Congratulations Marcus

Marcus Hochstadt has just posted, for the first time, his stats for his 5-month-old blog. They are nothing short of breathtaking, earning a purported $13,692.59 of profit (not revenue). I’ve personally never heard of someone turning such a quick profit on a blog alone. According to compete.com (which I find scarily accurate), he gets about 19,300 visitors a month currently, which makes his average visitor value somewhere around 71 cents per visitor, once again, an amazing number for a blog. Here are some things that I noticed from his blog and his blog post that I think you should take note of because they’re right on. You can easily emulate his success if you follow the principles he set forth.

He generated most of his traffic through Entrecard.com.
His most linked-to post was announcing the party in which he was supposed to surpass the 50,000 rank in Alexa. That never happened because Alexa changed their algorithm from bad to bad, but the party went on anyway. He received 1,003 links for that post, which is over 10 times as many as his second most popular post, Back Again, which only had 96 links, and even that was actually about his most popular post, the party.

What does that tell you? He used a Web 2.0 technology to generate most of his traffic, and he used it correctly. He didn’t just bookmark every one of his posts on Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumble, Reddit, etc. and go along his merry way. He picked one social networking site and absolutely dominated it. He interacted nicely with the other community members, made friends, and leveraged those friendships to 1) generate traffic and authority and 2) help him pull together the party mentioned above which was a huge contributor to his success. I have always seen social networks as relationship builders, instead of spamming them, and strongly recommend you do the same. Pick a social network, make friendships and contribute to the community, and those friendships and partnerships will help you carry your business.
He outsources all of his menial and monotonous tasks, and recommends you do the same.
So do I. It’s Plain and simple. There are way too many things you need to do in order to be successful as a blogger and businessperson to try to do them all by yourself. What will it take for you to start outsourcing? Sure, your first outsourced task may not be 100% profitable and successful, but that’s why you refine them until they are. With unskilled labor so cheap and at your fingertips, you really can’t afford not to outsource most, if not all, of your tasks.

As I said in my last post, I will never outsource my blog posts, but that’s a personal decision. Marcus recommends hiring a ghostwriter if you’re not good at writing, and that is fine. But I say give it a shot. Blogging is not all that hard, and you’ll only get better if you keep doing it. I personally write my own blog posts because I love doing them. The things I don’t love doing that take up my time, I’m outsourcing. Don’t just blindly outsource, though. If you have been outsourcing something for a few months and you just can’t turn a profit from it, drop it altogether. It’s not worth doing by you nor someone else.
Hang around and learn from successful people.

This is a mindset thing. If you aren’t doing it now, you should start. It’s plain and simple. It’s been proven thousands of times over again, and hundreds of books have been written about how success begets success.

This is my personal weakness. I love hanging around my friends that are stuck in their 9-5 job forever, and they’re great friends. I do, however, know that if I hang around them too much, I get sucked into their "watch 40 hours of football" mentality. That is just not me. I’m working on this. I don’t want to ditch them because they’re my lifelong friends, but they can’t keep sucking the success out of me. I’ve even tried to teach them how to make money online, but they wanted nothing to do with it, even after they saw how much I made myself.
Build a list and create your own products

What will it take for me to convince you to build your own products? If you’re already blogging or are in a niche, I guarantee you can make your own products. Let’s look at Marcus’s: 2 interviews and 4 DVDs. How long does it take to make a DVD? That depends, but it should take no more than a couple of days with research included. It helps if you have at least a little bit of knowledge of the information you’re teaching, but it’s not required. Don’t think you can make a good DVD? Call up someone successful and interview them. Don’t think you can do that? Then outsource it! See above paragraph for information on how to do that.

What can Marcus do, in my opinion, to double his profits?

It’s just one simple suggestion, but this has lead to between 40 and 70% of my sales, depending on which market and niche you’re talking about: release the power of the affiliate (or JV)!

Marcus should host his products on a separate domain and use something like 1shoppingcart.com to track affiliate referrals. Or perhaps slap up a sales letter and put it on Clickbank. It’s something to look at with regards to growing his business, considering he has outsourced a lot of his tasks already. He can leverage his popularity in the Entrecard community to help him sell his products. That’s really my only suggestion.

In all… congratulations, Marcus. Your stats are nothing short of phenomenal.

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