Creation of a Profit Pulling Site Part III

This series shows step by step how I work towards creating a profitable site to bring in hundreds of dollars a week, all on autopilot. I am giving you an opportunity to see the reasoning behind the different steps that I take.

You may remember from part one and two of the series, that I decided to create a site with free ebook and program reviews.

I had decided on the name Reviewitfirst.com and found a free site template that would do the job for the site.

Site Graphics

I decided to keep the site nice and simple.

I used Hemera graphics to choose the part of the graphics. You may recognize "Hemera Hank" (as I call him) which I used for the reviewitfirst.com graphics:

He should look vaguely familiar to you. He is the same person appearing on the front page of the Small Business Web Site.

No, that is not my smiling face up there, sorry. Here's my picture in case you were wondering. My modeling career never panned out ;-) and Hemera Hank had better graphics available than me.

The front page of the Reviewitfirst.com site is pretty boring actually.

There isn't much to do except for read the minimal amount of sales copy to convince people to sign up for the "Review it first Newsletter".

This "minimalist approach" is intentional.

I want people to come to the site and have very few options:

• read the benefits
• signup for the newsletter
• or leave

The site spells out the benefits of signing up:

• they are notified of reviews when they are released
• a very interesting bonus ebook is given to them for free
• it is the only way they have access to the reviews

As the site starts out, there are no internal links to the reviews within. In other words, the only way to get to the reviews is to sign up for the newsletter. The emails contain the links to the articles.

One of my top goals is to build my list as much as possible. This is where the profit down the road comes in. I'll share more about that shortly.

The Autoresponder

One very important thing for me to have in place from the beginning was my autoresponder.

This allowed me to start capturing names right away from anyone who wanted to signup for the newsletter.

I already had an unlimited autoresponder account which allows me as many autoresponders for my sites as I want.

I have a few dozen set up for various sites and it still costs me the same amount ($17.95/month) regardless of how many I set up.

The newsletter was set up to only require two things from subscribers:

• their first name and
• email address

This is typical for my newsletter signups for two reasons:

• I want the first name to personalize the newsletters
• I don't want to ask any unnecessary info that might prevent someone from signing up

Adding The Reviews

I decided to add 3 or 4 reviews at a time. When I had a few more to announce, I would let the list know about it. This would keep the interest in receiving the newsletters high (which is critical).

By "announcing" the new editions, it would create more interest and immediately send a flood of visitors to the reviews.

I gave some thought into what reviews I wanted to do first. Some considerations I gave were:

• Mostly positive reviews initially, because these were after all hoping to get an affiliate sale or two
• Not all 100% positive because that simply isn't the case. Some ebooks and programs are better than others. Some are excellent, some terrible.
• reviews of products with high interest. I want to get as much return for my effort as possible. Why write a lot of reviews initially for products no one would possibly be interested in? I chose some products that were popular to generate more interest (and more affiliate sales if they wanted to get it).

I tried to be as fair as possible in the reviews. Any links to the product were done in the mentioning of the article not as a sales push.

Getting Set For The Rollout

Once I had some content in place, I also made my welcome message and first email followup for the autoresponder.

The welcome message had the following functions. It:

• confirmed that they were signed up
• gave them directions on how to download the free bonus ebook
• told them how to unsubscribe if they wanted to
• informed them that they would be receiving the very first reviews very shortly

I then scheduled the first reviews to be sent out one day after the signed up. This way they aren't made to wait too long. It also gives them a little time to look through the bonus ebook that they received for joining up.

Time To Get Rolling

With some reviews in place and the autoresponder set to accept subscribers, it was time to start the traffic coming.

I used a variety of ways to get visitors to the site and was happy to have my first affiliate sale fairly quickly after the roll-out. At this point (a few months ago), I had spent all of maybe 6 to 8 hours total getting it ready to go.

Coming up:

• starting the traffic flow
• the profit stream starts to flow
• getting 1,000 subscribers quickly
• multiple side benefits to the site
• joint venture deals arranged