Let's make this as simple as possible..
Firstly, I recommend that you start your traffic planning by establishing your target annual income. Knowing how much you want to make by the end of the year not only gives you something to aim for, it also gives you the ability to work backwards.
Let's start with an example by setting a target income of $100,000 for the coming year.
If we know the average income from a single sale, we can calculate the number of sales that we need to make during the year. So, let's assume that a mixture of affiliate income and sales of our own products generates an average income per sale of $20.
That means that we need to make 5,000 sales per year, around 100 sales every week or approximately 14 sales every day.
The typical sales conversion rate is 2% and that means that if we want to achieve 14 sales, we need to drive 700 unique visitors to our sales page(s) every day.
Obviously, I haven't taken account of any overheads, advertising or promotion costs. My point is simply to encourage you to break your annual objectives down into management daily targets.
When you know that you need 700 unique visitors every day, you can determine where to go to source that traffic.
You can establish a routine of daily traffic building actions that will get you the volume of visitors you need. The real key is testing and tracking everything you do so that you can invest your efforts in what really works and cut down on, or eliminate, the activites that give you the least return on your efforts.
hey John..
It's funny how things like this can work with such precision, the plan you outlined, with the right maths and with pages that you know convert, can almost guarantee a six figure year for anyone..
Great insights dude
Peace
Jay
JayXtreme’s last blog post..Happy Holidays To All My Readers
Love this post - with so much info available it's so easy to complicate things, but this makes it so much more straightforward.
Happy New Year!
Hamida’s last blog post..Are You Building A List?
Good plan... what would you suggest for people who are promoting a range of products with varying prices and conversion rates, where something as simple sounding as "average income per sale" may be unknown?
Would you set a specific sales goal for each product, then use your process? Or is there some other way to attack it?
I've started looking at my 2008 results and am surprised at which products did better than in previous years and which did worse. (Short answer is that niche products did better, business/marketing products did worse, which is the opposite of what is supposed to happen in a recession.)
Chris
Chris Lockwood’s last blog post..LockwoodChris: @chasrmartin Here's another explanation of origin of species: http://tinyurl.com/a2hzt4
Chris,
I used the average income per sale for illustrative purposes only.
I would always recommend that the each product's performance is measured and analysed individually. Setting individual goals also allows you to dispose of products that don't meet your income thresholds. It's much better to focus on winners than the mediocre, or worse.
Your assessment of niche products out-performing IM products doesn't vary from my own findings.
John
John,
I just wrote a long blog post that was inspired by my not keeping good track of things until the year was over, which led to a similar conclusion to yours. It links to your post above.
Aren't the "experts" on the forums saying people can't afford to buy the niche products now? (That should have been a clue that thinking was wrong!)
Chris
Chris Lockwood’s last blog post..How to increase your sales in 2009
Hey John
This is so simple. We have been so busy building and promoting sites that we have forget the basics. I will revisit the 2009 plan and break it down per site and product, rather than sites alone.
Thanks for the timely reminder.
JJ
JJ Manning’s last blog post..Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone
I just finished reading Chris'post, which linked to yours and I want to say thank you to both of you. I am a beginner who has been dragging her feet to even start working on getting out on the net, and one of the things I had not looked at seriously was tracking. I have followed chris' newsletter for awhile and for 2009 - Gentlemen my Hat's off to you both because what has been said makes it easier - meaning breaking each product, etc down so that you see what works and what doesn't.
I would ask you both one question: How long do you track and decide what should go and what should stay. 3 months - 6 months ? Sorry for such a long response.
Thanks for re-introducing simplicity into what can sometimes seem like a mountain that can't be climbed.
irishman’s last blog post..ONLINE THEFT EXPOSED
Sheesh John, where is your RSS feed?
Freelance Biz’s last blog post..We Have A WINNER!
The feed is in the sidebar, almost immediately adjacent to your comment, in the Meta Category listed as Entries RSS