It was late at night. I was propped up in front of my computer grinding out another email sequence.
I decided to browse the Clickbank Marketplace to see if there were any “good” products on pay-per-click advertising.
That’s when I stumbled onto a gem.
When I read the sales page for this product I was immediately skeptical. It seemed like your typical “Internet Marketing Get Rich Quick Pitch.”
Tons of hype. Very little proof. And massively outrageous claims.
But he sold me. That, in and of itself, is instructive. I learned it a long time ago from Dan Kennedy…
“Sell ’em what they want. Give ’em what they need.”
Had he came out and said on the sales page, “Use advertising sponsors to cover your ad cost on your landing page and make a profit,” I would’ve totally dismissed it and quickly closed the page.
Very smart. He created massive curiosity… so much so that I had to buy just to see what he was doing, legal or not.
It was pretty simple really.
Create a landing page about a specific topic. I’ll use weight loss as an example. Find sponsors to advertise on that landing page.
Tell them you get X number of visitors per day/month/year to that page and it would make sense for them to advertise since their product is a perfect fit for this traffic.
But before approaching sponsors, you need to run some numbers.
You need to figure out how much each click is going to cost you and how much traffic volume there actually is.
By using Google’s Keyword Planner or Bing’s Keyword Planner, you can get those numbers pretty fast.
Bing’s Keyword Planner tells me the suggested bid per click for the phrase “lose weight fast” is $0.79. So, I’ll say my average cost per click will come in at $0.60.
It also tells me this phrase is searched 157,160 times per month.
If I can manage to get just a 2.00% click-through rate on my ad (which is pretty easy to do in Bing), I’ll get 3,143 clicks per month to my page.
At $0.60 per click, that’s a total ad spend of $1,885.80 per month. That’s my breakeven number.
I need to find a certain number of sponsors to not only cover that ad cost each month but to also give me a net profit.
Finding sponsors is easy. See who’s already paying for ads and approach them.
There are countless ways to use this strategy but while going through the guide itself, a few really big ideas came to mind.
Here they are:
1) Local Arbitrage
Sounds cool, right? I just made it up.
This one is pretty simple and straightforward… get local businesses to put an ad on your page and drive local traffic to your site.
There are a few ways to make this work.
Either get a bunch of different businesses to place an ad and run broad local traffic to your site to consume local news or local information.
Or…
Get similar businesses to advertise on your page and drive targeted local traffic for people looking for their services (ie. plumbers, landscapers, dentists, etc.)
Pretty much the same thing YP.com, Yelp, and all the other directory listing sites do, except you’re promising target traffic to a select few businesses.
Even better, use your page as a lead generation page while still including the sponsored ads and then you can also sell the leads you generate back to those companies.
Now you’re getting paid twice for the same traffic.
There are a million ways to do this just on a local level. Seriously, a million.
Spend some time really thinking about who’s already advertising, where they’re advertising, who they’re looking to attract and how much that customer could be worth to them?
The more a customer is worth to them, the more they’re willing to spend to acquire them as a customer.
For example, a few businesses with larger transaction sizes and higher lifetime customer values are… dentists, landscapers, lawyers, heating and cooling companies, plumbers.
2) “Comparison” Sites
This one has been around for a long time and is mostly used by affiliate marketers.
What affiliates either never realized or are too lazy to do is, ask the companies they’re comparing/ reviewing to pay for sponsorship.
The big dumb companies have multi-million dollar ad budgets and have a hard time finding a place online to spend their money.
If you approach them and offer them a “top listing” and guaranteed traffic, they’ll literally pay you thousands.
You don’t really have to purchase each product to review it.
You can just as easily compile a bunch of reviews from Amazon products and come up with your own “star rating” system based on their reviews.
A few examples of different types of products that I quickly came up with are:
Treadmills, blenders, web hosting, email marketing providers, dog food, diet programs.
The possibilities are endless here. For more ideas use this Google search query.
3) Large Niche Content Site
This one has huge, huge, HUGE potential. This is the biggest play you could make with this strategy.
At it’s simplest form it’s: niched content + big brand advertising.
The beauty is, the content doesn’t have to be unique. Who cares about SEO at this point.
You’re getting paid to drive traffic via multiple advertising platforms.
The more sponsors you have, the more you can spend on traffic. Going back to my Weight Loss example…
Absolutely huge market. The good thing about huge markets is, there are marketers out there creating content FOR you, for VERY low prices.
It’s called PLR (private label rights).
I can buy dang good PLR articles for less than $2.00 a piece.
Now, I’m not talking about the crappy PLR you see plastered all over those PLR Megastores. I’m talking about very well written stuff.
I have two sources for this: flaminghotplr.com and plrminimart.com. I know both of these folks pretty well.
I’ve purchased hundreds of dollars of content from each of them. It’s quality stuff.
I actually have a website in the weight loss space and I’ve bought close to 50 articles from Arun (the owner of flaming hot plr).
In a matter of a few hours, my site went from zero content to fifty dang good articles.
It’s like an instant authority site. Again, with this method, I don’t care about SEO. I just need good content to sell ads and drive traffic. Period.
Now, I can go to the content recommendation networks like Content.Ad and RevContent and get cheaper clicks (since I’m advertising content).
I just need to be sure my sponsor’s ads are prominent on each page.
When you choose a large niche like Weight Loss for this type of business, you have an endless amount of content that you can advertise.
People are constantly searching for all different kinds of weight loss stuff:
Recipes, exercises, meal plans, diet programs, exercise equipment, supplements, diet food, etc.
Now it’s time for you to get to work!