What to do now!?

There are many ways to start this out, whether you want to build a community forum and reference links to the niches you are interested in or maybe set up affiliate ecommerce stores could also be a nice idea.

I used to have a IM coach who would make videos for me, reply to emails daily and really help with his experience to make the most of mine. SEO can be a lot of work but it really depends on the niche, how competition will be like and I guess if there is an intent to buy market for your niche.

Keep In Touch!

Hi,
I am a member of Chris farrell's membership site and have been for about 12 months, if you go over to that site, just put a search in google and it will come up, he has a lot of free info, but you can join for about £30 per month with free hosting, by far the cheapest mentorship you will get.

He has all of the information that a beginner would need, I learnt a lot while I have been a member.

Speak soon
Take care
Phil

Ok, congrats on starting to take action and getting involved here. Those are two things that will help you a lot.

To be perfectly honest, it sounds like you don't yet have a really good idea of your business plan or some major internet business fundamentals. To me, you need to get some help with that stuff before you go all in with a full on mentor.

In my opinion, your first step should be to write out your plan on a piece of paper. Putting things on paper makes it much easier for you to see problems and for us to help you with where your plan is flawed.

Once you get involved a bit more and learn where the good advice is coming from, you will be in a much better position to choose an appropriate mentor.

Exactly so. Good plan - and perceptive and realistic comment.

The only other thing you need, right at the start, is probably an autoresponder account? You wouldn't be planning to try to make affiliate sales without building lists? If you hadn't yet thought about this part yet, take a look through all the threads here with titles like "What Do You Wish You'd Done Differently At The Start?" and "How Would You Re-start Tomorrow?" and "What Do You Know Now That You Wish You'd Known Originally?" and so on. There are about 100 of them! All the Warriors who are making a living as affiliate marketers are wisely giving the same answer: "Start building lists on day 1". There are reasons for that.

Is that because of the time factor, or something? Judging by your post (which is perhaps more "guessing" than "judging", I admit!), your writing skills are way above those of many people who do all the writing themselves. "Just saying" ...

You've already decided that you're going to depend on search engines for traffic? This is the only part of your post that worried me. There are other options, you know? Such as not depending on search engines for your traffic. Only you can decide: I'm mentioning this only to check that you do appreciate this?

I'm an affiliate marketer myself (ClickBank and Amazon, mostly), and can offer you two observations related to this ...

(i) Search engine traffic, for me, across my entire range of 8 niches, has always been the worst quality, least-opting-in and lowest-converting type of traffic out of everything I've tried. I do get plenty of it, as it happens, but only as an afterthought to my main traffic, and losing it all tomorrow wouldn't concern me unduly, and ...

(ii) As so many Warriors have found out (some of them to their very great cost) over the last year or so, Google traffic is the most precarious kind, because its supply is ultimately outside your own control. They keep changing their algorithms and have said openly that they'll continue to do so. And a business which depends on Google for its primary traffic can never be more than one algorithm-change away from a potential accident or even a potential disaster. For me, this wouldn't be a solid/reliable plan for a business at all.

Well, you're bound to. I answered only the few to which I felt I had anything useful to offer, and missed out the others.

Good luck!

Hi, I think you should start by yourself and discover the areas where you need a mentor's help. Discover your week points and decide then if you need help for a mentor because you don't know how to handle the problem or outsource it if you know what you need exactly.

There is a free program that I consider perfect for starting affiliate marketing websites, The Challenge by Ed Dale - Google it.

You don't NEED to outsource anything. In fact, if you don't have a good reason for doing so, I would say it could potentially be a good way of losing a lot of money very quickly.

If you don't know what work you need or how it should be done or what quality you want, then you won't know what to ask your outsourcer to do or have any way of judging whether or not what they have done is appropriate or needed.

Take this one step at a time. Just jump in and start. That's what I did. When/if you find something you can't do or don't enjoy doing, that's the time to outsource. But you will be doing it from a position of knowledge - at least you will know what it is that you don't know or can't do.

As for outsourcing writing, I would advise against it personally. Even if you choose a niche you know nothing about, there is no substitute for doing your research, learning about it and ultimately producing your own content.

Again. Practice. Try it. Once you have a site you can learn to improve it. Look at other sites. Work out in your own mind why you think some work and others don't. Try and follow the principles used in the ones you believe are good. You will learn and improve by doing.
As with the first point, there is no substiitute for learning yourself. You might choose to outsource later, but just bear in mind that every man and his dog can claim to offer seo services. I get several offers a week by email. If you are really going to outsource seo it helps to know how to do it yourself so you can understand what is good and what is bad. Too many seo people spend their time flooding random sites with random, rubbish comments. If you could see the spam folder on any of my sites, you would know what I mean.

Edit: Tanshi above makes a good point. "The Challenge" is an excellent place to start http://www.challenge.co/?ref=default

I agree with what was posted above. Before you start outsourcing everything you should do it yourself so you know what you're outsourcing. I have always thought that the best way to learn something is hands on. Just do it! Yes, people fail. But once you start making money and tweak things you'll understand what makes you money.

You'll eventually get to a tipping point and understand what exactly you need to do to make money. This will come naturally to you. At that point it will be easy to coordinate a team to make you money.

People will spend 100k on a college education. Even if you only spent 2k and fail a little bit your learning experience will take you a long way. Just don't get too caught up in those training programs. You'll end up spending a ton of money that you could have just dumped into a campaign for self learning.

Most of the information about marketing is freely available. Really all you need is a convincing website/lander and traffic. Affiliate marketing is as simple as finding a product that people want and convincing them they absolutely need that product.

Getting your website up and running is a first step. Next is to acquire traffic. If you have zero visibility you will obviously have zero sales. A simple process would be to build your site out and hit niche forums around your product, Youtube, guest posts etc. Also set Google Alerts to track when people are engaging in conversation about what you're selling.

I also believe in ethical marketing. There are many affiliates who have destroyed the reputation of the entire affiliate marketing industry by peddling garbage that only hurts consumers and is most of the time illegal. Good luck!

Thank you to all who have responded!
David - honesty is good, I love honesty! I love your advice to put everything on paper - you should see my notepad J
Alexa – very informative and very much appreciated response, thank you! Getting an autoresponder is now on my immediate to-do list, although I promise you I had it in my notes! It’s all in the list, right! Writing was just an example and depending on the extent of it, I will probably do the writing myself. Thank you for your kind words and again, thank you for your advice!

What you need is to partner with someone. Then you can help each other because no-one knows everything.

Look for a partner not a mentor.

Kind regards, Ian Stables

Here is where you start. STOP READING.

I am an idiot, I have had this SAME exact problem ever since coming here, and the information overload genuinely "broke the camels back".

I got absolutely fed up. I told myself "warrior forum will NEVER be able to help me as much as *I* can help myself". After this past week, I have discovered this is 100% true.

It began when I decided I was taking my focus completely off my own problems, and redirecting it to OTHER PEOPLES PROBLEMS. How can you truely be helpful and efficient untill you first are able to accomplish this?

What has changed in the last week? Well after 3 long weeks of spending little to no time on warrior forum, I began searching for "pain" like you can't imagine.

What kinda of pains do people have? I thought about anxiety, depression, then realized these things are too unstable. Too controversial. We simply don't have the scientific evidence for me to build a good case or write anything new and interesting, so I took my mind off psychological problems.

I then focused on biological problems in people. STILL, I could not find anything really new. But I kept looking... and then I took my focus off people completely.

Long story short, I stumbled upon an idea that has 22,000 searches a month, and not one single person competing for it.

It is new, its a serious pain lots of people experience.. but the pain isn't something THEY are actually going through. I tried to find something people would care about more then themselves, and fortunately I wound up finding something I think is awesome. Some of this will sound intentionally confusing because I don't want to give too many hints and would prefer people are a bit confused about what I'm actually doing.

I realized there was not ONE single ebook written about this topic, yet so many people were searching it, and ALREADY spending lots of money on outside the internet.

Launched my website yesterday, woke up today to $80 in my paypal, and I haven't even STARTED promoting it. I made 1 post on facebook, and realized today my entire paradigm for how to make money online has shifted.

I didn't learn this by asking people. I learned it mostly out of common sense and looking REALLY HARD for it.

Then I realized, the amount of organization and focus I actually put into this is really what seems to have made this specific idea work. I wasn't focused on marketing techniques, but finding a truely legitimate, helpful, untapped idea that can quell LOTS of peoples pain.

You can NOT get discouraged. You need to break that loop in your brain immediately. Just stop it. Stop thinking you need to know something unique or original because the unique ideas are things very few people know about.

The only way to find them is by LOOKING like I said. I am SO HAPPY right now that I spent the last 3 weeks of my life doing nothing but thinking in terms of pain, and how to alleviate peoples pain. Sure there are LOTS of ideas that are competitive, but you CAN definitely find a new idea that noone has jumped on yet.

Because like I said, I'm an idiot, but I definitely stumbled upon something profitable here. Reading for my first few months DID definitely help, but there comes a point where any further reading ceases to be helpful, and will become more of a barrier to success.

So PLEASE just stop reading, how much do you really already know?
How much do you really give yourself credit for?

Do you think you need to become a technical expert at everything to make money? I definitely am not an expert at anything, and I feel it is mostly my common sense that led to finding this idea. Although even when I found it, I didn't know I was looking at such a potentially profitable niche till heavy market research.

Just FOCUS, organize your thoughts, and start focusing on other people. Focus on their pain, make a long list of pains people have, pains their relatives have, pains their pets have, then begin researching competition. Think outside the box. Read medical literature, or any recent discoveries on things that have changed our ways of understanding a common disease or illness. Or even an uncommon idea or illness.

This is what has just began working for me, and I can't tell you how worth it all this work was. Its something I would have NEVER thought about untill I began really looking for it. Also when I say "common sense" I mean more in terms of realizing if you don't start looking now, how will you really ever find something? So more than anything, I suggest you start LOOKING. I could probably even mention the idea, and not a single person would understand WHY its so profitable untill they really researched the market.

I'm not an expert but if you could use guidance just pm me and I'll do my best to help you. I really think it comes down to discipline, research, keeping an open mind, and knowing the second you stumble upon something profitable. As when I found this niche idea, I couldn't find one shred of evidence to convince me WHY I wouldn't make money off it. Moreso the total opposite. When I found the idea I thought "ehh just another competitive idea", then I researched it and realized "omg there is actually *NO* competition for this". The more in depth I began research it, the more evidence I found to support that it would be profitable. The more I realized you can ALREADY BE LOOKING at PROFITABLE IDEA, and HAVE NO CLUE there is great potential to profit off it. The second I realized it, I bought the domain, wrote the ebook, and I will be making more threads about this in the future although I won't be speaking specifically about the niche in depth.

g/luck! -Red

ps. this really has nothing to do with "luck" because I believe most people create their own luck.

I say first thing is give yourself a LOT of credit for not only coming back but for asking for help. My dad always says "there is someone out there who always knows more" and this community is AMAZING at helping others. It is a ton of info but you are heading in the right direction.