I want to help you succeed at online marketing, so I will use the start of my own personal introduction into IM to illustrate the steps you must take, and what to avoid.
1. Be honest about your strengths and weaknesses, and learn what you don’t know.
I’m smart and not-so-smart. I’m not-so-smart when it comes to being a natural genius about websites, how to make money online, and online marketing methods, and smart enough to know that I should learn from someone who is. There are young whipper-snappers out there who just “get” the internet and affiliate marketing. They check out a few website designs, scan the basic concepts for generating traffic & sales, and go, “OK, I’ve got this.” And they really do! It just comes natural, like playing piano does for a born prodigy. Makes me crazy!
Obviously, I don’t have this natural knack for this website-traffic stuff, ’cause I study hard for many hours just to grasp some of the most basic processes. There are many times I read and re-read a page explaining how to properly set up my on-page SEO, or correctly vary & place my anchor text, and even after 2-3 reads, I just glaze over…I don’t quite understand it. If you’ve also experienced this, you’re probably not an Internet Marketing genius either. If you don’t even know what the terms “on-page SEO” and “anchor text” mean, you’re definitely just like me…I didn’t know what they meant either, for many weeks. But my friend Tony Robbins said, “When you don’t know something, don’t drive yourself crazy…just find someone who is very successful at what you want to do, and model them.” Good advice.
2. Spend time (lots of it in the beginning) on the Warrior Forum and other internet marketing forums, sifting through the information from the already-successful marketers to find the best coaches for your business model.
So when I first set out to “make money online,” I searched for people who 1) were successfully, consistently and currently making a lot of money online, and 2) were willing to teach me. While there were tons of IM “gurus” hawking step-by-step internet wealth courses, most of their courses were rehashed crap filled with outdated methods that didn’t didn’t work anymore, and many of these “gurus” were not that successful at internet marketing themselves. Indeed, they were working their asses off just to piece together a thousand dollars of affiliate sales a month. They were not getting wealthy and, more important, they had no time freedom. Indeed, they had essentially traded in their 8-hour a day job for another “job,” 10-14 hours a day of hard marketing and promotion in front of their computer screen, a trade-off I wasn’t interested in.
Then there were those who knew the true answers and current methods, but didn’t always want to take the time to teach others. But I was persistent, and kept contacting some of the more mature & successful marketers I discovered on the Warrior Forum (the absolute best forum for Internet Marketing – and it’s free,) like Stephen Wagenheim, Jeremy Kelsall, and many more, slowly putting together the pieces of the complex puzzle. Since there is no one complete textbook for mastering all the steps to internet marketing (“Damn!” you say…but true,) you must be prepared to do this same learning process – asking a lot of marketers, experimenting with their answers, and building your knowledge base. It could take many months. In a sense, this is one of the true tests of your fitness for online marketing. Right out of the gate, you may run into heavy resistance in finding the right mentors and information, and if you’re not up to being persistent, weeding out the real information from the dross, and persuading a few real successful online entrepreneurs to give you a few minutes of their time to point you in the right direction, chances are you don’t have the perseverance and persuasive skills you need to slowly build a successful internet marketing business or convince people to buy things from your website.
3. There are many ways & niches to make money online. Get really clear about which business model feels like the best fit for you, and focus on that model only, don’t bounce around.
Once I started contacting some IM mentors, one of the things that marked me as an obvious newbie was asking questions like, “How can I make money online?” Stephen Wagenheim wrote back with a list of possibilities long enough to keep me warm on a winter’s day, and said, “Well, what do you want to do?” The simplicity of that query hit me like a 2 x 4, and I realized I needed to scan all the ways of making money online and pick just one or two, or I’d never get anything done. Some of the ways you can earn income from websites are:
- sell products you created yourself – ebooks, reports, tools, inventions, health products, etc.
- sell other people’s products you didn’t have to create or inventory – essentially send sales leads to their product sites and earn commissions for each sale. This is called Affiliate Marketing
- Build a blog or website which gains tremendous respect & authority over months and years, then sell space to companies eager to advertise on a site they know gets tons of daily visits
- Write a daily blog about something you know & love, then add a forum to your blog, and once you’ve built up sufficient activity, offer a few choice products connected to that topic
- If you find you are good at web designing, offer your website building services to others for income
- If you find you are a good writer and can write interesting & informative articles at a fairly rapid rate, offer to write articles for others – there’s a huge market for this
This is just a short list of ways to make money online. As you scan Warrior Forum and other online marketing blogs & forums, you will find many, many more. In our next post (click here,) we will go into more detail about some of my favorite approaches and how I learned to start getting successful at bringing in some income from them. Stick with me, you can do this!
