www.tamomer.com

So you’ve decided to take the leap into deep water and go
into business for yourself, specifically into Internet
Marketing. Congratulations! This was a smart decision, one
that will eventually reward you with all the dreams you can
dream. Your challenge now is to survive that 1st year.

Hopefully you’re reading this early on in your endeavors,
and can make the adjustments necessary to keep your
enterprise afloat and your bank account buoyant. Here are
several things the “gurus” neglected to mention along the
way to building your own internet marketing empire!

1 - Who are you listening to? There are a lot of people
who’ve made a lot of money, and they’re all too eager to
tell you about it, frequently in the form of their latest
product. It’s very easy to find yourself tuning in too many
voices, instead of riding one horse till it either gets you
there or is spent. Find a niche that interests you, find
products that are either yours or through an affiliate
program, and focus entirely on your plan, not allowing
yourself to chase rabbits.

2 - What is certain! And that is that the real money to be
made in internet marketing is produced in the following
ways: owning your own site(s), your own products, your own
opt-in mailing list, and your own vision! Think about it!
Not one of the internet millionaires to whom we look to for
advice has lacked any of these for very long. You bought
their products off their sites, joined their mailing lists,
and to one degree or another shared their vision. If you
haven’t already, begin immediately to build your own empire.
Build a site, start learning about traffic, linking, opt-in
lists and all the other essentials necessary for long-term
success. Affiliate marketing will only take you so far. In
fact, most of the top affiliates have several of their own
products!

3 - The learning curve. There is a certain amount of
information you simply have to either learn (or pay for).
Don’t discount the fact that this will take a little time.
One doesn’t discover how to build and market a fully-
optimized web site in a month. Or three! This is; and
because of the fluid nature of the web; always will be a
work-in-progress. Do what you can do every day and come back
tomorrow for more. Don’t be discouraged when the money takes
a while to appear; if you do this right, when it does show
up it will be worth the wait!

4 - A support system. Get one. Don’t plan on supporting
yourself from your business right away. It took the best at
the very least several months to start seeing any real
money. Don’t despair if you turn out to be mortal, too. Give
yourself a chance at this; the rewards are simply too great.
I’ll leave you with a quote that sustained me many a night:
“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my
ship.” - Louisa May Alcott

Keith Thompson is the webmaster of Internet Marketing
Here & Now where you can find lots of information on how
to learn internet marketing!

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Former U.S. president, George Bush Senior told the following story during a broadcast back in 1989…

A young boy and an old man were walking along a beach. As they walked, the boy picked up each starfish he passed and threw them back into the sea. Confused, the old man asked him why.

“If I left them here,” the boy said, “they would dry up and die. I am saving their lives.”

“But the beach goes on for miles and there are millions of starfish,” the old man said. “How can what you’re doing make any difference?”

The boy looked at the starfish in his hand, threw it into the ocean, and answered, “It makes a difference to this one.”

How does that relate to Internet marketing?

Our quest into the world of making money online can often be like that walk along the beach. The starfish lying on the sand are the tens of thousands of people who, wanting to start their own business, have bought into some hype, and joined schemes and scams that have absolutely no chance of working for most of them.

These starfish… these people who have bet their lives’ dreams, and often life’s savings, on a poorly conceived, over-hyped “business opportunity” strike me as starfish stranded on that beach. They are so close to the ocean, - to proven online businesses they can own, and yet they need a little help.

As a consultant, and someone many people come to for solutions, I see too many who have bought into a “packaged deal” that includes everything from a complete turnkey website to guaranteed traffic. In theory, all they need to do is turn it on, and it will spit out dollar bills.

The dream of an instant, foolproof business is simply very, very appealing to some. We all know that if it were THAT easy, everybody would be doing it. Still, we like to believe that it is… just maybe… possible. It’s sort of like playing the lottery. We know our chances are one in one hundred million of winning, but maybe… just maybe…

Back to that walk along the beach… You can actually earn a decent living online being that boy walking along the beach. You save these starfish, one at a time by showing them what really does work online. You see people wasting time and money on some business concept that is failing them, and you do the kind-hearted thing. You gently show them the errors of their ways.

Many will still stubbornly hold on to the scam they have bought into, and continue trying to make that work. Their chances of ever making a dime are less than average. They are still looking for the easy, no-effort way, that doesn’t exist!

Some will notice that YOU are earning a living online and want to know how you do it. That’s your invitation to show them what has actually proven to work for you. That’s your green light to throw them back into the “Internet marketing ocean” and give them another chance at success… a much better than average chance because you teach them how not to wash up on the shore again.

One term we see used online frequently is six-figure income. That threshold has a magical effect with many because they have difficulty achieving it. You can easily achieve a six or even seven-figure income online. All you have to do is help others the do the same. They will happily pay you for your help. Help someone to earn $200,000 a year and they won’t mind paying you handsomely for that. Teach them the proper way to do it and they will be forever grateful to you.

Now that you know the key, there’s only one thing for you to do. That is to get started. If you don’t know how, that’s simple too… let those already doing what you want to do teach you. One way to do this is to join me at the Internet Marketing How To Workshop for a tremendous start. The workshop is taught by 11 people who “save starfish” all day long. It’s April 30th - May 2nd, 2004. Sign up now at: http://InternetMarketingHowToWorkshop.com

Copyright 2004 Willie Crawford

About The Author

Willie Crawford has been teaching others how to build an on-line business since late 1996. Frequently featured in radio, magazine and newspaper articles and interviews, Willie teaches the average guy what the top marketers are doing but seldom talking about. Willie provides detailed how to information in his newsletter, through his personal coaching, and at his annual how to workshop. Learn more at: http://InternetMarketingHowToWorkshop.com

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In my opinion, one of the ‘Golden Rules’ of Internet marketing has to be the following:

‘Once you have uploaded a website, you should leave it online forever - even if it is only making you a couple of dollars a month.’

As long as you are covering the hosting and domain registration fees each year (maximum of a couple of dollars a month), then why take the site offline? Admittedly if the site is causing you hours of work every week and still only making you a couple of dollars income each month, then yes, remove it. But if the site involves you in no work (for example if it sells an eBook or you generate Adsense income etc from it, then why remove it?)

The point is that whilst the site in question may only be generating a small amount today, you never know what might happen tomorrow..

This principle has been illustrated to me in a pretty big way during the past week and this is the sole reason that it is fresh in my mind and I want to share the experience with you so that you don’t make the mistake that I very nearly made.

I have a site which I built about three years ago. It was a bit of an experiment and not connected to my main income-earning sites in any way. The site covered a topic that was pretty competitive online - an industry for which top search engine rankings were exceptionally hard to get. As I say, it was an experiment and I didn’t really expect the site to make me much money - which was a good thing as it meant that I wasn’t too disappointed when it didn’t!

After a few months of receiving no traffic, the site was eventually picked up by a couple of the major search engines and it started to receive a handful of visitors each day. I guess on a very good day I would get 45 referrals. Needless to say, the site wasn’t making a fortune in income but something is always better than nothing.

Anyway at the beginning of this year I undertook a review of all of my websites and made the decision to ditch a few of the under-performing sites. This is where I nearly made a big mistake by deleting my little site but for whatever reason, the site in question managed to survive my ‘cull’. It was a close call but in the end I decided that even though the site was only making $20 or $30 a month, it wasn’t involving me in any work so it would be stupid to turn it off just for the sake of it.

So the site remained online and up until last week, it continued to tick over as it has done for the past three years, earning a minimal income every month from the few visitors that manage to find it.

That all changed last Thursday however when Google suddenly decided that my little experiment site was far more valuable than it had previously thought. Yup, Google decided that instead of listing my site way down the rankings for one or two low-level keywords, it would index the site at the top of the rankings (quite literally in first place in many instances) for numerous high-level keywords!

Result? The site has gone from receiving an average of 35 visitors a day from Google to receiving over 500 visitors per day. On the busiest day this week, Google kindly sent the site just under 800 visitors.

Of course, this is great news and the site is already making considerably more profit than it has ever done but just look at how I would have missed out if I had taken the site offline. Remember, this is a site that I have barely touched in three years and I certainly haven’t spent any time optimizing the site for the search engines. It is just a simple case of Google changing their algorithm in a way that favours my site considerably. This is one of those situations which could happen to any website at any time and this is the main reason why I say, once you have a site online, leave it there.

Clearly there is no guarantee that my site is going to stay at the top of Google for any length of time and given my experience of how search engines work, I am prepared for it to drop back down the index at any time but I am certainly enjoying the extra traffic while it lasts.

The above situation also illustrates how fickle search engines can be. Longer term readers will remember that I took the decision not to bother chasing search engine rankings some time ago. This decision was taken after Google decided to move one of my highly optimized sites from top position for countless keywords to about 20th position. This was a site which I had spent weeks optimizing and a site which had held top positions for over two years. Traffic to this site dropped away in hours and that was the point at which I vowed not to waste my time chasing search engine rankings and instead, would just let the search engines sort themselves out and rank my sites as they saw fit.

Sometimes this approach works and sometimes it doesn’t - I try not to let it worry me either way…

Copyright 2005 Richard Grady

Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html

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