#44 – 7 Reasons You Aren’t Making Enough Money From Your Websites

What you will learn

  • Why not seeing something through is a leading cause of failure
  • Why you should never drop what you are doing and to copy another idea
  • How vanity metrics mislead 97% of people
  • Why trust matters
  • How focusing on the wrong things leads to lower profits

A lot of people aren’t making as much money as they could be from their websites. The same problems seem to keep appearing again and again.

In this episode, we look at 7 reasons why you aren’t making enough money from your site.

Full Transcript

Mark: Hey guys, welcome to the Authority Hacker podcast. Today I am here again with Gael.

Gael: Hey, how is it going guys?

Mark: Today is actually the part two of our three-part launch series. On Monday we are going to be launching Authority Hacker Pro, that is Monday the 12th of September, and so we’re doing this series, kind of as I alluded to promote that. If you haven’t checked out episode one which came out two days ago, please do that first, this kind of follows on from it. In episode one we were talking about all of our failed sites, which we’ve done over the years. Today, we are at part two and we are going to be talking about seven reasons why you are not making enough money with your site.

Gael: I think the first mistake people make, and I am going to start with it, the first one is giving up too early. Sites take a long time to succeed, and actually as time goes, it takes longer and longer, and we are having these discussions with Tung from Cloud Living, with Perrin etc, before we would be able to publish thing on even established sites, and within three to six months we’d get some traction. And now, it’s up to a year for content to get any kind of traction from Google and so on. And we talked about examples of sites yesterday, like the ancestor of Authority Hacker which was TrafficTeo.com where we gave up well under a year, I think people miss evaluate how long it’s going to take for them to do well and that is one thing that I think people do with these sites.

Mark: Yeah, I don’t think it’s they are miss evaluating it, I think it’s they are being sold this idea of make money online- what I think of that phrase, the first thing that comes to my mind is all these cheesy sales pages with pictures of Ferraris and stuff, i think that back in the day, 10, 15 years ago, it was possible to make a lot of money very quickly, but the fact is it’s not like that anymore, I don’t know anybody who makes big money in year one in online business.

Gael: It depends on what you call big money, but you can make a 100 k on year one if you do really well, but you won’t make tens of millions of dollars.

Mark: That’s the exception, that’s not the rule, so, it takes a least a year for most people, probably two to really get to the I would say quit your job level, do you think that’s fair?

Gael: Yes, once again, I don’t like putting time on success, because that incentivizes people to say okay, it takes two years than I am just going to do nothing and wait two years now when my site is online. And, so I want to say, that includes working hard during that time, right?

Mark: Yes. I mean not just working hard, but working harder than you have ever worked before, during that time.

Gael: Yeah, because, I see so many people asking me how long is that going to take, how long is that going take, and I see a lot of these people if I ever answer that question they literally just wait that time and do nothing in the meantime.

Mark: I guess there is a time element in what you are alluding to, like Google taking a certain amount of time to- I don’t know what you would call it-

Gael: For me, I am not going to go to deep into that because that is not the topic of the podcast, but there is that sandbox effect that people talk about, where you don’t really rank much at the beginning, and for me there are actually different levels of it, usually there is the three/six months one, and there is the one year mark and then two year mark etc. And, we can see it with especially on the analytics for Health Ambition, and we are actually going to share the analytics in the podcast that is coming on 20th of September, but you can see these massive spikes where Google just gives us some love once a year and the traffic goes way up. And, it is still happening today, so there is that level of trust that grows over time with search engines. But that is not a reason for just posting and waiting.

Mark: And I think that also one of the big difficulties is actually getting any kind of feedback metrics early on, I think a lot of people have the problem where they don’t really trust that this is the real thing and you can actually make money online and all that kind of stuff, so there is a certain element of trust that you have to put in whoever has told you that this is a thing. I know when I was first getting into this, I didn’t know a single person, online or in real life that was I would say like a friend of mine who was doing well, so I couldn’t really get that reinforcement from.

Gael: Otherwise, it’s all stories, they are all lying to us, or something, and it’s hard to trust it, it’s hard to believe that it can happen to you or that it can happen in your social circle and your little town or something like this.

Mark: Yeah, that is exactly right.

Gael: That is what makes people give up early I think. Let’s go on point number two. Point number two is getting distracted when you hear that whatever is a good niche, and I think that happens a lot and we try to not be-

Mark: It still happens to us, these days, we catch ourselves doing it.

Gael: Yes, and it’s funny actually, we are about to start a bunch of new sites and I’ve been brainstorming a bunch of content ideas and stuff, and niche ideas and so on, and it’s true, you look around and you are like, oh my god, this is doing well etc. But, first of all, one thing I am doing is I am putting a huge backlog of content for Authority Hacker and Health Ambition to get done, so that when I am working on new projects it actually is what is making us money right now is actually making us more money, and then I get to that, but anyway, it’s one thing, these make money online blogs, including ours, these case studies of people doing well do extremely well, we did the one with Perrin, it’s already the third most commented post ever on the site, right, and that was released something like ten days ago.

​Mark: Yeah.

Gael: I imagine over time it is going to definitely stay in the top 3 for a long time. It’s been a long time since we broke that top three of most engaging blog posts. It’s the same, I read the case study on Tung’s site as well, about that guy doing these review sites and then literally at least ten people ping me on Skype and Facebook and stuff like oh my god, what do you think, do you think I should do it too, etc, and the truth is, when these case studies come out, it’s basically too late already. A million people, not a million, but a lot of people will do that. And you are going to end up competing for the exact same keywords doing the exact same stuff. Essentially, you kind of want to wait two or three years to actually even consider that niche I would say, and often, when you are ready to drop everything off that you are doing to jump onto a new niche and start a new project, it’s probably that once again, you are giving up too early, it kind of ties back to point number one, at least that is what I think, what do you think?

Mark: Yeah, I think a lot of people over exaggerate their success, even in blog posts or anecdotally or when they are drunk at bar or something like that, they say oh yeah, I am doing really well with this and then the person they talk to think oh, I can also do very well with that and they essentially try and copy them which I am always again, setting you and Perrin into podcast on copycats and why it’s a bad idea, but there is that aspect of it, there is the aspect which yes, we alluded to before is like it takes a big amount of time both for a year or however long that is, but both and in terms of your own time invested in the project for it to become successful, I think that if you are constantly jumping, you are doing the initial groundwork not having amazing success because you are only a few months in, and then you get distracted by someone else saying oh they are making good money and then you jump in and yous tart from scratch again, you are constantly just starting from scratch it’s like playing an MMO from level one to level 20, 50 times over with each different class, you are never going to experience the end game content with that.

Gael: Alright, we just lost 95% of listeners.

Mark: [laugh]

Gael: That MMO means Massively Multiplayer Online RPG so-

Mark: That’s the thing, though, I’ve literally played World Of Warcraft I think six times to level 40 but never above level 50, it’s the same principle that applies.

Gael: Yeah, it’s the same, and, I mean, it’s kind of like this shiny object syndrome people talk about.

Mark: Yes.

Gael: It’s like you go in one direction you walk five feet, then you see something else in the opposite direction you walk 5 feet, 10 feet even, and you end up exactly at the same spot two years later having nothing done. And I’ve seen a lot of people having done that and having bought a lot of courses as well and still having nothing done. I’ve had one on the chat for one of our products the other day, and he was like oh yeah, I am following this thing for two years, etc, and I am like, okay, is your site up, and he is like, no, I still don’t have the site and I am like, well you are waiting for that magic formula to come into your lap and to just copy someone else’s success exactly with us telling you which tools to write etc, it’s never going to happen, you are going to have to actually stick to one thing and build it up over time.

Mark: I think the overall lesson is getting it done, whatever mistakes you made and building your site or focusing on a specific niche or anything like that, none of them are nearly as important as actually just doing something, doing it and moving forward or at least I think that.

Gael: Yeah, you can correct your mistakes, start a basic blog and figure it out and then it’s easier to then, so many people are like oh my god I am not going to start my site until Authority Hacker pro comes out as well, I heard that a lot and I am just like, no, just figure something out, buy your domain, the worst case is you are losing ten bucks on a domain if it is really really really bad. But, you will be better off if you have it a couple of weeks ahead, now not anymore, but these are people I talked to a few weeks ago, in the middle of August. And, yeah, they are just holding on and holding on, and when we tell them that we are going to be releasing blueprints all the time, I am pretty sure some people will be like oh no, I am not going to start until the next blueprint is released and then the next one and then the next one. And, I am just afraid that it’s just not the way to go, you just get distracted by one thing and that’s it. Let’s talk about the next point now.

Mark: Okay, this is one of my favorites, because we used to run,

Gael and I used to run digital marketing agency and work with quite a lot of different clients, several hundred over the years, and this was a major pain in our but, I would say, ‘vanity metrics’ as we call it, so this is focusing on things which don’t really matter. A lot of people when they talk about succeeding online or having a successful site, they focus on things like how much traffic they are making, how many blog posts they are publishing, how many email subscribers they are collecting, because these things are great to give you an indicator or some kind of feedback that you are moving into right direction, and that is fine, you absolutely need to pay attention to the traffic and focusing on growing that, you absolutely need to focus on producing more content, you absolutely need to focus on collecting more emails and we spend a lot of time trying to improve these numbers. But, at the end of the day, these aren’t the things which determine your success. You can have a lot of traffic, you can have a lot of content, you can have a lot of email subscribers, and still be making no money, and we’ve literally done this several times over I think, with Health Ambition. In fact there was one time when we were, I think it was when we were on Ontraport as our email provider, we were making almost no money from email marketing, and we ended up pushing into the higher tier package, it was several hundred bucks a month, which so having so many email subscribers was a bad thing for us in that case.

Gael: We were considering shutting down the email list.

Mark: Yeah, it was quite funny. You are maybe thinking with all that okay, so I’ll just focus on my revenue. And, you are almost right there but not quite. Every month Gael and I have a review of all our sites and we have a spreadsheet for each one, focus, and we run all the numbers, figure out how much we are making. But, again, most people when you focus on revenue, it’s not the end goal; the end goal should be net profit after tax. You need to take into account all sorts of things there, your costs, how much you are spending on writers, how much you are spending on tax or VAT if you are in the European Union, if you are spending money on things like ads you need to work that into the calculation as well. And so, once you have this understanding of your net profit after tax each month or each quarter or however you want to do it, then you can really start to assess is what I am doing going to move the needle. If you are producing more blog posts, that is going to produce more traffic, it is going to get you more email subscribers, that is going to get you more revenue- great, but if there is a gap in that chain, anywhere, then the activity which you are doing might not really matter, or might not move the needle.

Gael: I just want to say as well so many public case studies of websites etc that [14:03 inaudible] because we haven’t done it yet, we might do it next year, I am not sure, so many of them literally give you revenue number without focusing at all on costs and profit, and people get super excited, especially lately it’s been the case for a lot of these FBA businesses, where FBA is fulfilled by Amazon, people selling items on Amazon and the revenue is always pretty high because you are selling physical items usually between 50 and 100 dollars, and you sell 20 items at 50 bucks and make a 1000 bucks and on Amazon it’s really nothing special, it can be a normal day. But, what people forget to say is that the item costs like 35 or 40 bucks, and then the Amazon fee is like 4, 5 bucks per sale, and so really the profit is like maybe 10, 15, 20, 25, it depends, and it’s much much much lower than the revenue numbers that you see on it, and it’s if you are reading any kind of public case study, and be very careful of what the costs are as well and don’t get hypnotized by revenue numbers because it is very easy to buy stuff for hundred thousand dollars and resell it for hundred thousand dollars, and say I have made a hundred thousand dollars, when really there is no profit. And that is also why I like content sites because essentially they tend to be lower revenue but much higher profit, like 85-90% profit margin.

Mark: Yeah. And I had a podcast with the guests who also used to run a digital marketing agency, and we were taking, it was like I can remember a time when we were making around or very close to six figures, a month in revenue, in dollars, but, almost zero profit, so it’s very easy at that point to say oh yeah, we have a six figure business, but what does it matter you are not making any profit.

Gael: Yes, and, it’s not worth very much either. As I said, it’s easy to buy something a hundred thousand dollars and resell it for a hundred thousand dollars, if you could just do that and sell a business for a high value I would do that all day. It’s not that complicated, and I am not going to name some very big public case studies but there have been a few that work that way and put high revenue numbers to impress people essentially.

Mark: Yeah. let’s move on to the next one.

Gael: The fourth one is that you are probably not trying to sell anything, and I think a lot of people, especially beginners, they believe there is some kind of magic that you put the site out there, you have a blog, and there is content on it, and it gets traffic and puff- money appears in your bank account. That is definitely not the case, all these content marketing SEO stuff etc, it’s just your way to get in front of prospective buyers, if you are not selling anything to them and selling is hard enough, it doesn’t just take a call to action on your site bar, to sell something to people, it just takes you really need to be quite insistent, and I think you get a good demonstration of that when we sell AH Pro, we will not be shy of putting it in front of the audience, and I think we earned the right to promote to them given the amount of free content we give away creating these podcasts and the blog etc, but, we get to selling, we are definitely not going to be shy, you are going to see retargeting ads, you are going to get a bunch of emails about it, you are going to get content that promotes it etc. And I think a lot of people are afraid to, and we have some friends that way, that are that way that are just afraid to not be liked by the audience because they end up selling to them when they are actually like a blog/ content site, and I think that parallelizes a lot of newbies that just they don’t want to offend people etc. And so yeah, you need to definitely have a plan to first of all have something to sell, and second of all, actually push it hard on your customers whether that is call to action in content, whether that is email, that is retargeting, that is whatever way you have to win your customers, that can be a Facebook page, whatever you are using, put it everywhere, there is that rule that says that you need to be exposed seven times to an offer to remember the brand and consider it, so that is something that I see a lot of people definitely being way too shy about. What do you think?

Mark: Yeah, and I just finished creating a blueprint for AH Pro about actually creating info products, and one of the sorts of key understandings in that is that a lot of people think okay, I am just going to have this product whatever it is going to be and I get ten thousand or hundred thousand, however, many visitors to my site per month, so one or two per cent or something they are just going to buy it, but it really doesn’t work like that, gone are the days when you could put this little sidebar ad on your blog and a lot of people would click through you really have to get in people’s face, with sales, and consider this sort of, the whole funnel process and how many times people are going to observe your message, and how you can then do things like follow up with email automatically, retarget them, with ads, all these kind of different ways to get this repeated exposure. And so just simply having something to sell is not really enough anymore I would say.

Gael: At least if you want to make good money, you might get the ad sell from the site bar but you are not going to make a living from that. One thing as well is like once you have something to sell, you start thinking about the way you created content and all the free stuff that you create differently, because, I mean, at least the way we do it is okay, we have this product to sell, on Health Ambition that is like juicing ebooks and other ones that we sell, on Authority Hacker that is like Authority Hacker Pro and then we are like okay, what are the kind of things that our ideal customers are looking for? I am going to take the example of Authority Hacker Pro not because I like taking IM examples but because it’s an example that everyone will understand; so for example on Authority Hacker it was like well, people want to do keyword research, right, they like doing SEO, the people that follow us, so all these tools have these keyword difficulties metric now but they are all different, and some seem to be crappy and some seem to be great. Let’s actually run a comparison and honestly we made almost no money from the article but that was a great way to attract just the right kind of people we wanted over, for when we actually do that launch, and same with like Perrin story, same with all that stuff, and what you do is you take your product and you are like okay what is the ideal customer, what is the kind of keywords they will tag, what is the kind of content they will enjoy reading to engage with the brand, before they buy and after putting call to actions on that type of content and strong call to actions and that is how you generate a lot of sales and you capitalize on all the good will and free stuff that you have been giving away. I think that is quite important and really, there is no magic, you don’t just put a website up and blog and make money, you need to sell something and if you have nothing to sell, the audience sees the product and you are selling access to them through advertising. That is the only way to make money. If you are too shy, go stronger and as I said, we know people that make full-time living that could literally make two or three times more money if they were a little bit less shy on that, so really that can make a huge difference, actually. What’s the next point?

Mark: Okay, so this is one that I guess we experienced several times ourselves as we alluded to a Monday, is that you are either aiming too high or not high enough. And, in Authority Hacker pro, another shameless plug, we have these webinars and people often ask for feedback on their sites, on their pages, sales pages, whatever it is, and, often, this can be difficult for them to see unless someone else points out, but it happened I think last month, we have an example of someone who had a hiking site about, I am not going to reveal it, but it was about specific sub- sub- sub part of that, and my first reaction was like this is way too small of a focus, I mean there is a definite cap on that, it was the same with my site that I created a few years back about micro sim cards, I mean, that was just poor keyword research, but there is a definite negative thing about focusing on too narrow of a niche, you can pick any topic, any small topic, and make an amazing site covering all the information you would ever need to know about it. But, in many cases, if the best possible outcome of that is you make a thousand or a couple of thousand dollars per month, then that is not where you should be focusing on, if you are running a business, okay if it is a hobby, or something, fine, but, you want to be making money, you want to be making a good living out of this some day, then you need to aim higher. But, the counterpoint to that is a lot of people also aim too high or not really high but too broad, and I think that is what we did at least at the start with Health Ambition. Health is probably the, or one of the biggest topics out there. And, our site, we had no idea the direction we really wanted to take it, our thinking was millions of people are unhealthy or want to be healthier, so we will make millions, right? Well, not exactly. It’s very easy to be broad and lack any kind of focus and the difficulty later becomes that it becomes difficult to sell one thing to your entire audience. With Authority Hacker, most people who come to Authority hacker now at least, are interested in starting a site, have their own site, want to make more money off of it, that kind of thing. With Health Ambition, we still have this issue where we have a lot of people who want to do juicing, but we also have some people that want to have healthier teeth. There are some cases where the two can overlap, but generally, those are just two completely different subgroups of people. It’s difficult for us to, with things like email marketing to hit everyone with one blast if that makes sense.

Gael: Yeah, essentially running mini niche sites.

Mark: Essentially, yeah. And, how do we just focus on doing one thing only like juicing say, without getting too distracted, there are many benefits to that, and I think we would have progressed at much faster rate than we did, at least at the start.

Gael: Yeah, it’s hard to find out the right balance, I agree. But one thing in business I want to say is we always have these big aspirations of being widely successful etc, we are rarely as successful as we expect to be, but that’s why I think that you should definitely aim for something that can be a six-figure business per month and if you fail, you will only make five figures, whereas if you aim for something that can make four figures and you fail, you make high three figures, which in most parts of the world you can’t live off. I like having this margin of error, on both side, I think, so go for the market that is like trillion dollars, but don’t go for a market that is 50,000 dollars per year. Mark: Yeah. If you are going for a large market, then make sure that your angle is specific and your focus is not too broad.

Gael: That’s what we did on Authority Hacker essentially, Authority Hacker is essentially online marketing, but, the angle is very specific on building Authority Sites, and that’s why it worked, because there is that one vision of it, it’s that people buying to [25:56 inaudible] into and that allows us to polarize people despite the fact that we are talking about social media marketing, Facebook ads and SEO and funnels and all that stuff which is a lot of stuff.Mark: I think that leads quite well onto the next point, about trust. Number six is- people don’t trust you. I see this way too often these days, and there are many reasons for it, but with authority sites, people are not usually buying from you whether that is your own products or affiliate products, they are not usually buying because you’re providing them with new information or most of the time at least, it’s people buy because they trust you, so if you recommend a product, you are reviewing a product or you are trying to sell them your own product or whatever it is, then there is a certain amount of trust that you have to have, and I see far too many people making just basic mistakes I mean from a starting point, things like spelling and grammar, which I know you used to do a lot Gael.

Gael: Yeah, that’s why I put it on the list actually, I get an email a week people telling me that there is a spelling mistake in something I wrote, so yeah. Mark: Yeah, basically, there is this kind of more basic things and I would include branding and low-quality design and that is not to say you have to have amazing design, it just has to be middle of the road good enough, look legit. And the same with the branding, don’t go overboard on that, inconsistency is another one, if you have ten reviews and each review you are saying this is the best product for it, this is the best product for it, then people are going to spot out the inconsistency there; being too overly salesy, is another one, I see a lot, that’s when you are really just trying to force the product down on people, and, it’s a difficult balance to have, and I still think we are not perfect at that one ourselves, and it goes counter to what we are saying in when the previous point is about not trying to sell enough, but it’s 2016 not, people are a little bit more wise to sales techniques and sales processes, so if you are not actually providing any kind of value to people then there is a mismatch there. And the other one is, as I said at the start, people buy into you or if it’s not you then your persona, we did a podcast on this about having a persona for your site, Health Ambition is a good example of this, the persona, or the person who we say is writing all the content is a woman called Helen, and that is not actually the case, it’s just the made up person.

Gael: Really?

Mark: Yeah. There is a whole podcast about this, we are pretty transparent about these things by the way, and the reason we did it was because we found out that most of our audience was over 50 female and we are neither of those things, so there was a bit of a mismatch there. Yeah, there were few other reasons as well but that was I guess the main one. Understanding who your audience is and buying from them, people buy from people like themselves who have the same views, the same opinions, the same, it’s just someone that they can relate to more easy, first of all, if you are a faceless site, it’s like who is writing this, there is no name, there is no picture, there is nothing there than that is kind of like a few notches down on the trust ladder. It’s something that the most people need to I think, pay more attention to just because you have a website about x topic, that alone doesn’t inspire trust, you need to get across you as a person- that trickles down in a lot of ways, and when you are producing content, you need to have right personal anecdotes and stories, and we do that a lot on Authority Hacker, is we talk about our own experiences, good and bad, things we’ve done wrong.

Gael: I mean, the engagement is like through the roof when we do that, even Perrin’s post, I edited it, and the intro was completely different but I was like no, let’s start with a point high attention personal story, so that was the Xbox story when he sold it etc, which is all true by the way.

Mark: Yeah.

Gael: I was like, okay let’s try to do this kind of like high engagement tactics, and as I said, this is the third most commented post on the whole site so it is actually quite impressive what it can do to tell a little bit about the personal story of the person writing.

Mark: Actually, just one more point I want to make about trust is that, this doesn’t happen that much with our audience, I am not quite sure why, just the type of people that buy our products I guess, but I see a lot of people online who are selling really dodgy products, things like diet pills and just stuff that doesn’t work, doesn’t solve people’s problems, and so I mean you actually have to be genuine in helping people and that will inspire long-term trust which I think is possible to sell people a few diet pills or something but if they take them and it doesn’t work, they are never going to trust you again, and they are never going to buy from you again. But your most valuable customers are those who are with you long term, who when the next product comes out, that is actually good, you recommend it and they buy it from you, or get the commission on it, that kind of thing.

Gael: Yeah, I mean, it’s same with Authority Hacker, we get so many demands to promote [31:47 inaudible] products and we don’t send any of these promos, and the truth is, I know people making five figures a month from promoting these products, so it definitely it works for them at least. But, if I did that I know that half the audience would be gone after the third or fourth email about this kind of products, and often that is renouncing to some short time money to be able to all the time accumulate a bigger audience and still, you will make the same money eventually from these people it’s just that you need to put the right thing in front of them so they will actually have a good experience after they are done buying it.

Mark: Yeah. Alright, let’s move on, let’s go to the last point about focusing on the wrong things; do you want to start with that?

Gael: Yeah, okay, I see so many people doing that, and usually, these are the sites that are terribly designed as well, when we talk about trust, there is other people that usually have the exact same setup of focus blog as we have on Authority Hacker, and this starts to be a lot, I can’t wait to redesign Authority Hacker, and that is you are focusing on the wrong things and I am going to start first with the monetization, because that is what we care about, it’s actually making these sites profitable, and making money and I see a lot of people trying to do AdSense on sites that just don’t get that much traffic, if you have less than 50 thousand visits per month, using AdSense- don’t even try, you are not going to make more than a couple dozen dollars, it’s really, you are going to make very little money, so not worth it, you are wasting your time and you are focusing on the wrong thing. There is also a lot of people trying to sell stuff to people that have no buying intent, so if you have an informational keyword like how to ”install windows” most people will not buy Windows from your affiliate link, they don’t have the buying intent, they are not interested, they just want to know how to do that. In that case, normally these kind of things get a lot of traffic so in that case that is when you monetize with advertising, so that is kind of the opposite of what we talked about. Really what you need to do, what your job is when it comes to doing the right kind of monetization is looking at where the traffic comes from to your content and use Google Analytics for that, and put what makes sense in front of people, if they are looking for free information there is nothing to sell them, use advertising, if there is anything that you could either affiliate or sell from your own shop, if you have anything like that, then put that in front of them and you can make some money, so for example, I am going to take an example on Health Ambition, we have an article that is pretty popular, about the health benefits of peanut butter. Now, we have some Amazon links to organic peanut butter on the site, but it doesn’t generate that many sales, why- because so many people can just buy that same peanut butter in their local grocery shop and why would they order it on Amazon? It just makes no sense. However, we make pretty good income from ads because this page has a lot of traffic and a lot of really good links actually. That is what we do, on the other hand, we have content and that is not a specific one on how to lose weight in three weeks, or that kind of stuff where it’s very easy for us to find weight loss programs that we can redirect them to and make the affiliate sale. Putting these things together and really understanding what people want when they land on your page, so understanding the traffic source, is what will make you not do monetization wrong and so many people do that and all are stuck too much monetization at the same time, I would say.

Mark: Yeah, I was going to say, again, just finished doing this blueprint about creating info products and this is a very common thing it’s people will spend a lot of time building an info product because they want to have an info product to sell, by they haven’t really sort of understood whether or not their market or their audience is willing to buy it or indeed what kind of info product they want to buy and so they spend all this time making a product just because they kind of want to and they stop producing content, stop link building, stop focusing on the core activities of their business and get distracted by focusing on the wrong thing, in this case building an info product. I know I did that with the Never Fly Economy site and I did it after about two weeks of running the site, just because I didn’t want to spend the time doing the difficult things like figuring out how SEO works and that kind of stuff.

Gael: That is usually how it works, actually, there is the obvious thing to do next but because they don’t have the solution right now they just pick something else to do. ‘

Mark: Yeah, and there are many things with running an online business, which anyone in the world or almost anyone in the world can do without any kind of training, and the example I’d see the most is around design and designing a logo, because it’s very easy to hire a designer, all you need to do in that is if someone else is doing the design work, you just need to have an opinion and everyone can have an opinion about whether something looks good or not. That is not a difficult thing to hold an opinion. People will spend a lot of time in many cases a lot of money early on in their sites, creating a great logo, hiring designers to do that, going back and forth, spending a lot of time giving feedback, thinking okay, I am making progress and doing something, but that is not progress.

Gael: It’s busy work.

Mark: Yeah, exactly, that is just taking up your time, but again, it’s not moving the needle, so use a text logo until you get a bunch of traffic, or until you are making few hundred bucks a month. There is no point in doing something, spending money on doing a logo before that. And, I get that we all have, everyone has admin to do, you’ve got to pay your taxes, you’ve got to do your accounting, you’ve got to answer support emails, that kind of things, but really, if you are not spending 90- 95% of your time and more like 99% of your time in the first six months focusing on the core activities that are as I said really going to move the needle and get you more net profit after tax, then you are wasting your time, you are focusing on the wrong things. And, actually, that is kind of why we built, that’s not why we built Authority Hacker Pro but that was kind of like the main focus of it, or one of the main directions of it, was we wanted to teach people this step by step- how to do things, that they might not be aware of how to do it which is fine and we teach people how to do it, content production, how to outsource content, how to do link building properly and legitimately, how to do email marketing, how to sell through email marketing, all that kind of stuff, but, we are not doing this to make you feel good or even necessarily just to give you the information because if you really look around, the information is out there, for free, but in this case, we wanted to actually get people to do it, which I think is, I think which most info products especially most online marketing info products fail to do. The way we structured it, in the blueprint format, do this, then do this, then do this, with over the shoulder videos, templates to copy paste, the Facebook group for support, the webinars for live reviews, and latest information, the one on one calls for really personal strategy stuff, it’s designed to make people actually focus on the right things and do them. And, done is better than done perfect. Let’s wrap up there, I don’t want to get into too much of a sales page for that.

Gael: Yeah, I was going to say I can hear you smiling when you say that.

Mark: Yeah, okay, so let’s wrap up here, Authority Hacker Pro is launching on Monday, remember that it’s been April since we sold it last time we don’t open it that often.

Gael: It is going to be a while until we sell it as well, it’s going to come back, it’s going to take a while and every time-

Mark: Yeah, if you are interested head over to authorityhacker.com/pro and make sure you are on that list, you will a get notified when it’s available and potentially, in fact definitely, get a special discount when it launches, and the other thing is- don’t forget that on Friday, so that is the 9th of September, it’s part three of this three-part podcast where we are actually going to be looking at what is the title- 7 Ways To Make More Money With Your Existing Site?

Gael: Yeah, it’s basically the solution to all these things we’ve talked about, it’s the other side, 7 things that maybe you have thought about but that is probably going to refresh it, or new things that will help you take your existing sites whether it’s a tiny Amazon review site or that is a big content site and help you hopefully make more money out of it.

Mark: If you listen to that and you do even one of the things then you will make more money. It seems like a fair trade.

Gael: We’ll try at least. Alright, cool, well see you guys in the next episode, goodbye.