Two Things To Make Money

You Only Need Two Things To Make Money...

In well over half a decade in online marketing I've seen newbie hopefuls be convinced into needing a never-ending stream of things to make money.

"You need a website," the gurus say.

OK, the newbie responds. I've got a website.

"Now you need a designer to make it look nice."

Done, the newbie says.

"Next you need a copywriter so the words sell."

All right, but this is getting expensive.

"An autoresponder is absolutely necessary."

OK...at least I can get one at low or no cost...

"And get that writer back so they can pen you some emails."

Ah, crap. All right, I guess.

"Everybody's using this whiteboard video maker now. You need that."

Oh, everybody's using it? I definitely need that!

"If you don't use browser popup notifications you'll be left behind."


...and the list goes on forever. It never ends. There's always something new that you absolutely must get because you can't make money without it.

Or so the gurus say.

two things to make money overdone window dressing ornaments flashy

You Need Just Two Things To Make Money

That's funny, because:

> I made my first offline consultant sales without a website. Made many, many times the dollars of what beginners in my field were making, too.

> I sold my first info product without an autoresponder series. Or much of a funnel, come to think about it.

> I never needed fancy gimmicks to make money, either. Probably because I never bought into the idea that they were necessary. And while I observed advice and experiences from other people, I didn't follow them as if they were the Pied Piper.

Nope, I made money from the beginning and I did it without any of these things the gurus insist you must have.

What I did have was the two things you do need to make money.

All you need are this pair of factors. Everything else is just window dressing.

Here they are:

1. Traffic

Yup, you need a group of people who admit they have a specific problem. This is also called a niche, a target market, a market segment. It's made up of the eyeballs and brains of real people. Figure out where they are; get them to flow to you.


2. Conversion

You need a solution to that specific problem your qualified traffic admits to having. When you put the offer for that solution in front of your traffic, you do that in the form of a conversion tool. It could be a sales letter, a VSL (video sales letter), a live closing call.

That's it.

You don't need anything else.

How You Can Use The Two Things To Make Money

Your conversion tool can be ugly. My first one was. (So was my solution fulfillment method, initially. No one cared. The content was great, so they loved it.)

But I had qualified traffic running to that conversion tool. Those people needed my solution...and they knew it.

All I used was a simple sales letter.

I'll never forget my first online info product sale: it was a Friday night in December 2011. Someone in Australia needed help with sales. They'd never talked with me, but the sales letter (my conversion tool, remember) demonstrated enough proof that I could solve their problem. So they clicked the Buy button and sent me $20 over Paypal.

Was it a lot of money? Certainly not, especially considering my offline sales volume. But it proved to me that it could happen, that people would buy online.

Traffic...and Conversion. Those two things are all you need to make money.

Is your focus on the right two things to make money? Or have you been distracted by the window dressing?

If you know all of this already and have been nodding your head vigorously, and you're great at the Traffic side but have had a struggle with scaling the Conversion, talk with us at The Closing Engine.