About
Hello and welcome to WebTrafficAcademy.org. My name is Harrison Schmidt and I started Web Traffic Academy in May of 2009 to show fellow webmasters, bloggers and online business owners how to get more web traffic and customers to their websites. Web traffic is THE most important ingredient in the recipe of ‘making money online’. You can have the coolest website in the world, or the best product, but if you don’t get visitors and web traffic you will never make any significant sums money.
Since it is very important to have a good online business structure and foundation before concentrating on getting visitors to come to your site and selling your products to them or monetizing their visits in some way such as banner ads or affiliate ads, at Web Traffic Academy you’ll also learn how to create good content(such as blog posts, digital information products, and software), what the most profitable online niches are and how to compete with the businesses already making money in them, how to build opt-in email lists to market to your customers, how to analyze successful online businesses and find out exactly where they are getting their traffic from and how much money they are making each day, how to build trust with your visitors and customers and turn them into fans that will buy your products over and over, the best tools to use to build your websites, web design tips to maximize your profit potential, how to profit from affiliate marketing, and many other topics.
If You Are Trying To Make A Serious Income Online, My Advise To You Is…
I’ve been making money online for 3 years now, my businesses have made about $100,000 in profits, and I’m now only 21 years old. I’ve spent well over 5,000 hours in the past three years developing my own products, and marketing them. I’ve studied thousands of online businesses and websites, and every different kind of online business model that has been thought of so far, and I’ve tried just about all of them. I’ve had great mentors, and great partners. I’ve had many successes and failures. I’ve seen it and and tried it all.
If you are an individual looking to make a sustainable long term income online with your own internet business, below are the 5 things you must do. If you remember anything from this site, remember these 5 things. If you do these 5 things, you will succeed in building yourself a sustainable online business and income.
1) Your must have own blog or website with unique, valuable, timeless, remarkable, free content made by you in the form of blog posts or videos. The more high content free blog posts or videos you have the more free targeted traffic your site will get from search engines, word of mouth, and social networks like twitter and facebook. Producing high value free content is the ONLY way to produce any significant amount of free traffic, espcially search engine traffic, which is the highest quality traffic their is in terms monetization. High value free content also breeds trust with your visitors, which makes it a lot easier to sell your products to them and get them to sign up for your email list, which John Reese says you should think of as your ATM as once you have an email list that trusts you, you can market affiliate products to that list and keep making money from the same customers. Not only that, but you can package up the best of your free content and sell it as a training course, just like Eben Pagan, SEOBook, Frank Kern, and Problogger say and do, and all the big marketers do. Producing high quality content also gets you known by other prominent people in your niche, which opens up joint venture opportunities, and gets them to recommend your content and products to their communities and fan base which will in turn become your fan base. Free quality content is also the best thing to syndicate across the social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg- sites that you can get a lot of free traffic from. I also recommend buying traffic to your product landing page too as it is more consistent than free traffic and something you have more control over, but free traffic is king because its well, free, and the less you have to pay for your traffic the more money you will make each sale.
2) Your must have your own product, that you sell for money, that genuinely solves an actual need that people are actively looking to solve. Something that improves their life. The easiest kind of product to make like this is a digital information product like a video training course or an ebook, because your margin is 100% profits, and the price of your product and how well it sells is based entirely on perceived value, which you yourself create. Some good examples of products that solve problems and that are in high demand are ones that help people make more money in some way (ie teaching them how to make money through the stock market, how to make money blogging, how to get a better job, how to make money playing poker, how to make money doing surveys, how to make money selling affiliate products, how to do a product launch, how to market your product more effectively and make more sales, how get more web traffic, how make money on twitter, how to make money through ebay- there are so many ways you can subdivide the ‘how to make money’ niche and if you know a real genuine way to make money that actually works, teaching it to other people via the written word or video courses will make you a fortune), how to improve their personal life in some way (lose weight, cure their illnesses, meet people of the opposite sex, grow muscles, improve their appearance), how to learn a skill they are actively seeking to learn (how to play the guitar better, how to speak another language, how to build a better program computers, how to play a sport better). As far as I can tell EVERYONE(that is a one or two man business) that’s making a lot of money online is monetizing their traffic with their own digital information product or software. Again, thanks to the internet, the best kind of product to have right now, and the easiest kind of product to produce is a digital product- such as an ebook, a video course, or a piece of software. Never before have individuals been able to mass distribute their own information products for so cheap, thanks to the internet. Some people like Eben Pagan, Frank Kern, and John Reese are making millions of dollars a year with their information products. Yes, you can make money through affiliate marketing, but the only big profits from that come after you have your own customer email list that you obtained by selling your own product.
3) You must have good Online Marketing Skills. Even with great free content, you still have to get some people to come to your site. There are tons of ways to drive traffic to your site. Some of the most effective ways to get traffic are creating high value free content, commenting and posting on blogs and forums with links back to your site(seriously, this is some of the most highly targeted free traffic you can get if you do it right- Gary Vaynercuk of WineLibrary, Darren Rose of ProBlogger, Yaro Starak(posted 10 comments a night)and Aaron Wall of SEOBook(forum moderator and blog comment poster with thousands of posts) have all said in interviews that posting thousands of quality comments on Blogs and doing thousands of Forum Posts was the main factor in their initial success), having a great affiliate program with a high payout(so you can get other websites to sell your product for you), and buying traffic for less money than you make on each sale of your product(so if you buy $100 worth of visitors from a website or google adwords or where ever, you need to be able to sell over $100 worth of product to make it profitable which is possible, and there are all kinds of ways to improve your conversion rate). Having a good affiliate program and getting other marketers and website owners to promote your product is also very important, the top 10 clickbank products are having most of their sales made by affiliates. You need to be able to drive traffic and visitors to your site through a variety of techniques that you can learn at Web Traffic Academy.
4) You need Passion. EVERYONE that is dominating their online niche and making a lot of money has major passion for their topic. If you do not have passion for your topic, your success will be short term and mediocre. You must be a master of your field, and without passion becoming that is impossible. Without passion your content will be boring and not high quality, and you can’t build a business on that.
5) You must Never Give Up. No matter how many times you fail, just keep learning from your failures, and eventually one day it will all click and you will start making money online. Even if you have a full time job, start trying to make money online and work on projects of your own and you will soon be able to replace whatever money you are making at your job.
That’s it. That is the secret to making money online. Do those 5 things and you will make a lot of money online.
My History
I was born June 22, 1987 in Escondido California, to Jim and Teri Schmidt, two baby boomer middle class people who had grown up in New York and Pennsylvania respectively and moved to California and met in Los Angeles in their 20’s. They were married for 16 years before they decided to have me. I grew up as an only child in San Diego County.
I had a good stable childhood and had a pretty good school experience, and living in the same house and town for the first 18 years of my life really helped me develop long term relationship with the other people growing up with me. I was never the most popular kid in school, but throughout elementary school, middle school, high school and college I developed some pretty personal relationships with a number of the popular kids in all the different clicks(the trendy kids, the geeky kids, the smart kids, the stoner kids, the gothic kids, the nonconformist kids, the jocks – I always seemed to hit it off with the leader of each group which made it so I was always welcome by each group to come and go as I pleased- some of my first lessons in social proof). I’ve always seemed to attract the attention of cool kids, interesting people, and people who I’ve wanted to get to know which has really opened so many opportunities and given me a broad feel for the different types of people in this world and how they think. A good friend of mine once told me that you become the 5 people that you spend the most time with, so keep in mind that you want to surround yourself with smart and successful people so some of their good traits will rub off on you. I’ve had the good fortune of having some really good friends and mentors so far in my first 21 years of life that have shaped this whole experience in profound ways.
In 2005 I graduated from Ramona High School with a 4.07 Grade Point Average. This got me into the University of California Los Angeles and the University of California San Diego. I decided to go to UCSD as it was close to home, and when it comes down to it I like San Diego better than LA and plan to live here a long time, though LA is a very cool world class city and I have some very good memories of visits there. I lived on campus and studied Economics and History at UCSD from 2005 to 2008, met some amazing people, lost my virginity (a couple times ;D) and had a very good overall college experience.
I started making money online through my own business in March of 2006. It was near the end of my first year of college at UCSD and I was getting pressure from my parents to start making some money, either from getting a job on campus or anything else I could think of. I decided to start trying to make money online start by starting an online business as it seemed like there was a lot of potential to make money online being that you can connect with over 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) people at an extremely low cost (compared to marketing via tv/magazine/newspaper/radio advertisements).
I had played a game called Eve Online for a couple years during high school(from summer 2003 to summer 2005), quitting right before going into college. Eve Online is a massively multiplayer online game, and the unique thing about eve is that everyone plays on the same server so at any time when you log into eve you are entering a world where you can interact with 5,000 to 30,000 people all at one time depending on how many people are logged in. Its a great simulation of the real world. They also boast a living economy, which taught me a lot about supply and demand and how buying low and selling high works and how to make money doing it. I was quite good at Eve, and right before I started at UCSD, I sold all my in game items and assets on ebay for about $2,000, which was the first serious money I ever made, all from playing a game I really liked.
I started reading forums and studying about how to make money online. I started visiting ebay and started doing some competitive analysis by looking at what other sellers were selling(you can see how many units of each item a seller sells, so you can see how much money they are making by subtracting the listing fees). I noticed a number of people were selling digital ebook guides to games like World of Warcraft and Eve Online and from their sales numbers it looked like they were making a lot of money. Digital projects being sold on ebay seemed to be making much more money than tangible items. I wrote my own guide for Eve Online, made it into a pdf ebook, put one up for sale for $4.95, and sold one within 5 hours of listing it. That night changed my life forever. I immediately started making $200 to $300 per week selling digital World of Warcraft and Eve Online guides, doing very little work.
My best friend and Eve Online Wingman at the time Drew Carle wanted a piece of the action, so we decided he would make a Macro Miner for Eve Online, as it looked like the sellers of those were also doing well. We noticed one of the sellers of macro miners was selling the source code to his script, and we won the bidding for $10! It was junk code, but it gave us a good framework and we used this code to write the Famous MMO-Evolution OCR/AI Macro Miner, which we sold about 4,000 copies of over the next year and a half at $29.95 each (we were selling on average about 7 copies per day at $29.95). We kept selling on ebay for about 6 more months making about $1,500 per month each(being in college making that much money working just a few hours a week is a lot of fun), then moved to our own site MMO-Evolution.com at the end of 2006(which became SimpleMiner.com after I left the company in June of 20008). We continued selling our guides and macro miner bot there until the beginning of 2008, improving the look of the site and trying to think of ways to expand. When we overhauled the look of our site from a really plain site I put up in a day to a really nice looking website designed in Drupal by a professional webmaster, it caused our daily sales to double while still getting the same amount of traffic. From that I learned that the look of your site really effects your conversion rate, if it doesn’t look professional and trustworthy people are a lot less likely to buy. For the next year, we continued to sell our macro miner through our site and on ebay.
At the begin of 2008 we were contacted by the owners of Eve Online, CCP. They were ordering us to stop selling our macro miner, as they claimed it was disrupting their game. This really freaked us out. I knew about a case between the creator of a similar product as ours but for the game World of Warcraft, but we thought he had won his case and bots were legally allowed, though it turned out the case was still going on. We contacted the lawyer that was defending the seller of the World of Warcraft Bot called MMO Glider, which had made its owner over 2 million dollars over the course of 2 years and sold thousands of copies. MMO Glider was being sued by Blizzard World of Warcraft over their bot that played the game for you and leveled your character automatically, and the bot creator eventually lost the suit at the end of 2008 and no longer sell it.
Eve Online CCP also filed a DMCA notice with our host and they took our site down, so we immediately started losing $200 per day in income, as I hadn’t backed up the website files because I was so new to web development and didn’t realize I could be locked out of my hosting account like that. I contacted my one affiliate, Ray Kamille, to ask for help setting the website up on a new host as I knew he knew about managing websites, and this turned into a relationship that would change my life. Ray Kamille turned out to be a major online traffic controller. He had a massive network of seo sites that were ranked highly in google promoting affiliate product and services, which had made him a couple million dollars over the course of the previous 2 years. Over the course of a year he taught me everything he knew about online marketing, php/mysql programming, web design, server management, and so many life lessons.
Anyway, when we got the cease and desist order I immediately I started to develop a new idea of mine because I realized that if I wanted to make money online long term with the goal of not having to get a job after getting out of college, I would have to change my niche and product. This idea was GamesRogue.com. I partnered with a very bright student in my business class at the time, Christopher Clasby, and we hired an artist and a program and started building an epic game and video entertainment community site. In June I left MMO-Evolution because I didn’t want to be involved with a business that had potential legal trouble looming, and launched GamesRogue.com. GamesRogue.com took over $10,000 and 7 months to develop, and turned out to be my biggest failure ever. It was a failure because we just couldn’t overcome 2 unseen barriers of entry- this niche wasn’t as profitable as it first seemed as far as dollar value per visitor, and our competitors were so entrenched into the google search rankings with such high PageRank home pages(I’m talking PR 7, 8, 9 only for the top 10 results for the highest search volume keywords) that unless you had a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a truly remarkable site like Kongregate.com or buy yourself high google PR you would never get high rankings or be able to get much traffic, and since the dollar value per visitor was so low buying traffic wasn’t profitable. This failure also killed my big ego that I had gained with my success with MMO-Evolution, which I am very thankful for. I feel I am luck to have had a major failure early in my life, as it has given me such a broader perspective and taught me many lessons that can’t be learned without failing. It didn’t turn out to be a complete failure though, as I learned a lot about how to manage people, how to design and build websites, what the best online business models are(selling digital products and services), how to get web traffic, and further about where the big money is being made online. It also evolved into the Game Website Builder at GameWebsiteBuilder.com which is my arcade game site content management system.
In August 2009 Search Engine Optimization finally click for me, and I built my own network of about 30 SEO blogs powered by the Wordpress CMS for the world of warcraft guide niche effectively promoting clickbank products, and have had moderate success with that. I continue to expand this network of websites into other niches.
My network of websites grows all the time, and the main projects I am focusing on right now are GameWebsiteBuilder.com, WebTrafficAcademy.org and BloggersAcademy.com. I have also begun work on Starcraft 2 Strategy Masters a place where Starcraft players can learn how to play Starcraft 2 well.
As John Chow says, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know it will be glorious.”
I hope you enjoy Web Traffic Academy. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Feedburner.
Feel free to contact me any time at WebTrafficAcademy@gmail.com if you ever have something you’d like to discuss.
