The Dance Racket – CASH COWS MOOOOOO

Since my wife owns and operates a dance studio I get to see the elaborate world of dance studios quite often. It has come to my attention that like many mini niches within a niche some are SUPER UBER CRAZY PROFITABLE.

Let me give you an example.

My Wife’s dance studio charges something like $45 per student per month for most individual classes. However she has a Performance Group that is a longer class period and the cost is something like $150 a month. So although the hourly price isn’t too different the actual income goes up nearly 300% as opposed to a student taking an individual class. This performance group she put together has been extremely helpful in growing her studio as it comprises a core group of girls who are ALWAYS at the studio and are her top customers.

Now I see this side of the business and see how good it can be but I never got a chance to get an idea of the other income that the actual performances can generate. Her group has performed at Disney World, the Boston Celtics, local fairs, etc. They are preparing to perform at their first actual dance competition this weekend. The competition is the ‘Step Up 2 Dance Tour‘. The tour seems to be a mostly New England event but goes to Florida at some points. In total they have 27 tour dates!

What Qualifies You To Enter?

Basically you have to have money and want to perform. Thats about it.

Why Would You Want To Enter?

The idea is to show off your talent and skills as a dance group. The prize is sometimes an entry into a higher national event, however this particular event holds no accreditation and has no actual value in winning besides that you get a $4 trophy and to beat other kids. Not that I know the very first thing about what makes a good dance or a bad dance (ok thats a lie, I know a bit) but there are SOOOOO many categories that it literally looks like every class will be in a small range of the competition that they will either get 1st, 2nd, or 3rd lol. Everyone leaves a winner?

How Much Money Are We Talking About?

Well my wife was telling me that she will leave Saturday morning at 6 AM and not be back until 10 PM. So basically its an all day event. Looking at the program prices and schedule I can get an idea of how many pieces there are and how much money it will gross.

Solo – $70
Duo – $80 total
Groups – $25 per student

Looking at those prices lets see roughly how many kids are doing each one:
110 Solos at $70 each = $7,700
61 Duos at $80 each = $4,880
73 Groups of 4-8 (we will say 6 students on average) at $25 per kid = $10,950
21 Groups of 9-16 (we will say 13 students on average) at $25 per kid = $6,825
8 Groups of 17+ (we will say 20 students on average) at $25 per kid = $4,000

ONE DAY TOTAL = $34,355

The normal rental cost of an auditorium this size is around $2,500-$3,000 for the length of the show. They are not allowing any food so visitors have to buy food/drinks from the show staff, which I’m sure will bring in a few more thousand. The trophies cost just a few bucks each. They are probably relying on the studio teachers to keep all the kids in checks so it will probably have a small staff and a group of local dancers to be judges that might be getting a small stipend. Overall I’m sure they will bank atleast $25,000 from one day of dance.

Seeing that they have 26 tour dates that could equate to $650k a year!

The best part is their 27th tour date is their ‘National’ event. So since basically every student is allowed in….win or lose. They very well may have approximately 10-15x their normal amount of students. In addition the national event costs more $$! It looks like a 4 day event, so seeing that it is about 40% more expensive to go there we can guess that at minimum it will get 4 x $25,000 + 40%…. $140k from a non accredited sports event. HELL YES. I am so Jealous I’m going to have to pull a Ryan Eagle and take these folks down with my own competition!

So next time your daughters want to dance and you get the chance to someday take them to a competition just remember… those people that just charged you $10 for a ticket are probably pocketing over $800k this year from the happy parents of America.

Quit Scaling and Start Sniping

Which one of these is easier?

Selling 1,000 glasses of lemonade at $1.00 each or Selling 1 glass of lemonade for $1,000?

The above example is a great one because each scenario yields the same end result, $1,000 in sales. How each is reached is another story. Almost all internet marketers would take the first approach. It takes significantly less resources and skills to sell a $1.00 item as opposed to a $1,000 item. You can see the success in this pattern when you look at how many people push email submits, short forms, etc. These are typically quick sell, low payout scenarios. Apple is a great example with their App Store. It was quickly shown that you earn way more money on the Apple App Store selling a quick game for $.99 instead of spending tons of money developing a great game and trying to sell it for $9.99.

Some internet marketers have gone after the bigger fish. Usually things that have MUCH higher payouts than a standard affiliate offer but have a much smaller demographic and require a more advanced technique of selling. Geno over at AMNavigator showed one such offer, the Compete.com affiliate commission is $1,000! I think the actual sale is $5,000 for a full year of service, so the commission is 20%. Ad Hustler has a great case study where he goes after some big spenders as he sold 68 vehicles for a car dealership.

So today I am going to try and offer some insight on to one of the techniques I use to rake in some serious cash. One of the best areas to try and target a huge sale is by targeting people on Facebook. Now STOP where you are for a second. I know exactly what everyone is thinking “damn another post about scaling a campaign on Facebook by expanding campaigns to other niches”. Well this post is just about the exact opposite.

I’m a big fan of instead of trying to fire a shotgun into a crowd and hit as many targets as possible, we should use the good ole Sniper Rifle and go straight for the headshot.

The BEST and CHEAPEST way that I’ve found to do this is to get your well crafted ad displayed to a SINGLE individual…over and over and over again. The end result WILL be that this particular individual is going to click on one of your ads sooner than later. You all know what I am talking about. If someone displays enough similar ads to you, you are eventually going to click on it just to figure out wtf its all about. I like to take this on a whole other level but we can get to that later.

How The Hell Do We Target a Single User

There are a few ways to do this with blackhat techniques like just message spamming them. I however like the idea of gaining the capability to continuously harass them with non stop CPM ads. To do this we need to take advantage of FB ad’s targeting option to display an ad to someone who like’s a page. Let’s look at the 3 accounts we are going to work with here.

As you can see I will be using my own Mike Chiasson facebook account that I have FB ads on. Next I have the account of Missy Holla who is the person we want to stalk display our targeted ads to. Lastly we have Sean Hollas. (Now I know some people are going to say that the names and faces closely resemble some familiar well known people in the affiliate space…but I assure you that is just a coincidence.)

So looking at Missy’s public profile we can gather a few things. She is a woman, lives in Orlando, FL, and she already likes the Facebook page ‘Coolest Case Study Ever‘. So if we could somehow gain access to being a page admin of that Facebook page we could then design ads that only get displayed to that group.

So seeing that Missy Holla is a part of that group the first thing we need to do is go join/like the page. Most of the time the Facebook Page doesn’t display who the current admin is. If it does you can simply message them. Unfortunately most of the time we have to resort to trying to contact the admin over the actual page wall. This is an example of a message you might post.

Now when the page admin messages you back that’s when you make your request. Sometimes a little social engineering is helpful here. I typically would make some sort of suggestion like offering some cash to be the owner of the page. Since most pages aren’t really monetized by any means this is usually pretty cheap. Don’t go after the pages that have like 10,000+ likes. More look for ones that are smaller, maybe a very small friend’s local business that he was supposed to start but never did. Those sort of pages exist in abundance and could be acquired for next to nothing. On the other hand you could always create a page and try and lure your target into it. IE: “If Your Last Name is Chiasson You Kick Ass” is something I might join if someone with the last name Chiasson invited me. [true story]

Once you are admin of the page you need to go remove everyone except your Single Individual that you are trying to target. In our example that is Missy Holla.

So in our example Sean Hollas is the current page owner of ‘Coolest Case Study Ever’. He sees my request and grants me to be a page admin of the page. Now that I am a Page Admin I now get the option to generate an ad in my FB Ad’s Campaign Setup that specifically targets ONLY people who already ‘LIKE’ my page.

Unfortunately Facebook does have some minimums that you need for the ‘estimated reach’ area that is shown on the right side of the image above. I believe the number is around 100 people, so if your group has less than 100 people FB will deny the ad saying it doesn’t reach enough people. One option you have is to create a secondary FB Page and LOAD it up with 99 dummy accounts (that you won’t login to as to not have ads displayed) and add that onto the target pages. This will allow you to hit your individual user and then also fill up the necessary quote of potential displays to make your ad run.

Set your ad up to either be a high CPM of $1.00+. You won’t spend barely anything since it would just be one person viewing it.

The end result of course. Your ad showing up top on your target’s list!

 

So lets hear some of your ideas on what high end products or business ideas you would like to pitch to certain people. Obviously most ‘standard’ affiliate offers won’t be worth your time on something like this. For myself, I promote manufacturing services to purchasers and engineers at the top medical and defense companies. I talk to my sales team at my day job at a plastic injection molding facility, find out anyone they’ve spoken with in the last week, then start the grind. We’ve had numerous examples of where a customer they are trying to work on will mention a service or statistic I have on my specific landers for them. They always call me up ‘seems like your vodoo is working’.

The Best Affiliate April Fools’ of 2011

As entertained as I was while reading about Mr. Green’s post about his Maldive’s affiliate retreat, I gotta say I did see one affiliate related April fool’s day prank that was better than that.

Last Friday on April Fools’ Day I got an email from Qwik Media. Not so slyly hidden in the email was a funny little prank. However as I was reading the email I instantly began calculating how much cash I had left on some buys to transition to this campaign immediately. I was thinking ‘Oh man this is going to kill it at this rate!’ I excitedly clicked the link and saw it led to a video page. I thought I clicked the wrong link and closed it and went back like 4 times before I actually read the message box… ‘April Fool’s Day!’.

Haha once I actually read this I felt like a friggin moron. I got so excited about it that I totally forgot about the stupid prank holiday. However it didn’t help that Qwik did a few cool things with this.

• The email looked IDENTICAL to their weekly alerts/updates.
• Had a professional look to the email.
• Hot topic….why wouldn’t an offer like this come out?!?

So thanks to Mike, Gary and the rest of Qwik Media for the funny laughs. I am eagerly awaiting the actual Rebecca Black $28.00 payout ringtone!

My $10,000 Blog Advertising Budget

A while back I started blogging a bit for a few reasons. The easy reason was that so when I stalked various other people’s blogs they could go learn a bit about me if interested. Secondly a networking tool. Lastly a utility to build a bit of a brand around my name. I’ve definitely experienced some momemtum in some of these areas, and without a doubt have a long way to go. Somewhere in the mix though, something happened I didn’t quite expect, I started making a little bit of cash.

At first I downloaded the WP-Ninja Affiliate plugin for wordpress. I started highlighting a few keywords that I might mention and tying affiliate links to them. The plugin then would replace that plain text with a link on any page it finds it. This is something I pretty much stopped doing and the only reason being that if I happen to mention a product or service it will link to it, and then people start bitching ‘he sold out’ ‘guru bullshit!!!’. When in actuality it was never a service intended to try and pitch to my industry readers but more something I envisioned google searches pulling up and cashing in on. For example I did a review a while back about a Starcraft II product I was pushing on Clickbank. I’ve actually made like $40 from that link, even though the review had nothing to do with the product, more my experiences selling it.

Next I started getting some requests for sponsored posts. This is still a no go everyone. I will gladly review something if I feel its a good product or readers might like some insight, but don’t offer to pay me some cash to try and tell people to go buy your crap. I know a lot of guys do that, just not my style.

Now I still get requests for ‘in text ads’, where someone pretty much wants to buy a ‘do follow’ link to give them some SEO backlinks from this site (currently a lowly PR3). I usually don’t mind embedding a link somewhere on a page that isn’t going to try and fool the reader (personally I have no problems trying to fool search engines).

Lastly I setup the OIO Publisher plugin on my site. I’ve been fortunate enough to be reached out to by some industry networks who requested banner ads and they toss me a little bit of cash to get some exposure. Clearly the CPM on these ads is really bad but luckily most of them are doing it for more brand advertising than anything else.

The Good Part

Then something absolutely crazy happened a few weeks back. I went and did a blog post about the iPhone 4 Glif product that someone made like $96k on. Although I thought the post was going to gather some attention it really didn’t bring much traffic but I must’ve accomplished my job of informing people of possibilities because I got a few VERY interesting emails.

Several people felt inspired from the post and wanted to discuss things like that more. How they could physically manufacture something, some idea they had kicking around. After a few skype chats with one guy it turns out he was quite serious. We were able to bring him into my work, show him around, and he worked with one of my design engineers for a week and put together a prototype for his product. Within two weeks from that prototype he was able to find someone to invest in him and give him the cash he needed to get things off the ground.

Although his job was pretty small, I thought it was REALLY exciting. The real juice came when one of his financial backers came to meet with us a week later though. Obviously I don’t know all the details of venture capitalists or anything but this guy’s group happened to have a pretty large client. This client actually was looking for a new place to manufacture some items. As it turns out….we were a perfect fit.

And although I’m not a sales guy for the company my ONE, SINGLE, blog post. Ended up putting me in line for a $10,000 commission!

After getting hammered in the ass by taxes (well not really hammered, just seems like it when you get them all taken out at once), I was left with still a good chunk of change. Being the gambler I am I decided to reinvest it in my businesses. Naturally I wanted to invest it all in pushing other stuff on this blog, maybe a new design, etc. In the end I made the choice not to invest it ALL into this site though. I try and keep affiliate funds, work funds, dance studio funds all separate, and I just couldn’t end up justifying all of the cash to go to this blog. Ultimately I ended up setting aside $500 to advertise this blog. I divided this up in a few things. One a sponsored listing on AffBuzz (I know everyone was wondering why the hell I advertised my lame blog on there). Secondly a decent amount of CPV impressions on my trafficvance account for this site. I figured if one post could hit big for me, maybe I should push my blog a bit more.

With the remainder of the funds I talked to my wife and we agreed it was a good time to thank a lot of the parents that have stuck with her dance studio since her opening 4 years ago. Some of her more elite girls are performing at the Boston Celtics game next month and although TONS of families showed interest in going a lot of them didn’t have the cash to bring their family to see their kids (ages 6-18) dance at the Boston Garden. My wife was absolutely ecstatic when over 200 tickets to that game arrived in the mail. Hopefully this investment pays us back big time at our dance studio. Even though some internet marketers are not happy with the Celtics, I’m sure we will still have a great time!

So overall, the money came in quick, and went out quick. Lets just hope together we can all make a little more.

The PPV Secret No One Bothered To Tell You About

Before I started working with PPV all the experts told me to do some market research about how they work and what works. Other affiliates and even my affiliate managers all suggested the best way to do this was to was to install the adware applications on your own computer and just surf around a bit and look at what pops up. Smaxor from A4D actually made a comment on a webinar saying something like “if you don’t have gamevance installed on every computer you own you are just throwing away money.” I agreed and began installing pop up software and didn’t really notice much of a change. I would see one pop a day if I was lucky.

Then a discussion got struck up over at Internet University (now Millionaire Mentors launching soon) about people’s lack of pops. Fortunately one fellow was kind enough to share a little tip that someone over at the largest PPV company, Traffic Vance, had shared with him. While most of us would simply go install the GameVance toolbar to start seeing pop ups, there was a secondary toolbar out especially for advertisers to get to scope out the competition. I heard rumors that this version has been around per request of some of the higher end advertisers. Either way I don’t think TrafficVance cares if people use it, after all they end up making more money!

This toolbar functioned quite similar to the original one in every aspect….except instead of seeing the Gamevance max of like 4 pop ups a day, you see a constant flurry of pop ups. This is useful for a few reasons. You have a MUCH easier way to look at several competing ads in a shorter period of time. You can notice what offers are being promoted and where. Lastly you can use to cost your competitors some cash if that’s your thing.

So why am I sharing this with everyone? A few weeks back I had commented on a post over at PPV Playbook and referenced this ‘special’ install. I thought nothing of it really seeing as how I’ve had it since before I was even advertising on PPV. Then when I got 20+ emails/pms about my small comment I realized that people want this thing. I already had one person email me and say that having this would be better than having the PPV Spy from Bevo Media.

Some Quick Disclaimers

1. When I downloaded this file it was from a GameVance download screen so I know it came right from their website.
2. I do not have that link anymore so the best I can do is upload the .exe (well in a zip format) to my server.
3. I’m not into distributing virus/trojans but obviously one has to suspect that running an exe there are risks. Feel free to install on a Virtual Machine or something, but leave the crying off the blog.
4. I didn’t make this and no way claim credit for its awesomeness. Just passing it along.
5. I wouldn’t recommend installing this on your main machine because it literally gets so annoying surfing with pops every few minutes.

So get out there, spy on your competition, don’t cost me too much money in wasted pops, and let me know your results with it. I think my highest count was like 8 pops in an hour or something (when I was reading message boards!).

DOWNLOAD THE GAMEVANCE MULTIPOP TOOLBAR HERE

UPDATE: After finishing up some meetings this morning I made it back to some very disgruntled emails from certain *unnamed* companies requesting removal of this information and toolbar. Rightfully so I do not own any copyright to the rapidshare links that were provided earlier and have removed them per their request. Fortunately everything else above isn’t owned by them so I will happily leave this information available that the tool exists and can be helpful to us as advertisers. Happy torrent hunting!