Web Income - The Right Way and the Wrong Way
The web is a terrific medium for generating income. However, as with most things, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.
An article today on BBC News sheds light on how spammers make money. It turns out that even extremely low conversion rates - around 0.00001% according to the report - still make it a profitable enterprise for the spammers.
How did they come up with this number? The enterprising researchers conducting the study, at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, infiltrated the Storm network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail. The researchers then routed their own fake spam campaigns through this network and tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site. After approximately 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted (of course, no pharmaceuticals were actually sold).
28 sales out of 350 million messages? If this is representative of how real spamming works, it is clear that this is not a particularly efficient model of selling. Of course, spamming is quite obviously wrong; but the underlying lesson applies to milder situations as well. Any site or email that does not attempt to first qualify the prospects a little, will face this problem of low conversion rates - for example, an advertisement for Star Wars action figures on a site that focuses on the benefits of aroma therapy.
Obviously, this is not how you want your own web conversions to work. What you should focus on instead, is to build a following of users/readers who like your offerings (content, products et al) and are actively interested in your niche or subniche; your job is to turn them into raving fans!
These users will be pre-disposed to buying from you. With a little ingenuity and initiative, you can set up a program where they buy repeatedly from you, allowing you to serve their needs again and again. Since the cost of customer acquisition is typically the single largest Marketing expense in web conversion, selling to your existing customers can be extremely profitable.
In any case, stay away from spamming - it can trash your reputation and cause your emails to get filtered out. Starting and growing a business is hard enough as it is - you don't need the bad karma!
An article today on BBC News sheds light on how spammers make money. It turns out that even extremely low conversion rates - around 0.00001% according to the report - still make it a profitable enterprise for the spammers.
How did they come up with this number? The enterprising researchers conducting the study, at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, infiltrated the Storm network that uses hijacked home computers as relays for junk mail. The researchers then routed their own fake spam campaigns through this network and tried to tempt people to visit a fake pharmacy site. After approximately 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted (of course, no pharmaceuticals were actually sold).
28 sales out of 350 million messages? If this is representative of how real spamming works, it is clear that this is not a particularly efficient model of selling. Of course, spamming is quite obviously wrong; but the underlying lesson applies to milder situations as well. Any site or email that does not attempt to first qualify the prospects a little, will face this problem of low conversion rates - for example, an advertisement for Star Wars action figures on a site that focuses on the benefits of aroma therapy.
Obviously, this is not how you want your own web conversions to work. What you should focus on instead, is to build a following of users/readers who like your offerings (content, products et al) and are actively interested in your niche or subniche; your job is to turn them into raving fans!
These users will be pre-disposed to buying from you. With a little ingenuity and initiative, you can set up a program where they buy repeatedly from you, allowing you to serve their needs again and again. Since the cost of customer acquisition is typically the single largest Marketing expense in web conversion, selling to your existing customers can be extremely profitable.
In any case, stay away from spamming - it can trash your reputation and cause your emails to get filtered out. Starting and growing a business is hard enough as it is - you don't need the bad karma!
