The first quarter of this year has been interesting. Here are the highlights of what I did and learned about making money online.
I organized my activity into four sections based on the 4 core areas of making money I often refer to in my blog posts, emails, and social media posts:
- Generating Traffic
- Capturing Traffic
- Following Up
- Making Offers
#1: Traffic Generation Activities
Social Media Posts
If you have been reading my other blog posts, you probably know that I post a lot on Quora, the main social media app where I share content. This is the engine for generating traffic for my business. I don’t do any online advertising right now, so this organic traffic strategy of posting on social media is a hugely important part of my business.
In January and February, I was still reworking content, using a new formula for constructing the post’s headline, buildup, content, and call-to-action parts. Reworking them took time, but it was a great learning experience.
I now have 63 new pieces of content to post.
I posted 16 times in January and 22 times in February. This was less than desired. However, the main headwind was the time it took to apply the new formula.
My goal is to post 30-50 posts per month. I finally hit this with 41 posts in March.
Another big thing I’ve learned is that to drive enough traffic to my assets, such as my website and product links, I need to post 30-50 times per month. And if I can ever get to a point where I can post more, that would be even better.
Producing so much content sometimes feels like a Herculean feat, and it is to some extent, but this is the reality of using organic traffic strategies and social media to build an online business.
#2: Capturing Traffic
Lead Magnet Opt-ins
The biggest growth area this quarter was the number of options for my lead magnet, a new free video.
In February, opt-ins increased 100% compared to January, and in March, they increased 90% compared to February.
I attribute this increase to the fact that I’m posting more content on Quora than in the past, which drives more traffic to the video opt-in page.
Some of my Quora posts have a link to the opt-in page, while others have a link to my blog (which has a banner for the free video). Having links in social media posts helps increase the number of visitors to the opt-in page and blog.
In general, the more visitors, the more opt-ins there are. However, I don’t want to put a link in every post because this can come across as self-fulfilling. People can view this negatively, and I only care about getting visitors to opt in or visit my website. Plus, social media apps can have spam-related rules that include links in posts.
Another nuisance I’m starting to track in April is to what degree having a link to the opt-in page has on the number of opt-ins compared to links to my blog or no links at all.
I’m interested in seeing what information I can extract from tracking this.
I expect a direct connection between the number of social media posts with links to the opt-in page and the number of opt-ins. For example, if I have 2x the number of posts in one month with a link to the opt-in page, I expect to get about 2x the number of people opting in.
Conversely, if I have zero links to the opt-in page on the posts, will I might get zero opt-ins?
Does this hypothesis hold water? I have no clue, but I am interested in learning more about it.
Another question this might answer is from what source are people opting-in from- are most opting in from the links in a social media posts, or from my blog banner?
If there is no apparent connection, that’s fine, too.
More commentary on this in a future blog post!
#3: Following Up
Following up is my biggest weakness right now. Per my training, I should be following up with my audience with new blog posts and emails to subscribers on my email newsletter list at least several times per week.
However, my average is 1 times a week.
Writing blog posts and emails takes time. And since I’ve been focused so much on social media posts to generate traffic, my time gets reduced when trying to make blog posts and emails.
This is something I have to address and improve. My feeling is I have to create a different schedule where I add more time to these tasks.
Also, now that I have a large arsenal of social media posts, getting content posted on Quora should take less time than it did in months past. This should free up time to spend on making more blog posts and emails.
I need to think about this more, and put a game plan in place this month. If I don’t, nothing will change and I’ll get the same result as before.
#4: Making Offers
Product Link Activity
I have product links in a few core areas. One is on my blog’s “store” page, Tools to Help You Make Money Online. Here, I have many products listed with descriptions. Someone can check them out, click a link, and potentially purchase one.
Another place I have some products is as banners on the sidebar of my blog. If you’re reading this, you’ll notice the banner pictures on the side or bottom of this post. I think this is interesting because people can see the banners on pretty much any page of my website—the home page, blog pages, etc.
While I get activity on both the Tools to Help You Make Money Online webpage and the banners, the other main area where I get the most activity is on the product offer links in the initial automated email sequence for those who opt-in to the lead magnet.
If you receive my emails, you might remember the free book offer for The Iceberg Effect in one or more of the initial batches of emails right after you subscribe.
To expand on this, I should set up a second automated email sequence to follow up with those who click on a product link from the first email sequence but do not purchase anything. I wrote this down on my “to-do” list to consider when I have more time. Testing this and seeing if it makes a difference would be interesting.
The number of clicks on product links also increased quite a bit. In January, activity was up compared to previous months, then down 75% in February (I don’t know why), and then up 550% in March!
The click activity tends to be inconsistent month-to-month, so it’s hard to pinpoint the trajectory for the rest of the year. I want to keep an eye on this.
Sales
The last category I’ll discuss in the post is sales. This was interesting- I had a 110% increase in sales in March compared to January and February! Thank you to anyone who purchased a product! I am genuinely grateful and hope you get much value from them.
Summary and Other Considerations
What I have planned for April and beyond
One area of improvement is to increase the number of “double opt-ins” from my lead magnet.
I can explain how this works. When someone enters an email address and clicks the submit button on the opt-in page for the lead magnet, this is called a Single Opt-In. My website builder and email system, Affiliate Systems, is connected and the email system puts a “tag” on the subscriber called Single Opt-In.
The tag is simply a way to identify subscribers and put them into different categories based on certain activity. I literally only have two “tags”- Single Opt-In and Double Opt-In, so I’m NOT trying to be creepy and monitor every little bit of activity from subscribers!
Immediately after subscribing (aka they are tagged as a Single Opt-In subscriber), an email is sent out with a link to the lead magnet itself, such as the free video that I offer now. When someone clicks on the link to watch the video, the email system tags them as a Double Opt-In.
Those who complete the double opt-in process are added to my email list to get my email newsletter.
However, I’ve discovered that less than 50% become a Double Opt-In subscriber. This means more than half the people never see the video they opted-in to get.
So, I added some follow-up emails for those who didn’t complete the double opt-in process to remind them to go to their email and watch the video (and, therefore, become double opt-in subscribers).
I’ll test this in April to see if it works!
Besides this, I’ll continue posting 30-50 times each month on Quora and see how my numbers shape up in the coming months.
If you have any questions about what I’m doing or any of the strategies I’ve mentioned, feel free to leave a comment or email me at success@m.businessbuildingonline.com!