Building a Profitable Internet Business-- A Chronicle
Part II, Updates
by Jack Hayford

Update March 2nd, 2005:
OK, take another look at the Progress Table. I've been saying that I'll take 300% growth per month and as of the last Update (below) it was looking like I would see about 500% growth for February (and remember, this is Leap Year - February was 3 days shorter than January or March). My growth rate in that all-important "Unique Visitor"category was actually OVER 1000%!

Now, no one says (except idiots and scam artists) that making money on the Internet is EASY. And it's not "easy." It does require work. All my work to date has resulted in a net profit of less than $200. Ouch. Not very impressive. But, I can see (can't you?) that by continuing to do what I am doing I WILL, in a few months, be making AT LEAST a few thousand dollars per month NET PROFIT. For me, the "shroud of mystery" has been lifted about how to profit on the web. The ANSWERS are out there! I've had to look hard for them... but I've found them!

Now, GETTING TRAFFIC (which I now know how to do) is JUST ONE PIECE OF THE PUZZLE. Right now, as I'm writing this, I have taken a break from my diligent study of SALES PAGES and AD COPY. That's what needs to be totally tested and refined next. Once you have traffic you have to work on your CONVERSION RATE. How many people are joining your mailing list? How many people are buying? You can make some serious money, once you know how to drive targeted visitors to your site, with only a 1% conversion rate - visitor:sale.

Did I make 46 sales (1%) from the 4600+ unique visitors that came to my site in February? NO, I DID NOT. And that's unacceptable! So, THIS MONTH'S PROJECT (in addition to continuing to search out and TEST new traffic-driving tools) is to TEST INDVIDUAL PRODUCT and SERVICE sales pages. Test the copy. Test the fonts, the colors, the length, the linking pattern, the headline, the call to action, the close, the P.S.

These are the things that YOU have to deal with as well to succeed on the web! But it's NOT ROCKET SCIENCE! It CAN BE LEARNED by ANYONE who wants it badly enough to ROLL UP THEIR SLEEVES, DUST OFF THEIR DREAMS and GO TO WORK AT IT!

Won't you join me? It's FUN!

Update February 15th, 2005:
You will see from the Progress Table that as of today, my unique site visitor count for February is up to 2491. Still puny but, as I said before, I'll take 300% growth and it looks like the growth rate will be as much as 500%, February over January.

So, what does this mean in terms of PROFIT? Well, unfortunately not much... yet. But this is a PROCESS... and I am in the very early stages of the build-out process. The results of my efforts to date are:

1. A few sales.
2. A few prospects.
3. A lot more visitors and page views.
4. More subscribers to my email list.
5. More bookmarks to my site.
6. My Alexa ranking has jumped from 4,357,260 to 1,599,622! In other words, the efforts I have made in the past few months to build visibility for my web business have made my site more popular than almost 3,000,000 (that's THREE MILLION!) more sites than it was before I started. (My goal is to be ranked in the top 200,000 sites within 90 days from now.)
7. My revenue from Google Adsense has tripled. (It's still small but it more than pays for the Pay-Per-Click ads I have on Google Adwords.

And, so far I have not bought any other traffic. I'm using the same free and low-cost traffic building tools that are listed here on the Home Page.

But I do want to tell you more about the Traffic Hurricane program that has been my major player in traffic building.

If you haven't done so already, I urge you to go look at the "sales page" for Traffic Hurricane. (It's not really a sales page because the program is FREE!)

This is truly an ingenius program. One of the KEYS to having a high traffic website is HAVING A LOT OF INCOMING LINKS! Links to your site from an external website. Traffic Hurricane is the way to get THOUSANDS of them. Yes, it takes time for the pages that you create with the program to get indexed by the search engines, but if you set up your pages correctly (Traffic Hurricane has an audio tutorial that walks you through the whole process!), THEY DO GET SPIDERED and show up in web searches!

Right now there are almost two hundred external links to my site. I have created maybe a total of 4000 Traffic Hurricane pages. My traffic has increased nearly 500% (mostly attributable to those incoming links) and only 5% of my pages have been added to the search engines (and I'm just counting the MAJOR search engines, not the hundreds of smaller indexes)!

Want to see what one of my Traffic Hurricane pages looks like? Click here. I have these pages for all of my various websites: My nutrition site, my consulting site, my music sites... all of them. And this program is FREE! (Now, if you want YOUR Google Adsense ads which pay you ad revenue - see my Traffic Hurriane page for reference - on your pages, you do have to upgrade to PRO which costs about $90. But you don't have to do that at all to get the major advantage of having all those thousands of web pages out there linking back to your site! The search engines spider them, add them to their databases, and WHAM, people find them and YOUR TRAFFIC GOES UP DRAMATICALLY! Try it!

That's it for updates for this week but STAY TUNED and GET TO WORK ON MAKING YOUR INTERNET SITE A PROFITABLE BUSINESS!

Update February 8th, 2005:
You can see from the Progress Table that as of February 8th, this site has had nearly three times the activity (including all-important unique visitors) that it had in ALL of the month of January and before that, well, there was virtually NO activity.

This is still just the beginning (ultimately the traffic has to be a lot greater and the conversion rate must be satisfactory) but I'll take 300% growth per month for starters (there's still almost three weeks left in the month!).

So, at this point I want to give you some specific details of what I have done to go from "0" to hundreds of visitors per day in a few months.

I Focused on CONTENT First!
Now, this may be the hardest part for you if you are new to the web or new to marketing. As I have been writing since college (and have a degree in English) creating content - STORIES, ARTICLES, etc. - this was the easiest part for me... but also very time-consuming. If I was going to make another website about a different subject, let's say fishing, I wouldn't write my own content. There are any number of places to get content that you can re-publish on virtually any subject. But make no mistake (as so many do) that a website WITHOUT quality content, WILL NOT attract quality traffic (the kind that converts to sales, aka "moola.")

As I say in my audio message on the Home Page, I do not have all the answers. In fact, I have few answers about how to succeed on the Internet. But it is incredibly comforting and EXCITING to know that there are PEOPLE WHO DO!

Before I continue and show you what I have done recently to TRIPLE my traffic, I want to tell you that what I have learned (and the results are PROVEN to me and hundreds of others), is that Ken Evoy has THE SYSTEM that, if FOLLOWED, WILL SUCCEED. Anybody, any topic, any product. And so, IF YOU ARE READY to get started making a serious income on the Internet (it won't happen overnight!), go here right now and start your business on SOLID GROUND with PROVEN CONCEPTS. You will see that what I am doing here is pretty much following Ken's advice, as have literally hundreds of other SUCCESSFUL Internet marketers. This "content first" concept, you will see, is the "C" in Ken's "C-T-P-M" success model... and IT WORKS.

Specific Traffic-Building Solutions
Once you start building your site around quality content, then you can begin to think about getting TARGETED traffic to your site. "Targeted" means people looking for your content!.

There are two main steps I took initially to attract targeted traffic to my webite:

I learned about XML (aka RSS). This is a very NEW way to promote on the Internet and most people are still not sure what it is or how to use it. But I can tell you this, it's virtually free to use, it's simple, and it definitely will bring TARGETED traffic to your site. There is a terrific pdf tutorial on this site that will bring you up to speed quickly on RSS. Click here to see it and download it.

Why should you provide an RSS feed?
"Because this is going to be the hottest way to provide regular information updates in 2005... Embracing RSS technology now can put you on the fast track and give you an edge over your competitors who are slow to embrace this hot new technology..." --Arun Agrawal, www.SEOtop10.com

I started using Traffic Hurricane. Traffic Hurricane is the program that we GIVE AWAY on the Home Page of this site. It's FREE. It's an incredibly powerful tool, if used correctly, to get YOUR KEYWORDS ranked high in the search engines. Think about it. Where do you go when you want to find something on the web? The SEARCH ENGINES. There are literally hundreds of "terms" that someone might use in searching for the kind of site you run. Let's go back to the fishing example. Think how many different terms (keywords) someone might use that relate, in some way or another, to fishing. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands. How would you like YOUR SITE to come up whenever someone types in ANY OF THOSE TERMS? That's the power of Traffic Hurricane and I urge you to go get it now!

Immediate Traffic-Building Solutions
These first two "solutions" have been really important in my efforts to start building QUALITY TRAFFIC (and a lot of it!). But they do take a while to learn and implement. Like you, I needed to see some results quickly, if for no other reason than to just feel like I was making progress! (We all need a warm fuzzy once in awhile!). There are two specific "no brainer" tools that I have been using to get INSTANT TRAFFIC. (Traffic that you can see the same day.) The first is called Instant Buzz. Instant Buzz is NEW. And, at the moment, you have to be INVITED by an Instant Buzz Member to join. But it too is free, simple, and has immediate positive impact on your traffic. If you would like to check out Instant Buzz just send me an email at says "INVITE ME" in the subject line and I will send you an Invitation (email jack@hayfordconsulting.com).

The next IMMEDIATE RESULTS solution that I have been using is a "Start-Page Program" called WebBizInsider. There are lots of "surf for credit" programs out there but most of them don't give a very good exchange rate. Some you have to visit five pages or more before getting one visitor to your site. WebBizInsider offers a one-for-one exchange. Visit one site, get one visitor. It's pretty easy to add a hundred or more visitors to your site every day with just this single program. They also have really good reporting features and some very attractive "Pro" features that are pretty cheap if you want to upgrade. But for FREE you can easily get some quality traffic headed your way TODAY. Check it out!

I will give you more updates as I continue to evaluate my site-building progress!

--JH

Jack Hayford has been a professional network marketer and MLM consultant for over twelve years.