My 14 Lessons In 14 Years Online

Hi guys,

So I have been online since December of 2002. For the newbies here, I want to share with you 14 lessons that I have learned are MOST important when it comes to making money online with affiliate programs. These are my own views. Some here will agree and some won't.

I am not going to get into TOO MUCH detail on each lesson.

Lesson 1: You got to have a WHY. Why are you trying to make money online? You can't make it about the money. Each person is different but you have to know your WHY. (Example: You want to be free from your job. You want to be able to make enough money to pay for a new car. You want to go on more vacations, etc)

Lesson 2: Once you know your why, you then have to start working on YOU. You can't come from a job mentality and become an overnight success story online. Before you do anything, you have to work on your mental attitude. You do that by reading motivational books DAILY and listening to audio. (This has to become a DAILY habit of yours).

Lesson 3: You have to have your own website for product review or just an opt in page. You want to have your own domain name.

Lesson 4: You have to build a list and get new daily leads.

Lesson 5. Don't just work with any affiliate program. You want to work with a program that lets you earn residual income and an income from upsells that is in their funnel. Never promote products that earn you a one time commission. (You want to earn $20-$50 per month in residual and anywhere between $100-$5,000 in additional upsells from one customer).

Lesson 6: You want to build your OWN list of subscribers and never build the list of any company. You want to capture the leads on YOUR LIST FIRST.

Lesson 7: For faster results with getting leads and sales, you want to look into paid ads. My mentor said this to me and it is very true: IT TAKES MONEY TO MAKE MONEY. You have to be willing to invest money into ads.

Lesson 8: This ties to lesson 7. Anytime you are doing paid ads, you want to track how many leads you got and how many sales you got. There are places online where you will market and your results will be very bad. Some affiliates will throw in the towel as soon as they spend money and lose it. You have to be willing to test different places to find the winners and the losers.

Regarding free marketing, some are doing really well but you have to know that free ads is slow and painful and it may not work. You can't sit here for months to see if your free ads that you places all over the internet will work or not. If you want fast results that you can scale, paid ads is the way to go.

Plus, never look at other marketers and their results. You have to test things for yourself to see what works for you and for you only.

Lesson 9: Never sit during the day and think what you should do to move your affiliate marketing business forward. You have to sit the night before and get yourself a strategy for the next day. Think about most important income producing activity and write it down. The morning comes and you know what to do instead of sitting there for hours and surfing useless websites and getting nowhere.

Lesson 10: Own the product that you are promoting. This gives you more belief about recommending the product to others.

Lesson 11: Believe in yourself and never let anyone tell you that you can't succeed.

Lesson 12: Most of the times when you are starting out, things are not going to happen for you as you want them to. You will face many challenges all the time but you have to keep at it till you succeed. Some people have failed for weeks and some months but they are now doing really well.

Lesson 13: While there are many "mentors" online, some are NO GOOD. One person will tell you this and the other will tell you that. Every good mentor will tell you in more depth what I mentioned above. There are people online who are making less than $100 per month and they create products that they want to show others how to earn $1,000's per month. So you have to be careful.

Lesson 14: I kept this for last because this is the most important lesson I have learned. That lesson is the ability to NEVER GIVE UP no matter what happens. You have to stick with it no matter what happens. Things are not going to work your way. You will not have enough money to invest. Your creditors will call you. People you know will laugh at you. People will think you are crazy. People will tell you that you should stick to the 40 years JOB career path.

No matter what happens, never give up and never quit.