The picture is of a witches’ grave.

We supposedly anyway. It’s pretty obvious the locals who buried thought she was a bit iffy because it’s the only time I’ve ever seen a skull and crossbones carved on a gravestone (although there were some suggestions when Margaret Thatcher died)

The grave is supposedly Alice Nutter’s, one of the Pendle witches who were executed on very dubious evidence in 1612 and is in the pretty little churchyard at Newchurch-in-Pendle in Lancashire

We were there this weekend, staying with friends and enjoying good food, booze and conversation.

My mate runs a ‘real world’ business. He has premises, vehicles, and all the trappings of an offline, totally unrelated to internet marketing business. His customers go to him because they want the service he provides.

So most of his marketing revolves around letting more people know where to find him.

He’s successful and is becoming more so by the year.

As an internet marketer I not only have to tell people where to find me and my products, but with a large part of my business (although not all) I have to convince my customers to buy from me.

Hence all the stuff you see in IM about copywriting, squeeze pages, persuasion, NLP and that lot.

So after the wine had been flowing a bit we swapped roles.

And it was REALLY interesting.

I came up with a new sales strategy that blew him away and he said he’ll implement immediately that should certainly improve his sales.

And he made a suggestion that I’ve actually been acting on for a while now but it brought it home to me that I need to do it a hell of a lot more…

Putting myself (or rather my affiliate link) in between my traffic and the services they want.

This means intercepting traffic that is looking for a service. Could be by SEO, CPA, banner advertising, links from sites or whatever and then making sure they click through my link before they buy the servicer they’re looking for so I get my commission

Classic affiliate marketing.

Obviously I need to grab contact details for this traffic as much as possibly before I send them on their merry way, but that’s easily done using LeadPages.

You get the score right? Affiliate marketing in it’s purest form.

The interesting part is HOW to intercept the traffic.

Well that’s what I’ve been focusing my attention on. Virtual real estate.

My team are building sites and software for me that I can control dynamically (and easily) to point visitors wherever I want them to go.

So we’re talking software with banner ads that I can change anytime I want and that will pop up in front of anyone using the software.

Sites where I can change the banner ads, content and links so that I can divert the traffic anywhere I want it to go – my own products, or affiliate services and products, or even to the sites of advertisers who have paid me to feature their images, banners or links.

It’s OLD skool

But if you control what people are looking at you can make money in a few clicks of a button.

That’s why newspapers feature so many of their own offers. Because they can’t lose – people are reading the papers anyway so just put any offer you want in front of them.

Controlling the channel – for example being able to insert an ad on a mobile app that is downloaded 10,000 times a week gives you a lot of power and potential income

You need a better example? Look at the Warrior Forum?

It’s making around $1 Million a year. Once you have the traffic you can monetize it.

And if the current ‘thing’ you have your traffic pointed at isn’t converting for you, change it.

You can do what you want when you control what your visitors are looking at.

I’m using a combination of search engines, PPC, links from other sites, email marketing, CPA and software based traffic to get people to my new sites.

I’m also building new sites and at the same time re-purposing old sites to make use of the traffic I’m getting.

It’s fascinating and bloody hell it works 🙂

Nothing new – not much is – but I thought I’d share a little of what I’m up to.

Comments welcome 🙂

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