Generating Cash Flow via Product Sales
Part of my efforts here is to build a very large stock announcement list, called the NSS Stock of the Month. I calculated that I need about $0.25 cents per double opt-in subscriber.
In order to build a list of about 400,000 to 500,000, I’d then need around $100,000 to $125,000. That’s of course taking things conservatively. If the amount paid via Adsense ads that are on one of my stock sites is any indication, some advertisers are paying $2.00 or more PER click via Adwords, and spending around $5.00 per subscriber –assuming that one in every 2 or 3 visitors will subscribe. My cost estimate is around 10% of that for one reason: ORGANIC TRAFFIC.
All my search engine optimization and a focus on building just two lists on one site and one list of the NSS site is to maximize traffic and focus on what is needed.
One of the lessons that I have in memory is how many companies sell stock and in some case self administered “504″ type funding drives that end up raising about the same amount of money that was spent “getting the funding”.
In the end the company doing the campaign to raise the money has no financial advantage. In fact, the owner or president of the company is better off doing nothing and focusing that time on sales increases.
In my case, I’ve set a strict limit to what I will spend and what I plan to raise selling the product that I’ve created –the NSS Inner Circle of Members. You can read about it here.
Once the numbers are achieved, my plan is to keep spending around $2,500 to $4,000 per month on various advertising and list building techniques to “keep the subscribers” at a steady number.
At this time, the Inner Circle Members will be sold out by the end of October to the end of November. Actually, at that time I will cut off sales, as there’s no point selling the Stock Membership near the holiday season. My prediction is that I’ll be left with around $300,000 to work with the building of the NSS mailing list. I am only planning on using about $125,000 or less to build the list. That will leave about 2/3 of the cash to actually invest using the same stocks picked for the Stock of the Month.
Those funds are then kept as a backup to all the sales made to Inner Circle Members. Should a member ‘want out’ I’ll have no problem refunding their deposit.
BACK UP PLANNING:
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten into anything without a back up plan. In this case I’ve got such a plan. The plan is to build both lists doing sales of ebooks using pay-per-click traffic and the SendMY.INFO list gateway. The ebooks will be sold priced from $2.97 to $9.97 to anyone, and when they seek “MORE INFO” or “INFO UPDATES” to the ebooks that they purchase, they will need to subscribe to the NSS Stock of the Month mailing list.
I should emphasize that not all will need to –it will be voluntary and then the strategy is to make sure around 50% of the book buyers do “double opt-in” to the mailing list.
If you are contemplating a 504 offer or even a traditional venture capital drive, keep very close ‘tabs’ on the costs associated with the funding campaign. It is not out of the question that if you seek too little, the costs associated with your time, funding effort and miscellaneous costs outstripping the funds that you secure. On the other hand, seek too much and you may spend too much time to secure it all.
My solution to these issues:
- I have broken up my funding to two rounds, which I am in the second. In this round, it’s not a strict ‘funding drive’ but a sale of products to a known group of people to build the sales. This is how I am building the Inner Circle of Member sales.
- The second resolution is to have a back up plan where I use the resources of the network to keep building the mailing lists while generating cash-flow. This is done by selling ebooks and using SendMY.INFO to build the mailing list.
I’ll keep much of this process updated from my Rich Sage making money blog.
Rich Sage
NSS Editor
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