downline builders

23 ad boards

24 mlm ads

25 link exchanges

26 various branches associated with or owned by major search engines (google news, yahoo answers, MSN groups, yahoo 360 blog, blogger, etc)

27 your free blogs/hub pages

28 profiles within social bookmarking sites,, article directories, etc

29 site review websites

30 blog directories

31 blog networks (blogrush, mybloglog)

32 Submitting to Massive giveaways

33 joint venture deals

Bonus: Trackbacks and trackback exchanges

Did I miss something? Do you have something to add? Feel free to join in the conversation at the warrior forum, and add more!

As an affiliate you are trying to sell a product, but that does not mean that every post has to be designed specifically to sell. In fact, if it is, you probably won’t sell.

There are many things that are important when it comes to running a successful blog, and there are many things that you want to accomplish.

You want people to either buy from you, or buy from the people you reccomend.

In order for that to be possible, people must trust you

One of the things that must happen for people to trust you is for you to have a good name that everyone knows that people can associate with someone they trust. You want everyone in the world to know your name and associate it with something great. That’s branding, and it’s important.

In order for that to happen, you have to have people talk about you and/or visit your site. So you also want everyone in the world to come to your site consistently.

But in order for all of this to happen, you must initially have traffic growth, and you must also have repeat visitors. You must first set up the systems, and lay the foundation for self perpetuating traffic.

A lot of times, you can accomplish a lot of those at once. For example, I have begun the process of slowly but surely developing trackbacks from all the major sites. That’s great because it helps me leverage other’s traffic, and attract traffic from different groups of people that may find my blog interesting. But don’t think for a second that that’s the only reason I am doing it.

You see, I am eventually going to create a post that lists the top bloggers, and a brief description of who they are, and what they do. This will of course be a great piece of linkbait, which I’ll be talking about later.

But regardless of how it brings traffic, none of that matters, unless it’s useful to you, the visitor. As this is a blog that teaches you how to get traffic, how to develop and grow a business, I have to find a way to teach you that.

Well what better way to do that then to actually show you what people have done to become successful? If you can’t do something, find someone who can and model it.

Also, I’m probably developing your trust, because I’m showing you that I am aware that I don’t know everything, and I’m certainly not the absolute expert of the field. I’m also showing you that I know what people are saying because I actually take the time to read it. I’m going to constantly be referring to what other people that are much more well known and more respected by the community then myself.

In addition, I’m learning as I’m teaching. I think you remember what you learn like 4 times more when you teach it, and teaching is the best known strategy for learning.

Aside from all of that, I’ll be showing you what I’ve observed. That all the major successful blogs get a large percentage of referrals, from one way or another. Whether they utilize social bookmarking, or widgets like blogrush… whether they get traffic from traffic exchanges, or other blogs, whether they have the RSS feed clearly visible, or sticky content that keeps people coming back, whether they have a free viral ebook, an interactive forum, or something innovative, whether they use pictures to keep attention, or they constantly have new quality content, or whether they linkbait all of the time, or utilize SEO, they’re all doing things that not only bring in traffic, but that keep that traffic going, and having systems in place that convert that traffic into more traffic.

If you don’t have at least 5 “purposes” that your blog post accomplishes in one way or another, you probably shouldn’t even bother posting it.

What does this post accomplish?

1) Adds Value to the reader that’s always going to be #1

2) Develops a relationship and gets the reader thinking on the “same page”

3) Adds quality content that could possibly be linked to

4) increases the chances of being linked to due to plugins

5) Adds another chance for someone to take an action such as clicking on blogrush or signing up for my newsletter (not currently up)

6) Creates another page for the search engine

7) Gives me something to refer back to later which will add another backlink as well as a trackback from myself.

Provides a backlink to the post “Develop a Clear Vision – Start With The End In Mind, and also the 21 steps to business automation.

9) Makes you read over the post twice as you realize #8 is actually incorrect as “21 steps to business automation” was not linked to in the actual post… but it is now in #8

10)Makes you wonder if I’m telling the truth in post 9, and reinforces that you read over the post again, and glance back noticing 2 links, even though they are both different one is about traffic.

11)etc

You’ll also notice that because of plugins added, it gives people the opportunity to click on widgets, download the PDF version of this post and refer to it later or pass it around, it gives them the chance to check out a blogrush post, it gives them a chance to look at the “related posts”, and it gives them the chance to add this post to social bookmarking sites.

You should always be looking for additional ways to post with purpose, and reviewing pluins that you can install to instantly add purpose to all of your posts at once.

One story that I really resonated with, around that time, was Steve Pavlina’s story about how he went from someone that had been caught and sent to jail for stealing, to realizing that he needed to turn his life around. In one of his podcasts, he stated that he decided although he might not have been strong enough at that moment, he at least had the realization that if he worked at it, he could some day have the ability to turn his life around.

Not only did I feel that I wasn’t living the life I wanted, I too wanted to change my life around, feeling that I wasn’t good enough, but realizing that I could. Not only did I realize this in my financial life, but in my personal life as well. I became almost desperate for something better, I even looked towards hypnosis, subliminal messages, and anything I could find.

So I would download everything I could on personal development. Brian Tracy, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Tony Robbins, Jay Abraham and Richard Bandler to name a few. I eventually got an ipod that I would wear every day for hours and hours, I would literally eat and sleep with my ipod on, listening to anything related to self development.

Like Steve Pavlina, I was able to turn something very negative, into something very positive, through a strong desire to change myself for the better.

I don’t know if I’m even on his level as a blogger, or as far as personal development oes, but I don’t need to compare myself with others either.

Anyways, I’m sure although many of you enjoy reading about this, there is a connection to affiliate marketing.

Because, Steve Pavlina, is a computer programmer, and has one of the best blogs on the internet. That’s not just my personal opinion, that’s based on the fact that according to a few sources, his blog is in the top 10 for annual dollars earned.

In other words, he knows how to make a buck or two, so if you want to not only make money online, but build a business, when he talks, you should listen.

In his recent post Personal Branding he introduces Personal branding, and notes that every single time you interact with someone in some way, you’re branding yourself whether you realize it or not. He then talks about asking for feedback and using it to your advantage.

[quote]Once you’ve gotten yourself assigned a few adjectives in someone else’s mind, it can be very difficult to change that. So just make the best of the adjectives you’ve been assigned. When you learn how others see you, you can “play back at them” by acknowledging their expectations. Instead of trying to fight your own branding, roll with it and turn it into a strength. This actually helps you reconnect your external brand with your internal one. [/quote]

Although it’s good to “role with the punches’ rather then fight what people think, or try to manipulate their thoughts, you don’t want to have to deal with a bunch of negative expectations. With this in mind, it’s important to realize that once people start perceiving you a certain way, it’s going to be very difficult to change it. Which is yet another of many reasons why you should start with the end in mind. Before you even start an online business, you should have a clear vision of exactly how you want everything to go. Start with your exit plan first.

Once you have that clear vision, you need to determine exactly what you need to do to get there. The idea is to become the person that you want others to perceive you as, and then from there, start your business.

So many other people make it up as they go, but that is not a recipe for success, nor is doing as others do. You may occasionally get lucky and find success by being spontaneous, and taking chances is certainly better than not taking one, but sometimes just a little planning can make all the difference in the world.

When you start with the end in mind, you won’t find a reason to do anything other than to keep working smart and hard. As long as you still have that clear vision, and you know exactly WHY you want success, you will always have a source of motivation.

You can completely change your behavior without being hypocritical, different, or approval seeking of others. We all have an “ideal” self, someone who we think we are capable of being. When we receive feedback that differs from the person we want to be, then we know. But you don’t want to be doing this after the public already has one perception of you. If that occurs, the best solution is a change of environment. Online it’s easy to do, simply create a new blog with a new look, and a new target audience. If you want to, you can even get a new name. However if the public has a negative viewpoint or perception of you, but you still feel that the actions you’ve taken are consistant with the person you want to be, or if you feel they are attacking something about yourself that you truely are, then the only problem is, they haven’t been able to see it from a positive perspective. This is where turning a perceived weakness into a strength, without changing your character comes into play.

You see, my whole life changed for the better, when I realized I didn’t like where I thought things were going. I truly believe that those random suicidal thoughts were the beliefs and ideas I had about my “end”, and a very possible end had I continued to think, act, talk, and feel, the same way, and do the same things I had been doing.

But it is not only a necessary strategy to have in your personal life in order to succeed consistently, but it is also a necessary strategy to have in your business life, in order to succeed in business.

Whether it’s for Personal Branding and for your overall business plan, or for your goal setting, and overall life plans, it is absolutely essential that you develop and maintain that clear vision, and always start with a clear vision of your ideal “end” in mind.

With Self Perpetuating traffic, you have more and more traffic  from all sorts of different directions.

If you had the choice to have made $100 per visitor with 1,000 visitors a year and shrinking, or .01 cent per visitor with more and more visitors every day, which would you choose? I don’t know about you, but I’d take the .01 cent per user with guaranteed unlimited traffic. That way I can leave the site and go onto the next project, and set up another one, and when I come back, I’ll have more earned overall anyways. In the long term, it would be way better. although setting your traffic up to receive money first and traffic second seems like it would be the same, the order matters.  Growth is necessary.  You cant earn from 0 visitors, and you will only have a limited blog if you aren’t using your traffic to grow.

You may have heard of the question, “Would you rather have a penny that doubles every day for 30 days, or a million dollars?” Well the doubling penny would be worth 5.37 million at the end of 30 days.
This should be a major lesson to you, in the long run a small company with consistently large growth, a website with increasing amounts of visitors, is better than a large one with small growth, a somewhat major website that’s losing subscribers.
It also should stress the importance of developing a strong foundation, a base, for your virtual empire. Traffic in the end is the only thing that really matters. At some point or another, you have to have traffic. Sure there’s some sites that can have membership sites, and get a ton of traffic and a ton of lifelong members, but slowly after time they will unsubscribe, and in the long run although you will get quite a bit more vs someone who sold one time products, your revenue will go down to zero eventually. No site can ever survive without traffic legally. Even people that do a lot of JV deals and collect royalties for developing products need traffic. They might not need it to their site, but they still need traffic.
But revenue on your site? You don’t really need it. This is a shock to most people, but it’s true. Look at youtube… they gained no revenue at all, then they turned around and sold it to google for 1.6 BILLION dollars.

Youtube didn’t have any of this cash comming in until after they grew like crazy.  When they sold… BAM! HUGE cash windfall!

Youtube was one of the highest, fastest growing companies there’s ever been, but it had absolutely no revenue… however it had millions of daily viewers, and had billions worth of potential. The other major “growth” web based company that youtube rivaled at the time for accelerating growth is myspace. This grew like crazy and at first they didnt use ads yet were able to sell their site for a huge sum of money.
The facts are simple. If you can build a large base of potential clients, customers, and people that other companies will pay for, you can earn massive amounts of money. It’s up to you on whether or not you want to ever sell anything to the people on your site. If you want to focus on growing your business as large as you can until growth slows and then sell it and take the huge windfall of profits, that’s totally fine. For me, I like the idea of eventually owning an asset that pays out money monthly, and I’d rather hire some consultants to help me generate profit streams and increase my profits once I’ve grown the business to a size I’m content with.
Unfortunately most people are going to have to have SOME money coming in to pay for hosting costs and other things. But if you can at least pay a years worth without collecting revenue, you may want to consider it. You should probably consider using a strategy that involves building up one part of your site for traffic, such as a blog for unlimited traffic, while you collect revenue from your home page. I have created a plan to build up this blog, develop it, add all the plugins, track my traffic, add several sources of traffic, and really focus a lot on building the systems that will help my blog grow.

Aside from buying a site that has already developed and shown that it can grow on it’s own, the initial startup method for a successful web business should ALWAYS be something very similar to…

• Build traffic streams
• Build Content
• Lay Foundation for Repeat Traffic
• Build more traffic streams
• Convert traffic into more traffic or as some say “go viral”
• Continue to increase rate of growth
• Leverage other’s traffic
• Profit

Profit should essentially be the last priority. I know that a lot of people will think that this is crazy, but keep in mind before every great economic boom people were considered crazy.  Donald Trump was considered nuts to keep building in the 80s when everyone was going bankrupt, People who said that the dotcom bubble would not last were nuts, people who worried about a great depression would have seemed absolutely looney, people that thought the titanic could sink were “crazy” It takes a little bit of a “contrarian” attitude to REALLY succeed big time. The fact is, although profit is nice, and for some it is neccesary in order to maintain the operating costs of their business, every bit of space on your website can be used for either traffic or growth.  Either one is better than nothing, but until you’ve grown large enough that you can leverage your profits, in the long run, it’s best to focus in on growth and building systems for the website to expand.
This can mean several things, but just what, exactly?
In the next post I’ll talk about more of the specific things you can do to lay the foundation and grow your blog, and use your growth to increase the rate of growth