A while back I wrote a little article called
“My Vision of Multiple Streams of Income”. After receiving
several emails asking for a sequel and sharing more real
life experience I decided to give an update on my journey
with SFI and Stone Evans’ PIPS system.
As I mentioned in my last article I went off
a good start with this system and I honestly can attest it
really works. The only negative thing is, if you want to
call it this way, that I put a lot of effort into this
project. The system is designed to run on autopilot, that’s
great. But until you’ve reached a certain level of
visibility, you need run your promotions around the clock.
I’m almost there.
As an example: I run several Google
AdWords campaigns to promote my website and SFI. The reason
for this is simple. This is a highly competitive market and
achieving high rankings with the major search engines takes
a long time and due to the rough competition you won’t be
able to reach the top without a few backdoor tricks.
So I took the route of actually spending
some advertising money and in return I have a wide spread
exposure. Remember the baseball movie with Kevin Kostner
“Field of Dreams” with the famous remark “If you build it
they will come”? Unfortunately this is no longer true for
the internet.
Back to the topic of controlling the
advertising cost with Google AdWords. I closely track my
expenses and I keep a lit on it if it gets too high.
The tricky part is to decide when it is
too high. I don’t have an answer for this. For me it means
whatever I’m comfortable with. Because you’re building
residual income and you’re not aiming for a single sale.
This is hard to gauge. Conversion rates are useless,
although my conversion rate so far is over 20%. That is
pretty good from what I read about this topic. What this
number means in subsequent income has to be determined.
I also tapped into the extensive library
of SFI’s partner
IAHBE. At first I just joined this organization because it
guarantees my position in the
SFI network. But
after researching their services and utilizing their
benefits like free mail leads, I have to say that this is a
great institution. It’s worth every penny of your monthly
fees.
Speaking about value-added services and
benefits. The one thing I’m truly impressed with is the
quality and consistency of the marketing material offered by
SFI. The wealth of online and offline marketing material can
be overwhelming, but if you use it appropriate it is a very
effective tool. Of course SFI also offers quality products
and services, which makes it easy to sell.
By using Stone Evans’ PIPS (Plugin
Profit Site) system I could maximize these efforts. I’m
selling all sorts of products and I already received several
commission checks through my affiliate program with
Clickbank. This is a huge affiliate provider for electronic
books and software. My job is to attract customers to the
products and then the manufacturer or author of the product
does all the selling and credit card processing. As soon as
the credit card is processed I receive a commission, which
varies between products.
After about 3 months of running this
business I would say that I’m still a little bit negative
with my finances, but this is due to my extensive Google
AdWords campaigns. By not counting this, I’m actually making
some money. Nothing to brag about, but maybe in another 3
months my tune might change.
Please send me an email if you like to
hear an update more often.