What A Tripod Can Teach You About Online Business

A tripod is defined as a “three-legged stand” in the Webster dictionary. Kick one of those legs out and what happens? It falls.

This isn’t exactly rocket science but failing to recognize this can have a devastating effect on your business.

Similarly an online business is held up by three “legs”. Knock one of those legs out and you’ll be part of the 98% of people who fail at making money online.

Anyone familiar with James Brausch already knows his magical formula to success. In fact, he has it in the header of his blog. Here it is:

traffic + copywriting + products = successful internet business

Now let’s go into detail in each one so you understand why each one is so important. The first “leg” we’ll go over is the most controversial one.

Products

Notice that the formula says traffic + copywriting + products. It does NOT say traffic + copywriting + adsense. And it does NOT say traffic + copywriting + affiliate products.

That’s a very important distinction. And here is why.

Adsense

If you are using adsense you are not building your own business. You know who’s business you are building? Google’s. You might as well just consider yourself an employee of Google.

Without any of the benefits of course. And without any pay raises. Most likely they’ll just continue with the pay cuts until everyone wises up and starts taking adsense off there websites.

Not only that but they can kick you out of the program any time the want. Is this something you want your business to depend upon?

Affiliate Products

You’re not building your own business by selling affiliate products either. You are building the product owners.

Why is that?

You can’t follow up with the customers after the sale. The product owner can.

Here is a direct quote from James’s website, “My own numbers show that it is 12 times easier for me to sell an existing customer than to sell a new customer.”

And guess what.

If you are an affiliate YOU are the one that is putting in the time/money for that first sale. And you get NOTHING for the sales after the first one.

That should be reason enough for you to start making your own products. I’m not even going to go into the issues of people not paying their affiliates. Or stealing sales from there affiliates.

Copywriting (Conversion)

The second “leg” of an online business is copywriting. You can have all the traffic in the world but without copywriting you’re not going to make much. The same goes for a great product. If you don’t market it effectively you won’t make much.

Now there are two distinct types of copywriting/conversion. One is well known. The other isn’t talked about very much.

First I’ll go over is blog design. It’s about getting visitors from your blog to your sales page in the most efficient way.

If you have a high traffic blog but can’t get people to click through to your sales page then your blog doesn’t help much. Even a small improvement on your blog design can have a huge effect on your bottom line. This area should be getting a lot more attention.

The next one is what everyone thinks about when they hear copywriting. And that is the copy on your sales page. You should constantly be improving this if you want to maximize your profits.

Traffic

The third “leg” is traffic. You can have the best copywriter in the world write copy for you but if no one reads it it won’t do you any good. And you can have the best products but if no one sees them once again no one will buy them.

This one speaks for itself. I don’t think it’s necessary to go into any further detail.

The key difference between a successful online business and one that is struggling is that the successful one continually improves on these three areas (traffic, copywriting, products). The 98% that fail get distracted on other trivial stuff that should be ignored all together or outsourced and they forget about the three “legs” that keep their online business up and running.

- Aaron Anderson

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