Hi there

I hope you're doing well today, because I definitely am.

In this tutorial I will provide a detailed step-by-step case study of a recent small scale project. It's simple, so you can easily study and replicate it. You don't need any investment money, nor 8 hours of work per day, if you can invest one per day, it would be more than enough. And if you're tired of doing CPA, spam or email marketing then this is another method for you to try.

The story behind this project:
Some of you know that I'm always busy testing out new things, methods and so on. This time I got in touch with someone on Skype (she's not from any other IM forum). The girl herself is fitness coach, so she's very passionate about fitness, health and beauty. But she knows nothing about selling or doing business. I've proposed to her to create a very simple e-book product ( ±20 pages of content ) and promote it together. She will receive 70% of all the profits and she also did most of the work, I was her business consultant, and I guided her through the entire process.

The basic idea was to develop a product, develop a simple sales page/website and promote it on another forum -> sales. And guess what happened next? In less than a month we were already receiving PayPal payments. I would've loved to see the expression on her face, but for me it was usual business hehe.


A quick FAQ:
  • Do I need money to do this method? No. If you don't have money for a domain/hosting/website, then use a free blog web2.0. As long as you can add a PayPal buy button on a page (simple html code), then you can earn money.
  • "I've already done forum posting and it didn't work for me". Well you've probably done it wrong, so keep on reading and learn from your mistakes.
  • Is this hard? No. If you can invest one hour of your time each day for: building a simple website (1 page), building a simple but good product and staying active on a niche relevant forum.
  • Do I need to develop my own product? No. This method is universal. You can promote affiliate product(s) on your website. Or you can even take payments and outsource the work (if it's a service you're offering).

About the product
As I already mentioned, this product was a fitness/diet related e-book. We were selling it for $19 initially (from mid July to August).
In the beginning of September, my partner has revised the product, improved it and we're selling it for $29 now (believe it or not, we already made twice as much in September '15 versus August '15).
It took her about 5-7 days to write the initial e-book. I will not expose what she wrote about, but it's not some super secret information. What's written in the e-book is already available on the internet for free. But she made it very simple and easy to read, so people enjoy the book. You don't need some "never-seen-before" product, you can easily re-write what's already out there. But please don't "steal" copyrighted material. We did invest money in buying stock pictures and where applicable using our own made photographs, but it's not a necessity.

Create your website
This is easy. All you need is one page where you can write text, add images to boost sales and grab attention of your readers. And add a paypal buy button so people can buy it. You can take a look at other sale pages from other sellers to see what a sales page looks like. It's a good strategy to add two buy buttons, one in the middle and one at the bottom. Usually people scroll down, and then scroll back up. And if they decide to buy after scrolling back up, they usually click the top-most buy button. If the visitor is "lazy" (in most cases) they won't bother scrolling to the bottom trying to find your buy button and will exit, so "help" them in the buying process .

Getting the visitors
The basic idea is to become an authority on another forum (niche related). Once you're trusted by the readers on that forum, you can easily promote/sell your products there. The most common way is to add a link to your website in the signature area. But beware, not all forums are flexible, some may dislike you doing that. So read their terms of use and signature policy. In most cases you will need to have 50 - 100 posts before you can use your signature area to add text/links/images. The trick to get visitors, is to stay active every day. Keep giving value to the readers, and help them in every way you can. You will need to invest a couple of weeks in doing this, for some it may be a boring process, while other people will enjoy doing this. It's a hell lot easier to do this if you're passionate about your niche. But if you're only doing it for the money, then you may want to outsource this "forum account activity" process. Exactly how Nemanja Explains below, as a tip/hintto selling products on this forum.



Quote Originally Posted by Nemanja View Post
I see most of the people make same mistakes.
They join the forum and then they immediately create one or few sales threads at BST section, expecting sales to start pouring in.
This is not working and never will!
What I like to do is to put myself into the buyers shoes,
let's say you are the buyer and you are browsing this forum in search of some service/product and you see some sales threads from members having 1-10 posts with no itrader feedback, no thanks, no reps, etc...
Would you buy something from that member? Yes, that's right... and this is the whole point!


Choosing your niche
You're probably very excited and eager to start this new project yourself.
But beware, the very first step is the one that'll determine your success. If you skip this step, you may end up wasting a lot of your time/money/energy.
The biggest mistake I that I believe people will make is picking a bad niche, bad forum or developing a bad/boring product. Or in the worst case, not even sticking to this method for some weeks before quitting. (PS: quitting is for suckers.)



Few notes:

  • Your product doesn't need to be an e-book, it can be a service, physical product or software.
  • You don't need 1000 UV's to make sales. We were getting no more than ±15 UV's per day in July/August. Now it's 20 - 50 UV's per day.
  • In September we started promoting on two more forums, so that was the reason we were able to double our sales from ±$250/mo to ±$500/mo.
  • It did take her 20 days to make enough posts on the first forum before we started promoting the product (she also has a full time job, so she worked in the evenings). But as you can see, it was well worth her time and she well deserves the 70% cut.

Let's do some simple math:

In August we were able to pull off 13 sales. Profit: 13 x $19 = $247
We had 421 UV's in that month. So that's $0.56/visitor.
And 13 sales / 421 UV's = 3.01% conversion rate.

As you can see, it's making money.
So I would encourage you to get in touch with your friends/family members who're not familiar with online marketing / business & sales, and start a small scale project with them. This way they can focus on what they do best (wood design, architecture, motorcycles, fitness, dieting, child care, ...) while you focus on selling (website, marketing, sales). Of course you should understand the 33% rule: most of the projects you start will fail 67% of the times, but in 33% they will succeed. So trust me when I say that it's not "really" difficult to start 3 of these projects, because one of them has to be a winner.


"If you help enough people get what they want, you can get anything you want" You've probably seen this quote many times. But the sad part is that not many people are willing to apply it in their life/business. If you help enough people solve their problems, by giving them tips, answering their questions, etc... then those same people will most likely (in 90% of the cases) buy your product(s).