When results aren't showing, how do you keep going?

I know just how you feel. If you believe it and want it, stick with it. After more than 2 years doing my online bits and pieces, I have started seeing some success. Good luck.

You just need to keep going and think of the alternative. Whats the alternative? You either keep going or give up.

You could have a chat with your mentor to re-evaluate your plan. Depends if you're seeing results or not. If you are, then fine tune, test and scale up. If your results are improving each month, then you're on the right track.

You want a personal story? Sure

I started doing niche sites with Adsense
Month 1 - I made $2
Month 2 - I made $6
Month 3 - I made $26
Month 4 - I have made $240...should hit about $270 by end of this month.

People laughed at me being happy that I tripled my income in month #2 from $2 to $6..but I kept going . If I had listened to them and gave up....where would I be this month.

Hey Brandon,

It looks like you are heading in the right direction. Are you still involved in that same niche and website? Have you continued to build it stronger or larger?

I know the feeling of getting 0 results for what you feel like is so much work. Sit down and look at what is in your way right from making money. Is it that you are getting no traffic? Or do you get plenty of traffic, but none are signing up to your newsletter or buying with your promotions?

Whatever the case may be, you are close. It sounds like you already have a website, a product, and a list set up. That's a solid sales funnel ready to go. If you already get lots of traffic, you have to pay close attention to where you are getting it and what it's doing. They might not be buying because of your sales copy, the way you connect with them in your newsletter, or even where you are getting them from.

These are all things that you have to work the kinks out for each niche site. Once you get one kink worked out you move onto the next until eventually you get sales rolling in. At this point you increase your efforts to keep it growing.

Like I said, it looks like you already have a good amount of kinks worked out. I like that you have a group of mentors ready to go for you, but realize that you're the only one who can make it work. It doesn't matter who is helping you.

If you publish 2 articles and a video every day for the next 3 months, I guarantee you will at least have the traffic coming in to the point where you can test out all the sales kinks.

As with any niche site, there are different stages you have to go through. Construction, Traffic Generation, and Sales Enhancement.

Travis

Hey Brandon,
I keep going because I know that I can't lose. I know that I will achieve complete financial freedom while deciding how much money I want to make.

Tweak things until you get the results you want...

What got you started in this business in the first place? Its a little embarassing for me to say it, but a piece of crap progam. Still I go back to when I first saw that, and everything I told myself I was going to do with that money. Remembering those initial goals and reminding myself that with the help of the people on these forums that I WILL make it keeps me going on even the worst of days.

Brandon,

My first thought is... if you have a mentor (or mentor team)... they should be able to tell you where you're going wrong.

Are you tracking your results? Do you know what your click through rates, conversion rates, signup rates, and average time on page is?

Have you narrowed down the problem? Is it lack of traffic, or poor conversion rates?

-Dan

You just keep at it my man. It took Tom Hua 10 years to make his first sale online and he's a multi millionaire today.

Another thing is to have multiple sites - it increases your income.

Well being a copywriter myself... I'd be happy to take a look at the sales page to let you know if I think it's up to scratch... if you want to post a link.

-Dan

Brandon, some awesome advice posted above. Now, from a mindset point of view -- each day you attack your IM adventure always know your "WHY". Why did you start your IM endevours? What is the true reason you started IM in the first place?

Always keep your "WHY" top of the mind. It will definitely help in those times of struggle. Whatever you do, do not give up, keep pushing forward. Everyone is telling you to keep pushing forward, because anyone/everyone on this forum has been there at one point or another.

Wishing you the best

When I have a bad day, I just remember how bad it was a year ago. It keeps me going.

Your site is nice. Left a comment for you. Good luck with it!

Also, you might want to re-think your niche or 'supplement' in another hot niche while things solidify in your current niche. Some niches are seasonal. If you're promoting a biz opp, I have some recommendations, you can PM me and I'll show you. I'm the top producer for one of the biz opps I promote and got it down pat.

Also, think about offering your list something to buy from the very beginning. Something small, as small as $7 is OK. It takes them from a prospect to a buyer, and if you get them to make a small commitment, a percentage of them will commit at a higher level with time.

Brandon, I know exactly what you feel like.

It took me ages before I finally broke through - like 2 years.

I wanted to quit so many times, but I stuck in there and now I am living it up

Seriously you have to hang it there. Everyone who has ever achieved anything great, failed so many times before hand. But they kept on going and that is what you have to do.

The amazing thing with internet marketing is that you can go form making $1,000 a month to $10,000 a month in literally a couple of months. There is not many other opportunities like that out there.

In saying that, there is no point in banging your head against the wall. You have to look at your business and analysis how you are making money and how you could improve.

You need to look at your business plan and be completely honest with yourself. For a long time, I was living in a delusion. I thought things could turn around in one particular niche, but then realized that I was wasting my time. So I got out, worked a different niche and starting making more money very quickly.

You also have to make your goal income targets a must. Starting from this week. Decide that you have to make $x this week no matter what it takes.

I wish you the best of luck in your quest

Keep pushing forward and never look back.

Hi,
I fully understand where you are coming from. Had a look at your site, looks good.
Does your mentor not suggest a way of turning it around.Have you considered any CPA offers on your site, people looking for money and debt management usually want immediate answers.
Pete

I struggled for years in a network marketing business. I then realized one day that I was building it the wrong way and attracting the wrong kind of people. I changed the way I did things and started to achieve the success I was looking for. I’m not quite where I want to be just yet, but I’m getting there.
I found that my biggest problem was the lack of a quality education. No one properly trained me, no one taught me how to go out and build a successful business, no one even really pointed me in the right direction, it was just alot of “buy this and buy that so I can get an override commission.”
I guess seeing the light at the end of the tunnel is what keeps me going.

No, you are not impatient.... some people are lucky, they make it within a very short doing exactly what you are doing, others may take longer. Now that you know what it takes, it up to you to see what is making you the most money and you work more on that..... when money fails to kick in fast, it can be a challenge especially when you have those waiting for your success or failure, to tell you that it does not work. But one thing for sure, unless you give up, you will achieve your goal.

Brandon, something does not seem right. I am going to take a different stance than most of the posters in this thread.

Most of the posters may not have had money to work with their business, so they bootstrapped. This takes time and elbow grease.

You on the other hand of spent money to get this off the ground.

Unless this was software you were having made, that amount of money and time should have gotten you some good results.

How much marketing are you doing? What kinds of ways are you marketing? Paid, articles, etc?

How is your backlinks? How are you getting your backlinks?

Is your market for hungry buyers, did you make sure there were plenty of buyers? or is this something you came up with and wanted to pursue? I had one site worked up to #1on google and stayed on the first page and it made very little sales. I dropped it and moved on.

I have had some difficulties and been very discouraged along the way, but usually found that more backlinks and split testing what I had done on the site gave me some answers.
Sometimes I just have a dud.

Your team may be part of your problem if they just give you suggestions for services they get paid for. No disrespect to them, but they may be looking out for themselves first.

Many independent people coming together as your team only look at the part they do, sort of like you would have 10 people stand around an elephant, stick their hand out and discribe that elepaphant as the part they are touching.

Your team may not be able to give you a complete answer. You need to do some trouble shooting or hire someone to do it for you. Don't throw more money at it till you know what needs to be done to make this work, or move on.

Jeannie


"I have not pinched my pennies and I feel that I have put a solid consistent effort each day. To date I have put in more than 10 grand and over 1200 hours.

When I say that I am not seeing results, what I mean is that I am not making any significant amount of sales and as a result not much cash is coming in yet".

That's a tough one....

There's never a guarantee that once we put up a website that it'll curely start earning any money to get back any we spent.

It may just be that you entered the wrong niche?

Try to review everything you did and learn from them.

Looking at Yahoo, I see you have a fair amount of backlinks. Apparently through blog commenting or commenting on sites?

Are they bringing you any traffic, or are you using all that just for backlinks?

I have been doing this for a couple months now I started with ppc and well that didn't work so I moved on to free traffic and well I also haven't made a significant amount of money but I keep going cause I know this works. I guess I am kind of hard headed but when I started I promised myself I would make this work no matter what! I have it embedded in my head and even though there are days I want to quit I don't cause I know one day I want to make this my career. I know I can make this work for me and you can to.

Brandon, you're definitely on the right track man! You have done more than many people EVER do in IM.

Look at it this way, most fitness programs are 12 weeks long. What percentage of the people that start them actually finish them? I bet it's less than half.

This might seem counter intuitive but have you considered taking a week or two off? I recently took a week off after 2 years of doing this every single night and every single weekend.

I went on a cruise and had no laptop, no internet connection, no iPhone...just a notebook, the book "Crush it" by Gary Vaynerchuck and the book "Rework" by Fried and Hansson.

I was in withdrawls for the first couple days but I read both books and spent lots of time in the sun and the water with my wife and I was FLOODED with ideas and I also gained some clairity on some other ideas I had kicking around.

I came back home, put one idea into practice and had my first $600 day! Not millions I realize, but that $667 took me under 2 hours to put together and it took me 9 hours at work the next day to make half of that!

If you're not seeing the results you'd like to see, take a look at what you're actually doing and watch your metrics (site visits, click thru rate, conversions etc).

Like they say, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.....

Shock the system.

I'll pm you a link to some help...

Please don't give up!

Brandon, It looks like you have a plan, have spent money on things that will pay off in the end and you are now in the building phase. Congratulations on taking action.

Mike had a good suggestion:
"If you're not seeing the results you'd like to see, take a look at what you're actually doing and watch your metrics (site visits, click thru rate, conversions etc)".

Since you are in such a competitive niche, it is going to take some time. I hope some things start popping for you soon.

Jeannie

First I want to say that consider everything your experiencing as pure feedback. It's not negative or positive, it's all just feedback and data for you to analyze so you can take your next set of actions.

Now I'm with Jeannie on this one. Something is definitely not right at one of the major key points in either your marketing campaign, plan or execution. So what I would do now is try and find any potential problem areas and leaks.

So here is how I would start the process...

Question 1 - Are you getting enough traffic? yes/no

If the answer is yes, ask your self what is the quality of this traffic and how well targeted is it?

If the answer is no, well then you know one area that is causing you problems.

Question 2 - Assuming you are getting enough quality targeted traffic for your opt-in list and/or product what are you converting at?

From the sound of your post it sounds like this is the overall problem area. This is quite a broad area so I would have to drill down further to try and dig out the problem. Here are some example scenarios.

Conversion on opt-in is low from ppc ads - in this scenario your getting traffic but not enough opt-ins. In this case you could have miss match somewhere between the keyword (mindset), the ad (expectation) and the landing page (delivering on that expectation).

Now lets say your getting plenty of opt-ins, but you can't convert them into buyers. Thats a totally different problem area. So you'd have to break this down further.

Are the people on your list reading your emails?

Are they clicking the links to your offer page?

I think you get the idea where I am going with all this. Basically you need to break your entire business/campaign down as much as possible and look for any obvious choke points in your sales process.

Also I'm not sure what niche your in but you might want to reevaluate it along with your position and/or USP. You also should really completely deconstruct and reverse engineer your competitors (the successful ones) as much as possible to try and pin point what they are doing differently then you and why...

Much love,
Gorilla.

I hate to say this as I am not making money myself but it look like the words you targeted are informational instead of buying keywords.
Also If buy your program I want to know ahead of time the benefits.
I might if its true say my tactics will allow you to get the Credit Card Companies to lower what earned.
I also might say that the program not only get you out of debt but them on the path of financial independence.
Maybe a little more emotional laden words both negative in describing where they are but positive tow here they are going.
Remember people don't buy on logic but on a emotional response

Hey all,

I just wanted to say thanks for all the feedback that you have all given. It is great to have support from people when you are feeling down

I am going to take a step back and take a closer look at my metrics. From there I feel confident that I will be able to spot some of the major problems.

Thanks again to all!!

Brandon

Every blog post seems to be named tips on budgeting

also why don't start a blog on running a successful vending business?

Hey Brandon, just took a quick look t the blog in your sig after seeing Zach's comment. If this is the site in question I one area that could use some work. The site feels sorta forced. It feels like a site built by a marketer if that makes sense.

This is a lesson to all who are looking to do something of their own. Initial stages are not so easy and their will be hard times when you will think to give up . when you won't see any results coming and will think to leave everything. But that is the only time when you need to keep holding for some extra time before you start getting some results.

The lesson to learn is if you are aware that you are on the right direction, do not give up so easily. Results may take time to show up and that is the real test of your temperament and other skills.

Keep up the work and DONT GIVE UP!!! Internet Marketing has a learning curve... People who have been in IM for years are still constantly learning tips and tricks. I learn little things every day that help increase sales.

There will be hard times, but do not give up and just try and work through them no matter how discouraging they are. You have a plan so just stick to it!