How I define success? More than $1m/year.
There's nothing wrong with money (who would be a member here if they didn't like it), but like the other people said, it's not just about that.
Also keep in mind all money is not equal.
It might help you to figure out what kind of lifestyle you want to live then work backwards.
As an example, you may start off saying you want to do $1m/year (very doable) but in fact you can get that standard of living for $500,000/year depending on where you want to live.
Also, you may realize that in fact you may need $2m/year to live the lifestyle you want in the place you want.
If I knew then what I knew now here's what I would have done:
Step 1 - figure out what I love doing so much that it feels like a hobby
Step 2 - develop a personal brand around that
Step 3 - start publishing content on that, with a call to action to join my list
Step 4 - develop a micro-continuity product around it.
For example, lets say your "passion" is "multiple orgasms for men".
Now let's take your $1m goal, let's look at real numbers.
You don't need a fucking billion links, you don' t need to be a fucking media buying rockstar. You need a simple ass list that you control which gives you direct access to a CAPTIVE AUDIENCE.
Let's say you start the "Multiple Orgasms for Men Insiders" Newsletter.
You are keeping it old school. You don't need a fancy membership site or all that other rubbish.
A simple as aweber account, or more like Interspire (advanced so you can mail on your own and control your list the way you want...more on that some other time).
See, it's a niche topic so you can easily be the "Worlds #1 Multiple Orgasms For Men" Expert.
Each month your captive audience of men (and women who want to please their man) pays you $4.95 for "insiders secrets"
-case studies
-exclusive interviews with experts
-graphics (lol)
$4.95/mo is an impulse buy and even in a recession it takes more effort to go inside paypal and search for the subscription (so you can cancel it) than to just forget about it
$1,000,000/$4.95 = ~202,020 readers aka customers
Do you think there are ~200,000 men on the planet interested in multiple orgasms in men? I think so.
Now the old way of converting people would be to send them to a sales page but that is not going to convert (according to the well publicized Clickz study 1-2% conversion rates are average for typical direct response sales pages).
So you are going to use leverage.....a.....WEBINAR.
This is going to give you 10x-25x the conversions. Let's take the low estimate - 10x. So, if you get ~2 million people on a call (you can autoplay the webinar check out stealthseminar.com), you will convert prospects to buyers like crazy.
But first you have to get people on the call right?
So how many clicks are you going to need?
Let's say your webinar sign up page converts at 30%.
So, you will need 6 million clicks to get 2 million webinar sign ups of which 10% or ~200,000 sign up for your Insider's newsletter.
Now in reality, not all the people who sign up for the call will show up, more like 50% (only if you are really lucky and create a killer pre-sales sequence....see Ted Nicholas' work on this).
The bottom line though is that you don't have to do a lot of thinking and this way is simple, gives you a google-independent business and YOU control all the aspects that matter...the traffic (because it's list traffic), the conversions (through the webinar) and the content (you can easily outsource this...or do the research yourself, lol).
No worrying about quality score shit, updating wordpress plugins, unapproved ads and the like.
You could get the 6 million clicks from JV Partners but that's another can of worms. A HUGE partner may send you 10,000 clicks so divide 6m clicks/10,000 clicks to see how many people you'll need to mail for you.
You could get some cheap targeted traffic with CPV. If your actual cpc is $.10 (try using adult traffic networks), it's going to cost you $600,000 to acquire ~200,000 paying customers.
This may seem like a big number but at least you have a goal! Even if it takes you 5 years to get there, you can avoid shiny objects syndrome because you have a solid understanding of the numbers you need to hit to get what you want.
And if you price point is higher, your webinar attendants rates are higher, your sales conversion rates are higher or your CPCs are lower - you can get their faster, easier and cheaper than described above.
But get this - the sweet, sweet beauty of enhanced lifetime customer value in the form of continuity is going to be your friend.
You will do the work of acquiring customers once - and get paid for life (the life of the customer that is).
Life time customer value is: avg sales price*no. of transactions*no. years customer remains with you (expected)
As long as you deliver value month in and month out you have your $1m/year in largely passive income without having to worry about the drama of getting traffic or tweaking sales copy or hiring a $250,000 copywriter.
Good luck....
