The secret that was left out of The Millionaire Fast Lane Book

[MJ DeMarco]

The question is, how do you get 12.000 visitors a day?

Hard work.

The only keywords that have such volume of traffic are highly competitive and the people that rank on top have deep pockets and full-time teams working on SEO...

I was a one man SEO team.

To get that volume you need to buy traffic.

Wrong.

While I don't remember the exact numbers, paid advertising (PPC) was probably around 25%. The rest came from SEO and affiliate relationships. I was on PAGE 1 for all long tail, targeted keywords. I also was on page 1 for some generics as well.

Do you see this forum has A LOT of traffic? As I write this, it has 313 people online and nearly 10,000 visited today.

Do you know how much of that I PAID FOR?

None.

Zero.

But I guess, to get traffic, I need to pay for it.

The problem is, when you look at PPC prices from networks like Google Adwords, specially for keys with significant volume, you realize that most clicks cost from $0.50 - $1.

I remember my PPC costs being around 50 to 60 cents per user, hardly cheap. There were some keywords I bidded low dollars. (1.08, etc.) In general though, my ROI on PPC was steadily declining due to increased acquisition costs and it was probably the lowest ROI, and unpredictable. I paid affiliates 20-45% - this was an acquisition cost I could project.

we know that MJ had a great domain

I remember being quickly disappointed (within months of purchasing it) that "type in" traffic was virtually nothing. The only thing the domain did was juice my SEO rankings and strengthen brand image.

making it almost impossible to operate a lead generation business via paid advertising, which limits scaling and expanding hugely.

Did I advocate starting a lead generation business recently? I don't recall doing so. I think its sad that all these people are rushing out and examining the "lead gen" business simply because it was something I did. There were reasons why I exited the business, one of which, was my perspective of its viability ongoing in the future. Additionally, what works today is far different than what worked yesterday. Nowadays, most traffic is social in nature.

The secret that was left out of The Millionaire Fast Lane Book

Sorry bro, there is no secret unless years of hard work is somehow a secret.

In closing, here is something to consider: Most of your premises are false and therefore, your conclusions will also be false.

 

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[Vigilante]

That's because you are still living inside the box of your own creation. There are a million ways around the mountain you have created. Read that sentence again, as you have created the mountain you stand before. In your post above, you still used the word can't. Until you can see past that, you are right... you essentially "can't."

In my case, I found one of the million ways around the mountain. In my case, none of the variables in your post above mattered. Why? Because we got the world's largest retailer to advertise our services for us, and for that we paid... nothing.

We didn't fit any of the single assumptions in your post above. We didn't sell our own product, we didn't have fat margins, and our average ticket was <$100.

Until you drop phrases from your vocabulary such as "you are limited to..." you are never going to think outside of the box enough to achieve scale. In my current business (unrelated to the business I sold as above)... I am not "limited to" anything. 99% of the people that would stand before my business would point out all of it's limitations. Meanwhile, my cash deposits continue to come in daily. If I listened to people who told me what couldn't be done, my deposits would be zero. What other people might see as barriers, we have learned to see as nothing more than diversions. Every bend in the road creates opportunities for people that can see past them to the finish line. Losers stop at the bend and assume they've reached the end of the road.

You have to want it bad enough to find your way around the mountain. If it were easy, everyone would do it. There's not a turnkey business model you can follow. The Millionaire Fastlane book didn't propose any replicable business model to follow. It proposed a mindset of rule breaking that enables you to tunnel through the mountain, forge new paths around the mountain, or climb over the mountain. The 99% will stand in front of the mountain, like you are doing, and propose it's too big for you to move. You've outlined a lot of reasons why things can't happen. How about investing energy in what can?

 

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[Vigilante]

Basically EVERY business that relies on being an intermediary can't afford to pay advertising... Which means, it can't scale! (unless the product in expensive enough to award a above average commission).

The last business I built and sold was entirely an "intermediary." It was a services business that aggregated and organized services, and had no owned assets of it's own. We didn't own a single screwdriver, ladder, delivery van or W2 technician. The business quickly scaled beyond our capability to provide infrastructure... we sold it in to a larger organization, and today it's the second largest installation provider in the country and serves the world's largest retailer as it's largest customer.

Take words like CAN'T out of your vocabulary. In the one post above this one, you used the word "can't" five times. You used the words "probably not," "impossible," and other limiting words just in your most recent post. Words create artificial ceilings where none need exist. If I followed your thought process above (and we had thin margins and the entire business model was structured on thin commissions) we never would have been able to do what we did. If I had the mentality of what couldn't possibly happen (I can't pay advertising, I can't scale, I can't bid on a contract with the world's largest retailer) the biggest accomplishment of my life to date never would have happened.

When you begin your thought process with all of your misconceptions about what "can't" happen, you miss what CAN happen if you have the guts and stamina to build a business based on a value proposition that fills a need. You're missing the forest for the trees.

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world." - Harriet Tubman

"Jump into the middle of things, get your hands dirty, fall flat on your face, and then reach for the stars." - Ben Stein

 

[DeletedUser2]

your fundamental thought process is flawed.

as an affiliate, you buy traffic at X and get it to convert to Y. make the spread.

affiliates make a commission on other peoples product.

instead create one.

before you do, go back, re read all of vigilantes stuff, Patrick stuff, and MJs stuff.

now if you are selling someone else's stuff, you are limited by what they set as a price (no locus of control there)
if you create your own product you can let the market set the price, by creating, or adding value.

you are also used to selling 1 product, where as as a product creator, we know that the money comes on the back end. our front end products pays for our customer acquisition.

to give you an example. customer acquisition costs $60. we lose roughly $40 bucks to acquire a customer, but up sells and other value adds increase this to an AVERAGE of $116 per customer acquired. once we taped our our merchant accounts for volume, we turn to back end monitization, so we utilize the emails and phone numbers we have acquired, and begin monetizing there with a call center. now we can see as much as $187 over a couple months from each customer.

Emailing affiliate products that are in line with what our customer wants, and is tied into the customer demographic can raise our income to over $200-250 Per customer over a 6 month period, and over $300 over a 12 month period.

your assumptions come from the affiliate model, where you have no long term value generated from your actions today. its a very shallow pool you have to play in, and as a consequence it breaks alot. campaigns, fail, or cant scale.

you also have 2 major things in your way that will keep you shackled to poverty, or just "enough" money. never true freedom, or success.
1. you have to be willing to fail. fail alot, fail often, fail hard. AND THEN KEEP WORKING ON IT. failure is part of a process. the process is more important than the results.
the successful results comes from the process and all the failures.
Go back to the book, look at the CENTS model. test your ideas against that model, not the forum. in a relatively short period of time you managed to piss off alot of really good people here WHO ARE ALREADY SUCCESSFUL. doing that says you have a talent for polarizing answers. great. see if that could be put to some use someplace else, such as your business.

2. your head space is cluttered with all the most limiting thoughts. instead of HOW CAN I DO THAT, you instead default to the lowest common denominator of the slow lane, YOU CANT DO THAT.
I ahve a friend who drove over 60M hits (yes 60 million) last year alone with SEO. how he does that, god only knows, but then again i dont do SEO. any argument around SEO not working he would laugh at. he doesnt like Paid traffic since he mastered SEO. the thing is he didnt start with you cant do that, he started with HOW can I do that. the rest grew out of the process.

get out of your own way, stay out of your heads limiting space, listen to some of these people, and go try to break any rule that you think exists, and im sure you will learn so much doing that one process, you will be able to come back here to answer all these questions yourself.

bottom line. be a creator not a consumer,
create your own products
create a funnel that deepens your value per customer
and you will find that you can afford even expensive customer acquisition costs for your product.
then print money.


hope that helps
Z

 

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[Vigilante]

What if I had listened to everyone who told me I was too small to do business with the world's largest retailer? What if I let my own fear about what "can't" happen decide my future? What if I didn't have the balls to break the rules?

You have an understandable blinder. You have the perspective that the world gives you about your own limitations. You will find 99% of the people you talk with agree with your viewpoint. That 99% has never broken the mold.

The 1% that don't agree with you are the people that I gravitate towards. MJ and dozens of other posters on this forum are in that 1%.

Your quest is noble. Your questions will lead you to a positive gain for yourself. You are intrigued enough to know there's something wrong with the limitations you have discovered (not realizing for the most part they are self imposed). Hang in there, keep asking questions, and keep challenging assumptions until you find your way over, around or through the mountain.

 

[Vigilante]

So don't go that way. Find a new way. We did.

The world's largest retailer continues to advertise that business for free. Why? Because we filled a need for them. We solved a problem, and filled a services related void in their universe. We added value. We have something under wraps that will recreate a similar metric, and it is about to happen all over again. Lightning is about to strike twice, and now I know how to manufacture lightning. It all comes back to creating something of value that solves a problem and/or fills a need.

If you can't get scale, it might be mores a problem of your value proposition vs. your ability to PPC. The best businesses grow organically and don't rely on the most expensive methods to generate publicity.

Good luck to you. It CAN be done.

 

[Vigilante]

He was here to make a (flawed) point. He basically was saying that MJ's model was not replaceable today... and that was the secret that was left out of the Millionaire Fastlane .

However, MJ has never advocated (that I have seen) trying to replicate his exact business model. In fact, he advises NOT to attempt that. His unique business was timely... but his thought process is timeless. The blueprint is not found in starting a .com lead generation aggregator that is scaleable and replicate-able by copying limos.com in different industries. It's the thought process of breaking the traditional mold and traditional teaching about economy, wealth and employment that's important, not replicating the exact method MJ used to build his unique business. There was no secret that was left out of the Millionaire Fastlane .

To that end, the original poster's entire premise was faulty, and he wasn't here to understand. He was here because he thought he had an intellectual, disruptive "gotcha" message.

Along the way, there were several things that I learned also. I dig threads like this, and even the intellectual challenge. I'm just stating that when the thread title pops up, insinuating that there was a secret that was left from the book (as if to sell more books...) that's what gives me the fingers-on-the-chalkboard sensation. We can have an intellectual debate about issues and strategy, but it shouldn't start with the premise/presumption that someone isn't telling the whole story.

 

[biophase]

I go away for a week and miss this whole thread!

I started reading this from the original post and was formulating an answer for him/her. But after going through the whole thread I decided not to post the meat of it. I'm sure he won't give a shit about me or whatever I don't know but I don't help rude people. Why would I spend time to help someone who shows up and insults others on this board? However, I also don't want to not help the ones who will actually read and appreciate this forum.

My main thing to ponder is, What is SEO saturation? What does it mean?

Even taking into account a super tiny niche, how do you achieve SEO saturation?

If red softball bats gets 100 searches a day, are you at SEO saturation when your analytics shows that you got 100 visitors from the keyword "red softball bats"? What about "cheap softball red bats?" mutliplied by the hundreds of other iterations and adjectives that people are putting in front of it?

If you rank #1 for every single possible iteration of red + softball + bats AND "adjective" + red + softball + bats, are you at SEO saturation?

What about about spot #2? What about the images spots? shopping? videos?

Is 100 hits a day the maximum that you can get for this search term?

What does it SEO saturation mean?

 

[Vigilante]

"Of all the skills of leadership, listening is the most valuable—and one of the least understood. Most captains of industry listen only sometimes, and they remain ordinary leaders. But a few, the great ones, never stop listening. That's how they get word before anyone else of unseen problems and opportunities."

— Peter Nulty, Fortune Magazine

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Dude, give it a FN rest.

Nothing we can say will change your mind.

You're convinced that no internet business started in 2012 can make money by using a mix of SEO, PPC, directory advertising, affiliate marketing, social media, word-of-mouth, and traditional marketing. (And yes, any successful startup NOW [or started 10 years ago] will require a mix of this, not "just SEO" or "just PPC".) Building traffic is a tiresome, evolutionary process requiring a mix of all the above.

You're searching for overnight success and "exponential growth" yet, you don't want to put forth any effort for it. You talk about 10,000 visitors a day but refuse to examine how to FIRST achieve 100 visitors a day. Nope, you want to launch and in 2 weeks, be at 10,000 visitors per day. Then you whine that "SEO is too slow." (Translation: I'm to lazy to do the hard work; I'd rather pay my way in)

You suffer from what I call the "silver bullet syndrome" -- you want someone to give you some secret magic formula that works in any market, in any industry, in any year, and an any economy. Essentially, you want someone to hold your hand and tell you "Do A+B+C+D and then you'll be RICH" AND you want it to be guaranteed. Moreover, your assumptions are constructed in a vacuum as if the market is static and not evolutionary.

Do you think my startup got to 10,000 visitors a day in a few short months? Years?

How about this forum? Think the traffic here happened overnight? Did you know this forum is over 5 years old? Where were you 5 years ago?

Anything substantial requires an effort that requires you to start at the ground floor from nothing.

You?

It appears you want to start at the top, or at least, find the elevator that will get you there fast and of course, have it be a sure-fire bet. You can't PAY your way to the top, you have to EARN it.

While I appreciate your support for TMF , my tolerance is thinning fast. You've asked for help, got it, and then shoved it back in the faces of people who took the time to respond.

I'm cool with you thinking whatever you want - it doesn't change my reality or the reality of people who are out in the trenches "doing it" versus bitching about it, and then trying to convince everyone else it cannot be done.




And BTW, I don't advocate affiliate/arbitrage marketing (earning commissions on other people's products) and none of the models in my book do either -- your entire argument is premised on a course of action I openly oppose.

Quit making shit up.

 

[Disruptive]

In The Millionaire Fast Lane book, MJ talks about his stats from his internet business:

He said that:

- at any given day, he had an average of 12.000 visitors to his website
- his "conversion rate" was around 12%
- his "unit price" was around $4

This means that for every 12.000 visitors, about 1440 would "convert" at $4 each, and MJ made around $5760 per day, or around 170k a month.


Now, 12.000 visitors a day is a lot of traffic...

The question is, how do you get 12.000 visitors a day?


You can't "blog/seo your way" to 12.000 visitors a day... The only keywords that have such volume of traffic are highly competitive and the people that rank on top have deep pockets and full-time teams working on SEO...

If you go with "long tail keywords", your chance of ranking on top are higher, but the volume is simply not there to get your 12.000 visitors a day, even if you make like 10 blogs/sites.


The answer is: To get that volume you need to buy traffic.

The problem is, when you look at PPC prices from networks like Google Adwords, specially for keys with significant volume, you realize that most clicks cost from $0.50 - $1.

If you find a keyword that costs less than that, chances are, it has insignificant volume or it doesn't convert at all.

And even if you think about buying ads directly from websites, you end up with $15-25 CPM's, which lead to click prices over $0.50 in most cases.


Having this in mind... let's run the math again on MJ's stats:

- at any given day, he had an average of 12.000 visitors to his website
- his "conversion rate" was around 12%
- his "unit price" was around $4

If you had to pay for those 12.000 daily visitors, at a PPC of $0.50 each, you would have to pay $6000.

Remember that MJ made around $5760 per day from the leads he sold... which means that if he had to pay for ALL his traffic, he was in fact operating at a LOSS of -$240 a day. Not so great...


Now... we know that MJ had a great domain... which by itself got decent "direct traffic" which obviously he didn't have to pay for... and maybe he was #1 for some relevant keywords but still... most of his traffic had to come from paid sources.


Maybe PPC was way cheaper back then... maybe CPM's were way cheaper back then... but nowadays the price of ads has just skyrocketed, making it almost impossible to operate a lead generation business via paid advertising, which limits scaling and expanding hugely.


I think this was left out of MJ's book.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

My question really is, what do you do when you reach saturarion via SEO if you can't afford to grow via paid advertising?

I NEVER reached "SEO saturation" with my business. There was always room to be ranked better.

Tell you what, once you reach "saturation" on SEO, report back here.

Ill bet you'll be able to afford to PPC advertise because your ROI on that effort will be nearly infinite. (You should be making a boat load). Sounds like your problem isn't SEO saturation, but a market that is too small. Scale is also a function of total available market size.

Where is your scale when paid advertising is not an option?

Word of mouth? Social media marketing? Sharing? SEO? Affiliates on a pay for performance? Content marketing? Video marketing?

You keep talking about SCALE as if it is this thing that happens overnight, or in a few short weeks or months. Do you know HOW LONG it took me to earn six-figures monthly? YEARS. The point of scale is to have the ability to move higher and higher incrementally -- with no ceiling -- not to do it suddenly overnight. (Although that's possible too with virality and PR).

 

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[LamboMP]

Ever hear of word of mouth? Have a great service and the word gets around.............

 

[Pinnacle]

The real secret that was left out of the book was whether to park your Lambo in the driveway or the garage after reaching the Fastlane.

Should I surprise people when I pull out of my garage, or let them admire the magic by leaving the car out in the open all the time? Questions like these MUST be addressed!

 

[Vigilante]

It's not that nobody has raised these questions before. Quite the opposite. They're raised weekly.

Some have found their way around them.

Others have stopped in front of them.

Hang around this forum for a while and you will see the revolving door of some. Some people stop at the inquiry. Some see the difficulty and decide to pick up another get rich quick book.

Your post wasn't revolutionary or unique. Your hypothesis has stopped many people dead in their tracks.

Without knowing the specifics of your challenge nor the nuances of your industry, I can tell you there are a myriad of ways to generate traffic to a web site that don't include PPC advertising.

I think you hit the nail on the head with regard to the experience from your perspective within the affiliate world. As an affiliate, you own nothing and are vulnerable to the whims of your owners. Traffic is your crack cocaine. You have an in depth knowledge of a corner of a singular focused way to harness traffic to make money.

The world is much larger than that. I am learning from you why people here have railed against relying on affiliate scalability for sustainability.

I hope you find what you are looking for, and I likely don't have any additional expertise I can lend to your quest. Best of luck to you! Keep pressing!

 

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[Deleted5250X]

I worked in sales for reply.com in their replyrealestate.com division. There goal was to be one of the largest aggregator of leads, they did construction, car, and real estate leads. They had $30 million in revenue when I was there in 2010 but were not profitable. My division selling real estate leads they would bid on the large generic key words that individual realtors couldn't afford to bid on because they were to broad, there conversion rate was 14% and my guess was they were paying between .25 cents to .50 cents per click and no more. Once you landed on their landing page based on the zip code entered they directed you to their lead capture page but they also sold redirects to major real estate brokerages who had their own lead capture systems.

These leads we captured were being sold for $55 per lead with 7 leads being automatically delivered per month. That's a pretty fat margin but I'm not sure how long it will be viable as the cost of acquiring real estate agents to buy these leads was extremely expensive using mostly inside sales.

It's not that hard to drive traffic Via SEO, especially if you target long tail high converting keywords. Age matters for SEO but google also realizes that people often search for viral content and it will rank this content even if it has been recently created. Google incorporates momentum into its SEO which is why breaking stories will show up at the top of the results.

As you know there are different ways of advertising, keep using all the advertisement portals that return a positive ROI, and if advertising cost more to generate leads raise the price as the people who are buying the leads won't be as good as you at generating them themselves or use PPC or PPV advertising. Most people who buy leads are buying leads for big ticket items.


I don't remember the specific section of the book where MJ talks about his unit price, but the industry standard for online lead gen companies is to sell that individual lead to 4 different companies, and have them all bid on the job which dramatically increases your revenue.

Different Fast Lane Models
1) Subscription Based - Evernote, or Spotify, or Hulu Plus, or Netflix
2) Content Based - ehow.com, Wiki Answers, lynda.com, YouTube, Justin.tv
3) Lead Generation reply.com, ziprealty.com which essentially combines lead generation for its agents, care.com
4) Social Networks - You can buy traffic but you also must get word of mouth, What comes to mind is cougartown.com which is an online dating website that did a lot of radio advertising in my area when it launched, not sure if it counts a social network though.
5) Brokerage Systems - reply.com has a brokerage system for leads and I know they pay for traffic, All these new crowd funding startups are essentially brokerage systems, they all pay for traffic, Groupon pays for traffic up to $26 per acquired customer and they essentially broker coupons. These sites calculate lifetime value of a customer, if a person books a limo through your lead gen and it works out well, odds are they will return and their lifetime value is greater than that one time cost.
6) Advertising - Not sure the difference between advertising and content based but ehow.com and this forum make money from advertising, hulu.com makes money from advertising and it paid for all of its traffic with the ads it aired during the Super Bowl, talk about expensive.
7) E-Commerce I'm not really experienced in this but zappos.com pays for conversions, JCPenny Hired an SEO firm to rank for every single top key word and boosted profits 2 holiday seasons ago. Read about the commandment of control for controlling margins, if you create enough value you can charge high enough prices.

It is well known that Pay Per Click Advertising is the most expensive advertising tool available, its concentrated and attracts motivated consumers, with low barriers to entry as you can spend as low as $5 a day, explore other advertising forms to get a higher ROI.

 

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[Rain]

I think the book's overall purpose was to highlight the Fastlane Millionaire philosophy, rather than dissect the author's own business down to the atomic detail.

Edit: I also don't recall MJ ever telling anyone that his business model could be easily replicated. I'm not necessarily saying that you're wrong here, but we all have our own paths. The Internet is great because of the leverage it provides, but it's still not a free lunch.

 

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[Felix II]

Like what, toothpicks?

Products I have personally designed that have about 1000% margin:
1. Costs $27.00, Sells for $400
2. Costs $130, Sells for $1400
3. Costs $150, Sells for $900

These are just three out of close to a dozen with similar margins.

(Note: I designed these for a company, hence I am still slow lane)

 

[thomashoi]

Advertising is getting very expensive, and to pay for it you have to make enough money... I can only see 2 ways to .....

I read somewhere that says "Advertising is like sex, only losers pay for it"

Back in April 2010, I bought a domain for $10 and put a couple of blog posts and let
it stay idle.... 3 months later towards the end of July 2010.... My blog started getting
thousands of visitors a day.... the peak was over 6,000 visitors a day and this lead
to total sale of over $260,000 in 5 days.....

How much did I pay for advertising? $10 for the domain and a few hours of hard work
a day to write the blog posts.

An essential skill for entrepreneur is to be creative... If your product or offer can really
help people solve problems that they are willing to pay for, then write an article and submit
to the newspapers / magazines with a link to your website. This type of editorial content is
much more powerful than advertising simply because people trust editorial content.

If you don't know how to find reporters who are interested to publish your article, then
go to this website HARO - Help a Reporter Out ™ and sign up for an account.

There are many reporters looking for good content to be published in The New York Times, ABC News, HuffingtonPost.com, CNN, FOX..... you name it, they got it!

But before you get excited and go and submit crap, please make sure your solution
does really solve a NEED!

 

[Vigilante]

If books piss you off, you might want to try like Yoga or Tai Chi or something. It obviously didn't piss you off that much... you joined the forum by the same name sponsored by the author of the same name to discuss concepts put forth by the book.

You're gonna need to be a bit more specific if you want anyone to engage you. What specifically in the book did you disagree with, and why? How could people possibly try and grasp what the author's message was if they didn't understand the paradigm change necessary to break the chains of traditional thinking regarding work, savings and retirement?

31 posts and no speed seemingly indicates you are not on the same page with the majority of posters here... which is cool... but if you want a debate, put out something we can discuss.

I wish this thread would die already. The original poster is long gone along with his crackpot, debunked hypothesis.

 

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[Disruptive]

If you think about this problem long enough, you realize it's bigger than it seems at first sight...

It's not only the business models that rely on leads and advertising as their revenue source that are ruled out, it's basically every business that is basically a broker/intermediary/drop-shipper.

Just think about it... can you really make more than $0.50 per EACH visitor that comes into your website, when you only get a percentage of a sale?

If your conversion rate is 1%, which is typical for most products... it means that you would have 1 sale per each 100 visitors.

100 visitors, at $0.50 each would cost you $50...

Can you REALLY make $50 on commissions per each 100 visitors?

Well... if you got 10% commission, to get $50 in commissions, you would have to sell a total of $500.

Is there really a product that sells for $500 and has 10.000+ searches a day?

And this is just to break even... you are not making any profit yet...

Even if you had 50% commission......to get $50 in commissions, you would have to sell a total of $100.


Do you see the problem here?

Basically EVERY business that relies on being an intermediary can't afford to pay advertising... Which means, it can't scale! (unless the product in expensive enough to award a above average commission).


The only solution I see is to develop your own products... and get full margin, not just a commission.

 

[darkjediii]

The 'secret' you missed was in the book all along - stop looking at the event and work on the process. While folks like you are listing the reasons why you can't do it, the few of us are doing it anyway and finding a way to make it work. so that in a few years, the people that had too many "can'ts" and "impossibles" in their vocabularies are scratching their heads wondering how we got so "lucky" in getting in at the right time when SEO was so easy or great domain names were still available.

How do you eat an elephant? The answer is not its impossible...

One bite at a time..

 

[CarrieW]

it looks to me like you got tons of very very VALUEABLE advice in this thread. I wouldnt expect a magic answer. even if someone knew what to tell you it would be of no use to you because you dont seem to want to "get it"

 

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[911Carrera]

Your real problem is that you're looking for a secret to wealth, you're looking for someone to give you a guaranteed way to build a profitable business, you're looking for a step by step guide to wealth and success. You won't find that and anyone who promises that is scamming you. That's a recipe for failure. MJ gave you the blueprint you need to help you become successful. But your success relies on how bad you want it and what you're willing to do to achieve your goal.

 

[Deleted5250X]

I'll give an example:

Suppose you build a website where you sell your widget and you SEO it to #1 on your keyword

Your website gets 100 visitors per day.

You sell 2 widgets per day to those 100 visitors @ $10 each / gross profit per day = $20

You buy the widgets @ $5 each, so net profit per day = $10

Why would you sell a product for only $10 each can you tell me one product that is sold at this low of price?
If the Product only Cost $10 I don't think the pay per click will be .50 Cents especially if you choose to show up on the number 7-8 spots on google. With the fast lane you have Control if your read the end of the book where he talks about commandments, you can decide the price you'd like to charge, factor your marketing expenses into the product price because the odds are competitors will have the same marketing cost as you.

Suppose you build a website where you sell your widget and you SEO it to #1 on your keyword

Your website gets 100 visitors per day.

Choose a Larger Market, no point entering a market where #1 for your keyword gets 100 per day, if you focused and learned SEO and marketed and your company you should be getting more than 100 visitors per day. Your stuck in the frame of mind of an affiliate, I was there also, all the SEO guru's tell you to target long tell low competition keywords. If you spent a 1-2 Years SEOing your site and learning spending 5-6 hours a day on it, you could easily rank #1 for some high competition keywords.

Am I the only one that realizes that certain niches / business models are just dead ends without exponential growth potential?

I assume most people here realize it, that's why we don't see everyone hopping into the door to door magazine subscription sales business.

But if he was to do it again TODAY, from scratch, with the current competition and advertising costs, I doubt he could make it.

This is an irrelevant argument as timing is everything in entrepreneurship, you need to fill an unmet need in the market. Don't choose lead generation only because you see others made money with it. Choose a market that has not been commoditized, which lead generation has almost become. If your stuck on lead generation than innovate and find a new way to deliver higher quality, higher converting leads to consumers.

I guarantee you could sell leads to real estate agents if you had appointments booked for the agents as most of the real estate lead generation companies are selling extremely low quality leads for high prices. These people have only searched for houses when captured.

I can't understand how can you achieve "explosive growth" with SEO, when it takes at least 6 months to rank for any given low-competition-keyword.

Your way off on your estimates, in six months you should be ranking for high competition keywords if you spend enough time. If it's a low competition keyword it will only take a week or two after launching the website. I think your overestimating the complexity of SEO.
Read this article in the Wall Street Journal about SEO and stop focusing on SEO if that business model is saturated innovate a new business model.
Google Penalizes Overstock for Search Tactics - WSJ.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?pagewanted=all

You get to #1 and a journalist finds your page, and writes an article about your company on the homepage of inc, that's explosive growth, SEO is a marketing method and is not innovative, SEO is only part of a larger strategy.

Edit: Wanted to include that explosive growth is not about how you advertise and market, realize that SEO is a way of marketing your product, service or company. Explosive growth is about having a product that is able to scale using many different marketing techniques, not limiting yourself in the number you can produce. A single franchise is not explosive because you can't bring in 10,000 people a day its unexplosive. A internet Lead gen is only one example of explosive if the market is large enough with not enough competitors. I think MJ listed the business models as examples and most fast lane businesses use a variant of each of those models. Your taking Lead gen and the way MJ did lead Gen as the only way people do lead generation. This is incorrect.

 

[PatrickP]

lol I laid out EXACTLY how I built 2 different businesses.

BTW where ever did you come up with your forum name???

Troll might have been even more appropriate.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Bump due to this thread.

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/questions-from-the-book.53652/

Marking GOLD as well as the lessons herein cannot be said enough.

 

[Whole Paradigm]

MJ DeMarco,

Don't get me wrong. Your book is probably the best book I've ever read.

It's the only book I've ordered 3 copies of. I gave one to my brother and kept 2, and I've recommended it to a lot of people.

Did MJ pay you to buy three copies, give one away, and recommend it to a lot of people?

 

[Likwid24]

Create a great product or service that fills a need and customers will come to you. Word of mouth is the best advertising and I can think of a ton of other ways to advertise for nothing or next to nothing. If your creative you'll figure it out. Just like vigilante said, you need to take the word "can't" out of your vocabulary or you will never acomplish anything.

And if your so convinced that you can't create a profitable lead Gen site then start looking for other ways to get things done. Create a product, buy real estate, etc...

 

[PatrickP]

I started business to client and built it to 16K per month with 60% being before tax profit.

Did it the same way.

No matter what anyone says you will see things the way YOU want to see them.

That is fine, you are right it is impossible we are all lying about our success. Please go do things the way you see fit satisfied in the knowledge that you showed all of us that without PPC you can not do it.

 

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