the push towards the $1 million extra income continues

Well surprisingly a lot has happened since my last blog post about my intention towards an extra million dollars in income this year. Following up on a fantastic article I recently read about harnessing the power of online lead generation, I have quickly developed a pretty solid money generating system. Basically what I’m doing is lead arbitrage. A big retailer I have become an affiliate for is willing to pay $x amount for a buyer of this product. As long as I’m able to keep my cost under $x per lead, I’ll make money. And thanks to the power of the internet, even if I’m making $.25 per lead, I can easily do that 100 if not 1,000’s of times a day. Well I’ve been able to do just that, and I’ve grossed nearly $800 since last wednesday, and netted around $400. These numbers aren’t going to always be the case, but the big retailer I’ve signed up to work with is paying double commissions on your first month (if you generate over $100 in sales, which is something I crossed in the first hour and I hit $5265 in total sales yesterday). So I have a lot of wiggle room to learn the system and constantly refine my strategy. I have definitely seen how easily you can make, and lose money on this. It can happen in a flash, especially if you are not careful. But I can also see how quickly trends emerge, and how if you track all the data you can you really will start to develop a system. For example, I thought that it would be reasonable to get 10% of my leads convert to sales. I figured if I was doing highly targeted advertising, I would get a higher proportion of people buying. So I set my per lead cost to slightly less than 10% of my commissions. I was definitely wrong about that number. I’ve found with pretty good stability that the lead to sale conversion is pretty close to always 5%. So as long as I keep my per lead cost below 5% of my commission, I’ll make money (which is exactly what has happened over the last 3 days). Now even though I’ve been reading feverishly over this (not to mention working very hard on Call True’s new year sales plan, 50-50 for 50 in 50), I still have so much to learn. But I can say that internet based leads is a remarkable system, and my brain recently has been buzzing with possibilities for all the industries that haven’t even begun using the power of internet lead generation. I really envision a future where leads can be prepurchased or invested in like options and stocks are traded today. You want to buy leads for “a new ford truck,” you can do so with ease. But an early “investor” is rewarded with a head start in refining their plan, improving CTR (click through rate), and thus paying less per lead than a newcomer. I can see massive companies conducting lead arbitrage where they’ve figured out how to maximize CTR for say “First mortgage,” searches at $.35 cents per click and they’re willing to direct those leads to the highest bidding mortgage company (maybe someone who’d pay .45 or even .55 cents a click). There really are endless possiblities, but they all have the same result. More targeted leads for companies, at a lower cost than ever thought possible, more often.

Isn’t the internet fun?