Introduction, formalities, and whatnot. Probably a TL:DR Thread.

Hello, everyone!

I'm James, a 21 year old from West Virginia, USA who is just getting started with internet marketing.

Ever since I started playing around on the internet, I always knew there was an opportunity to make money with it. The problem was that I never knew how, and I never had the time to sit down and learn.

My turn around point was during one lonely, dark night at 3:30 in the morning, I came across a guy by the name of Adrian Morrison on TV. He made everything sound so simple. So immediately got out of bed and looked this guy up. Of course, the first result was his page selling his program. Bad news - it wasn't free. But here's the thing: This is the internet. You can find anything you want for free. So back to Google I went. I started really researching internet marketing, who was involved in it (I came across some more very well-known names and programs in internet marketing.) I found out that for me, because of my current employment status, I'd be better off venturing out into Facebook marketing. Why? It's very cheap. It may not offer a good conversion rate, but it's cheap. I already had a Clickbank account, but I didn't know how to use it, so I found out and by 5am I already had my first ad up: a golf swing ebook that give a $30 dollar commission.

That ad failed quickly. Why? I didn't do enough research. I used the CPC method, which as it turns out, is not cost effective at all. I had a budget set of $5 USD, and that was gone within a few hours. And guess what? 0.0 percent conversion.

So, back to the drawing board. I looked at other advertising methods, which ones worked, which ones didn't. The next product I tried was a diet program, that had a $42 dollar initial commission. I decided to try out AdFly with this one, which probably wasn't a good idea, but hey, I gotta experiment. I set a $7 USD lifetime budget for this one, which equates to 7,000 visitors. So far, I have 5,000 visitors and no conversions. So, either the product was a bad idea or AdFly just isn't a good market.

Then I came across a product I thought for sure would have a guaranteed conversion. The Diablo III Inferno Codex, which is a series of very well written guides for one of the best games ever developed. By this time, I had done quite a bit more research. I hopped back on to Facebook ads, set it up (with my hoplink, of course), but this time I selected the CPM method. I set an $8 dollar budget for this campaign. I bid 5 cents per CPM, but it's costing me (get this) LESS than 1 cent. If all goes well, this ad will be viewed by several million people, and I'm hoping for at least one conversion.. Low standards, I know, but I have to start somewhere.

I decided to fire the golf swing campaign back up, again using the CPM method. Once again, this is costing me less than a cent to keep going. I also set up a visitor boost account with this one, with 1000 visitors. So far, with them, I've got 36 visits but no clicks or conversions.

So far, I've had no conversions with any of my ads on any service, but my ads are being seen... I know patience is a virtue when it comes to internet marketing, and I'm trying my best to remain calm and not get upset when I see no conversions. So far I've only invested about $20 dollars throughout Facebook, AdFly and VisitorBoost, so I'm not losing out on much. If I get just one conversion with any of my campaigns, I'll make back what I've lost. As far as I know, I'm doing everything right for Facebook marketing. I'm really trying to make it work there, because, as I said, advertising there is very cheap and with over 800 million potential customers, I just couldn't say no.

Anyway, that's how I got started with internet marketing. If anyone can help, by all means feel free to talk to me. If there's anyone interested in knowing more about my methods, again, let me know! I'm completely new at this, but I'm going at this with completely free information I've found on the internet, particularly YouTube, so I'm not part of any program. I'm just learning as I do more research.