Mark Anastasi has just published a book called ‘The Laptop Millionaire‘
This includes Mark’s story of moving from poverty to financial independance with the guidance of a mentor he calls his Laptop Millionaire

One interesting target needed to replace a typical income is to get 400 clicks a day – to bring in $100 a day.
At first I thought no problem – until I started thinking a bit more about it.
400 clicks would typically cost $400 using Google adwords or $120 buying solo ads (that typically insist on free offers)

Also 400 visitors with 2% clicking on Adsense might typically bring in $4 – so you really need a product of value to sell instead.
Then 8 buyers would bring in about $120 for a $17 digital product (after fees) that you owned or $60 as an affiliate.
Still not a viable business – spending more than you earn.

Long term ‘free’ organic traffic is great – but no way to plan a start-up business at the mercy of Google.

Alternatively, if you have your own list to mail, say twice a week, with a 20% open rate and 5% of those bought making 1% of list members buying you would need a list of 2500 to produce 200 sales a month – or $3000 income from your own $17 product.

Buying clicks from solo ads to create a list typically costs $1 per lead.
So a list of 2500 would cost $2500 and bring in $3000 if you have your own products to sell.
But that’s where things start to get tricky, because you really need 8 new products a month to keep your list interested.

Jason Fladlein suggests creating 1 product, to solve 1 problem in 1 two hour sitting.
Sounds easy – but I have yet to get anywhere close to that goal.
I’m just not happy unless I spend much more time to improve products to meet my own standards.
Nevertheless a ‘job’ creating 8 new products a month to market to your list is quite realistic.

Alternatively, creating one product a week worth $17 suggests a list size of 5,000 is needed for $3000 a month income.
This pushes the time to recover a $5000 investment in list creation out to a couple of months.
Or a list of 20,000 if you are able to create  only one new product a month.
Pushing the time to recover a $20,000 investment in list creation out to over 6 months.

These are still reasonable business plans – and a few years ago they would work with an extremely high degree of confidence.
But nowadays products of extraordinary value sell for a little as $5 – making life a lot tougher – even more so when companies, such as as clickbank charge a fixed $1 fee as well as a % for every sale.
This makes it much tougher to get started and much longer to recover any initial investments.

Experts, like John Thornhill, confirm that most of your online income is likely to come from ‘back-end offers’.
That’s where I still get stuck.
Affiliate back end offers ore OK for your own traffic but don’t help if you want other affiliates to promote your offers.

The time and effort I spend creating new products or the value I think they are worth means very little.
All that really matters is the value customers put on my products.
That’s why I am planning to create shareware versions of my software so people can try before they buy.
This means I’ll need to wait much longer before any income arrives but hopefully the unit price will be higher when users understand the real value of each product.