I’ve been working on my Complete Auto Loans asset now for almost 2 years. I was introduced to the idea of affiliate marketing from a guy I hired on Odesk to do some paid search management for me. He introduced me to his lead buyers and I built out the asset to start selling leads.
How to Market My New Asset
Paid Search Management was something I knew very little about. I began my journey focusing on optimizing Complete Auto Loans for organic keywords. At the time, my abilities to rank organically were still pretty dismal in comparison to what I know now. I did my keyword research, built out some pages, tried to develop a design that worked best for conversion and waited for money to start rolling in…. and waited… and waited. After a few months I did start seeing some very small trickles of conversions but the most I ever made in a month was $24 (not enough to live on…).
The game changer for came for me when I started to understand more about content marketing and outbound/inbound marketing strategies. My first huge success was when I distributed a Press Release one Sunny afternoon and made $40 while I was at Church with my Family… I was hooked!
The Beginning Stages of My Work
I worked the asset pretty hard for about 6 months and ended up making about 10 grand in the month of April 2013 and about $30,000 altogether. However, the amount of labor and article content that had to go out was taxing to me. I was also worried I was spending less time building my Internet Marketing Company which has been experiencing extensive growth over the last few years.
I ended up dropping the majority of my responsibilities with the assets to other people for a while. Some months it made pretty good money and other months it did not. I took some time to reflect on my success in the past and developed a plan to come at my content marketing in a different way.
Hubspot and Marketing Automation
I was introduced to Hubspot this last year through a book called “The Marketing Agency Blueprint” by Paul Roetzer. I highly recommend reading this book if you’re thinking about starting your own SEO company. Hubspot changed the way I viewed online marketing. I went from being an SEO who ranked keywords to actually being an online marketer who used content to engage persona’s to a specific action I wanted them to take for my client.
This was the beginning game changer for the new way I would be coming at my “asset” development in the future. I would first focus on developing my persona’s, targeting content towards them, and then wrap up everything with marketing automation software that would categorize them and e-mail them based upon their interests… slightly different then ranking a few key-terms.
Building a Real Business
If you’re going to do affiliate marketing or eCommerce development, make sure you’re building a real business. Real businesses communicate well with humans. They interact and provide value. I knew that my strategy before had mainly just been focused on writing articles that would hopefully rank short and long tail key-terms. My new strategy would be focused on the “value” I was targeting towards a specific demographic.
Where Things are at Now
I’ve streamlined my work to now be about 1 hour of focus per day on my Auto Loans asset. I was able to generate about $1547 in my first two weeks of effort. I consider that a big win for the first couple weeks of effort. I’ll continue to keep you updated on my successes.
Some of my future plans include:
- Hiring a virtual assistant from Odesk to help streamline some of the more automated tasks I do.
- Increase my payouts per lead by developing new partners in the auto loans space (15-20% increase payout)
- Organize my marketing automation plans into a more succinct system
Have questions or comments? Let me know below. Let’s learn to make more money together online!