Rich Sage Community Progress August 2008

During August of 2008, I made a major shift in my effort to build my readers.  After publishing the latest update to the Rich Sage dot com site, I am now making minor changes and additions to make it a large community  –both public, via several forums, such as the FREE AD FORUMS, and publishing areas and my private membership, the Rich Sage Underground.

In the case of the Rich Sage Underground, I am experimenting with the sales page.  I’ve made around 3 update and upgrades to the text and look of the page.  As with all things, the “Membership Invitation” as I call it is a work in progress.  At this point I have done all I can.  My next step is to work with a professional writer to develop the page and refine the copy.

After that I can have a graphic guru work on the page layout and make it a professional setup.  All of that will get done in September, before I embark on a several thousand dollar per month ad campaign.

More about my traffic building and monetizing plans…

Monetizing with Ads:

It simply does not work, unless you have several thousand visitors per day.  Advertising is also a bit unreliable.  With ONE EXCEPTION:  CPA  –Click per Action ads. I will be changing most of the external ads that are featured on the site.  Taking their place are ads for my own programs, products and services.  I’ll essentially display my own ads that pay CPA commissions via my affiliate program.  I am building my monetizing efforts using my own programs.

I’ll also keep the Google Ads running because of my “Earn $123 dollars per day with Adsense” and what I believe can be achieved using it in the long-run.

The monetizing plan as now narrowed down to CPA type of setup and my own memberships, products, services and applications. A good example of that is the RichSage Marketplace that I setup using a Clickbank data feed.

Rich Sage Traffic Building:

Most of the first year efforts to build traffic were done solo — I researched and executed all the work from article publishing to search engine optimization.  Now it’s time to “hand over most of the work” to a professional and outsource my writing and some of the advertising.

All this is possible because I can now calculate the revenue PER visitor that I get to Rich Sage dot com. I can in the next six months nail down a budget on a monthly basis for advertising and marketing.  In the case of the Rich Sage Underground, I can calculate the exact conversion rates and return on ad investment using Google Analytics.

I am more than ever convinced that the best long-term approach to online success is to in various way “pay for visitors”.  Organic traffic is fine –however, from a commercial point of view, paid traffic is more and more sustainable, predictable and available to expose my brand and products, and is clearly the way to go.

I’ll end up spending around 20% of revenue over the next year building traffic by advertising.  I should add that this is revenue MINUS affiliate commissions.  Otherwise, after paying staff, advertising and affiliate commissions, there might not be anything left!

Anyway, the numbers are very important and I’ll discuss them as they come in month after month.  I like numbers  –they greatly clarify any point.  Until the numbers work, really, everything that I talk about is just theory.  Only when the numbers work can I proclaim what I have done and succeeded with as fact and that I have made great progress.

Carpe Diem,
Rich Sage