Welcome to this training. This is called the I.M. Gritty. That stands for basically the nitty-gritty of I.M. Essentially, we're going to talk to you about the core things—the nitty-gritty that you have to know about making money online.
First of all, there are thousands of ways that you can make money online. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert at all of them. As a matter of fact, I'm only really good at a few. Basically, for information and software product creators like us, the money comes through a variety of income streams that we've actually built over the years.
If you were thinking, heck, I just bought this internet marketing product, I'm going to do what it says, I'm going to be rich, tomorrow, buy a big fancy house, buy a yacht, and live happily ever after as I sail into the sunset with my partner, you're very mistaken. That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works. It actually takes a lot of time, energy, and effort.
I wish that I could tell you exactly how long it's going to take you to accomplish what we've been able to do in the creation of our business. But I have absolutely no idea, and here's why. I don't know your work ethic. I don't know your aptitude.
That's important, because you might be a really hard worker and have a really great work ethic. But when it comes to actually understanding and getting a grip of what you have to do online here, I don't know if you're going to be able to grasp it all. Whether or not you can do it in the same amount of times I've done or not, is really, really hard to predict.
By the way, you should be very wary of anyone that says, hey, you can make this amount of money doing this by tomorrow, by this time, or by any given time because there's just nothing like that. There is no magic fairy dust that you can sprinkle over your computer that's going to make money pop out of it. It just doesn't work that way.
We've done well for ourselves by working hard to create multiple income streams. Our main income streams are as follows: affiliate marketing, product launching, recurring billing products, coaching, and webinars. There are a few other things that we do, but this is the core. I like to call them the pillars of our business.
Affiliate marketing is where we promote other people's products to our subscribers. Obviously, in order to be able to do that, we had to assemble an audience, then get people from that audience to subscribe, then build trust with them. There's a number of steps that we had to take just so that the first stream could work for us.
Product launching, that's the second stream. That requires, obviously, a product. It requires more than that, because you have to create the product so that you can sell it. But you also have to build the website, you have to build the sales funnel, you have to recruit affiliates to promote that product, because they're the ones that send the customers.
Recurring billing. This is just a different type of product. This is a membership site, where you basically offer something to people and build them monthly for it. We've been able to create multiple recurring billing products. The cool thing about this is that you sell the person once, but they pay you over, and over, and over again. It's like Christmas once a month when those rebuilds kick in. It's really cool.
Coaching. This is something that is a little bit more of an advanced pillar. We didn't start this first week in business. This is something that we started doing years after we had already been making a full-time living online. We started coaching others.
The cool thing about coaching is it's a high-ticket product. We have digital coaching that we sell for thousands of dollars. We even have in-person coaching that we sell, where people can actually pay us to come to our office and actually get consulting on how to build their business.
The other thing that we do a lot of are webinars. Webinars are the way to sell high-ticket products. High-ticket products are a really, really important part of our business. They'll be a very, very important part of your business.
Don't make the mistake that I made in the beginning. Don't think that you have to be an expert marketer before you can sell high-ticket stuff. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can sell high-ticket products even easier than you can sell low-ticket products.
As a matter of fact, low ticket buyers are really tough to find. You know why? Because in order to make a significant amount of money with low-ticket items, you have to sell a lot of them. Trust me, it's a lot harder to get a thousand people a month to buy low-ticket products from you than it is to get one or two people a month to buy a high-ticket product from you through a webinar.
Smart marketers set themselves up to make money through marketing to their lists. Imagine that, marketers set themselves up for marketing. Here's the thing. A couple of keywords here—set yourself up and list. You have to set yourself up to be able to make money with your list.
A significant percentage of our income comes from affiliate marketing, I would say anywhere between 30%-40%. It fluctuates. Again, I wish I could tell you an exact dollar amount that we make from affiliate marketing, but that's not how it works. That's not how being an entrepreneur and owning your own business works. Some days you have more customers than others, it's just the way that it goes. It's the way the cookie crumbles, as they say.
Marketing happens when you've got an audience. That audience is on your list. We're talking about subscriber lists inside of an autoresponder. In order to set yourself up to be able to make money through marketing, you have to first assemble an audience and get them to sign up to your list.
Everything that we do online is somehow geared to that end. Everything that we do online involves getting people to sign up for something, to buy something with the purpose of getting them on a list.
They are worth a lot of money when they're on the list. When they're just customers, they're worth only what the price of that product that you're selling them is. But when they're on your list, they're worth a lot more to you, because you can sell them product, after product, after product, every time that you market to them.
A collection of responsive lists or PPC meaning pay-per-click, ad capital, is required to make consistent money through affiliate marketing. There is no if, ands, or buts about it. You have to have a collection of responsive lists. Not just one list, but multiple lists. Every time we create a lead magnet or a squeeze page, we're building a list.
We have hundreds of lists in our autoresponders. We've got tens of thousands of subscribers. Over the years, we've had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. But they haven't all subscribed to one list. They've subscribed to numerous lists. Some lists have 10,000 subscribers, some lists have a few 1000, some lists have a few 100, but it's the collective responsive lists that actually give you the ability to make money through affiliate marketing.
The only other way that you could do it is if you have capital, if you have money to spend on ads. By the way, if you're smart, the first two words in this slide are smart marketers. If you're a smart marketer, you're not just grabbing ads, ad money, and creating pay-per-click ad campaigns, and sending the clicks directly to an affiliate offer. That's called direct linking and that's stupid.
Instead, you want to create lead capture funnels, and you want to send the traffic that you buy to those lead capture funnels. You want to assemble those people that enter their name and email on a list, and then you want to mark it to the list. There's a series of steps they're involved in doing it right.
Number three, it's important to establish yourself as an expert authority on a subject in order to get people to trust you and buy your products. I've been saying this. You have to build a tribe first. In the process of building a tribe, you're building trust with the tribe. You're communicating with them daily.
If you're wondering, well, where do I build this tribe? Where do I assemble this audience? Where do I find these people? There are so many ways nowadays. Social media is probably the first one that comes to mind. You could assemble audiences on YouTube, you can assemble audiences on Facebook, you can assemble audiences in any number of social media accounts.
People assemble huge audiences on TikTok and on Instagram. These are basically digital stadiums. There are places that are available to you for free, where you can gather followers, gathered users. Assemble a tribe, then communicate with them, and build trust through content that you post to them daily. Then you can invite them now that they know you to sign up to your list. Once they're on your list. You can mark it to them with emails.
We are always in product creation mode, because once you have a tribe, you have to supply them with content. You have to supply them with products. We look for ways to dual purpose every piece of content that we create.
How can we use this video that we're making right here to attract new customers? How can we use it to build relationships with existing customers? How could we use it to create products? How can we use it to create bonus offers and do affiliate? How can that same piece of code content that I created be used in multiple ways including building a tribe and making sales?
Anything that you do or say online can be product content. Whether it's a podcast, or it's a video that you recorded, or it's even a social media post ,or a blog post or a report, all of that stuff that you're making can be dual purpose, can be turned into a product to establish yourself as an expert authority, and to build a tribe first.
Doing it right requires a couple of months of planning and prep work. We're talking here about creating products. We're talking here about digital assets that you can launch. To do it right, it takes time. It takes at least 60 days to create a valuable digital product that you can launch.
You might say, well, heck, I can do that in a few days. Yeah, but can you launch it? The reason that I say it takes 60 days is because we like to dedicate 30 days to building the product. That means creating the product, building the website for the product, assembling the sales funnel for the product.
Remember, a product goes into a sales funnel. It's not just a product, it's a collection of products, because you need an upsell, you need a downsell, you need a back-end webinar. Putting that together is not going to take you two or three days. It's probably going to take you at least a month. Once you've got that product, you've got to set out to build an affiliate audience, because the affiliate audience are the ones that are going to bring you the customers.
Affiliates get recruited on social media, on Skype. You basically have to build relationships with people that are influencers in your niche, people that already have an audience of their own. When you build relationships with them, when you give them an incentive to promote your product, now, they're going to drive the traffic for you.
When you promote products as an affiliate, you can only make money off of your own traffic efforts. But when you promote products as a vendor at your event in your product, you can invite hundreds, a limitless amount of affiliates. You're making money off of all of their traffic efforts. This is why it's important to focus on creating your own product.
Guess what, even if you could get your product created in 30 days, you still don't have that audience of affiliates, so you need to recruit them. Having a product launch means absolutely nothing without a list of customers and without affiliates. Affiliates are the ones that drive you traffic. That traffic, when they buy, gets automatically added to your list.
If you want to know the fastest way to build a list, I would say launch a product. Within 60 days, you're going to have a list of customers that you could start monetizing. If you want to do it the hard way, and just create a squeeze page, and try inviting people one at a time from Facebook and social media, okay, that's just going to take you a lot longer. You'll be lucky if you ever make any sales with that kind of a list.
All right, number five. We, here at our company, focus on building funnels, not just products. I alluded to this a little bit on the last slide. It's not just a front-end product that you could create. Maybe you're a great writer. Maybe the information just flows through your fingertips, and you can type up a cool report in two days.
You could have a 20, 30-page report, you could slap some graphics on there and make a PDF, maybe. Maybe that's all possible. But the reality is that that's just going to be the front-end product. When they buy that half of that money that they buy, that they paid you, goes to the affiliate that referred them.
If you're going to make any significant amount of money, you have to have an upsell, so you have to offer them a second product. Guess what, part of creating products is creating that upsell product, that downsell product, that second upsell product that's creating a series of products.
You know what, the money that you make launching products isn't just from the product launch. As a matter of fact, the majority of money that we make in our business happens in the time after the product launch. Our products are made up of an array of products that we offer after the initial purchase. There's that initial purchase, then there's the upsell, then there's a downside, then there might be a second upsell, and then we want to put them into a back-end webinar.
In the beginning, I didn't have webinars of my own. I didn't have high-ticket products of my own. I didn't even know how to make one. I do now. But in the beginning, I was creating product launches just to get the leads so that I could put them into somebody else's back-end webinar.
This was awesome because I could make high-ticket profits without having my own high ticket products. All I had to do was create a low ticket product, like a report, an ebook, have a cool funnel that made me money for the affiliate, and now recruit affiliates. I would recruit affiliates to promote my funnel, they would send me traffic, and that traffic turns into leads because I add those customers to my list when they buy.
Now that I have a list of buyers, I promote a webinar as an affiliate, and now I'm making 50% of high-ticket sales. Those high ticket sales can be $2000, so every one of those sales makes me $1000. Heck, a front-end launch might only make me $3000 or $4000, and that's if I sell hundreds of units. But I can make $3000 or $4000 in 90 minutes with just three sales by promoting somebody's high-ticket product.
Essentially, all our launches are just lead magnets. We create incredible deals that are literally painful to sell. Sometimes, I look at some of my sales funnels and I say to myself, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm selling all of this for just $20. It took me months to create this content, these videos, this ebook, this downsell, this upsell, this members area.
It took me months, and I'm giving it away for $20. But you know what, that $20 that that person invests is going to get them on my subscriber list, because now they're a buyer. They get automatically added to my buyers list when they buy. Now that they're on my buyers list, I can register them for webinars, I can promote other products, I can literally send them a $2000 offer, and with one email, make thousands of dollars in sales.
Even though it might have been painful for me to give away at such a low price, sometimes even for free, because it's a loss lead in many cases, where I literally create a product just to make the affiliate rich. I give 100% commissions. That allows me to attract a lot of affiliates.
I like having offers that attract a lot of affiliates, because the affiliates drive the traffic for me. When there's a lot of traffic coming to my product, I make a lot of sales. When I make a lot of sales, my buyers list grows. When I have a big buyers list, I make a lot of money on high-ticket products by just inviting them to webinars.
My own webinars, other people's webinars, we basically make high-ticket commissions. It's just a really, really easy way to break into the business in the beginning when you don't have your own high-ticket product. Essentially, we create incredible deals that convert really well, and then we offer high commissions to affiliates so that they all want to promote more, and more, and more, and more.
Sometimes, not only do I give away 100% commissions, I also run a sales contest. I go into my pocket and I actually give thousands of dollars away in prizes to make it competitive, to get even more affiliates on board, because I know the value in what they can bring. What they can bring is not just sales, it's a customer list. It's a buyer's list.
That's what I want, because I'm going to monetize that buyers list many, many, many, many, many, many times long after that launch is over. I hope that you've gotten the nitty-gritty here of internet marketing and making money online.
We've covered a lot of things from actually doing affiliate marketing, to creating your own products, to launching those products, and all the different income streams that we've assembled in our business over the years. It takes time to do it, but it happens. It's really just about your discipline.
We've made the reference before to maybe sticking to a diet or sticking to a workout plan. If you make a determination that you're going to lose weight, or that you're going to get fit, or that you're going to grow a muscle, you need a plan and then you need a schedule, an action sequence that you're going to do every single day. The results aren't going to be visible right away, but they eventually will be. That's the same exact process that you can follow when you're building your online business.
You can start maybe with one pillar. Maybe you can start with affiliate marketing. Maybe you can start with product creation. As you get good at that and that starts yielding some profit, then you'll tack on another one and another one. Before you know that a year has gone by, you have three or four pillars in your business generating you money, and so on and so forth.
The businesses that stand the test of time are the ones that actually treat it like a business from day one, they schedule time for all these pieces, and then they're the ones that basically grow at a steady pace. They grow and they scale at a steady pace. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
I hope that you've enjoyed this training. We look forward to seeing you in the next training. Take care.