The dilemma of a beginner IMer

Hi Iris, yes this I do get where you have gone with this post and yes it is our dilemma. However, I look at the alternative and I say no no no. Much of the stuff we read in hear is very advanced and is a matter of tweaking or other minor changes for those already in the flow.

For me I take it one skill at a time. It seems you are good at article writing. I am sure there is a company out there that needs that service. The problem is most of our future customers don't know they need us yet. This is a good thing. We are not out there trying to sell 8track tapes. We may be beginners in hear but go out in the world and ask many of your friends or just be a reporter on the street for a day and ask a simple question. "What is article marketing." I bet you get more blank stares than you can imagine. In other words us beginners are still way ahead of the curve. We know what is coming and if we persists we will be the purveyors of our own business destiny.

Keep at it.

Hope this helps or inspires

You are right, it takes time to make money, but when you do the right thing consistently and smartly, the money will start tickling in steadily. I started this journey of IM, I can only go on and on..

There's a great book call Bounce that outlines what you need to be great. You need to spend 10,000 to be a master at something. There is no shortcuts and no one great has spend less than that time. It is confirmed in many books and studies.

The great thing is that once you get to a certain point your gains are exponential. Keep at it!

The most important thing to do is to just start. It doesn't matter whether you fail or not, because every failure is a piece of data that leads you one step closer to success. Don't waste time hemming and hawing over what path to take. Just pick something you think you will enjoy and do it. Do it until you are blue in the face. Then, step back and see what worked and what didn't work. Do more of the things that worked and cut out the things that didn't work. Wash, rinse, repeat, and always be testing.

Its really true Iriss, It take time to be a online marketer, That what is happening to me right now. Haven't yet a success in a 6 month. I will try harder this 2012.

I am going to answer my own question. Lol.

I think that the solution is to set limits. Do something for 2 weeks, or even a month. Do you get any results at all? If not, it's time to move to something else.

I guess when I wrote the original post, I was referring to a "global" perspective. How do we achieve greater personal development? In this scenario, rules become a little more vague, because nobody really has a way of knowing... how much they developed in 1 month or whether it made a difference on anything.

We can only try our best, observe results and adapt.

I think after a while you will notice what is right or what is wrong. It is always a matter of seeing things and changes. when you not noticed that your wrong after a long time, you probably never find it out, and if you cant change it because it makes no difference to know it...you will keep going!

Hey everyone,

Brand new to the forums per several days ago and I ran across this thread in my ever persistent quest for enlightenment.

Just thought I'd add my two cents in here, seems to be the best place to start since I am just getting my feet wet as an IMer in these forums.

Since October 2011 I've been researching day in and day out about how to get started in internet marketing. Years ago when I was in college (I'm about to be 28 lol, getting old!) I dabbled in it very little, but never had any success with it. When my wife and I left the Air Force about a year ago she insisted I be a stay at home hubby. Of course I obliged her, but I started getting really stir crazy doing nothing but playing WoW and video games. Needless to say I had to do something but I despise working for other people, and not doing my own thing. I've a very peculiar guy to say the least, thankfully I have someone who loves and supports me, even the crazy side!

Back to the point though, it has been about a week and a day since I finally gathered the courage to take the first big step in my new career (after months of researching). I finally bought my first domain and hosting! I decided when I first began my research that affiliate marketing would be the most logical first step. There isn't a better option in my eyes for beginners than to start building those foundations of passive income. Anyways, I bought my domain and hosting on Monday of last week, spent three days straight doing product research, planning, and site setup, then launched on Thursday.

Since my launch last Thursday I've pulled in $140 from Clickbank plus someone got a free trial, and if they purchase that product in full it should put me at about $200. Needless to say I was ecstatic, and let me tell you it was the most rewarding experience I think I've ever had. Something I built, something I created, and something that was devoted to a very good cause (this first site is an informative resource site regarding a serious medical condition my wife has). Not to mention all the research I did prior to even taking my first step into the game was very well paid off, also very rewarding. With knowledge comes success.

My site is already ranked #2 on first-page Google for my "keyword phrase" and I'm on page four of the broad version. I haven't set up any backlinks yet though, nor have I submitted any of my content to directories (both of these things I am still researching to try and figure out the proper procedures). I'm hoping I'll sky rocket to the first page for my broad keywords once these things happen. I self taught myself all the SEO and coding I would need.

As I was researching article directories and backlinks, I was utilizing (and learning!) PPC to drive some traffic my way until my organic search gets going. HostGator gave me $100 Adwords and $25 adCenter coupons. Ironically Google banned me from Adwords after I burned through about $30 of advertising for site violations (again, something to learn before hand!). Of course I researched this problem thoroughly and discovered that I had what Goog's consider's "paid links" but I didnt have "nofollow" in any of them! I also added a Compensation Disclosure just for good measure (as well as a Disclaimer for the medical information, and the standard Privacy Policy). I dont get my adwords account back but at least they put my site back into the search query (they took it off until I fixed all my links and resubmitted my sitemap).

It has felt like a whirlwind of information running through my brain, but I am making such great progress in my eyes (almost $200 my first week!) and I just keep on pushing.

I know I'm brand new, but my advice to any fellow newbs out there is to research research research! That's all I've been doing for four months before I even dared step foot into the scene, and it has payed off for sure. I have a fairly solid grasp of what is going on, and what I have to do, and where to go after completing X tasks. I have exponential amounts more to learn, but I taught myself the foundation, and that is what is truly important.

I highly recommend affiliate marketing as your starting point if you are feeling lost. Here are the steps I took to get success in my first week, if this helps anyone else out there.

- Research what you are going to undertake, if you think you've read enough, slap yourself and hit the books for another two weeks just to make sure.

- Hunt down other successful affiliate marketing sites. View their page source code, pick apart every single aspect of it. (that's how I figured out my affiliate links needed rel="nofollow"). This is called reverse engineering. You are breaking down something successful to find your own success. Find out how they optimize, look at their keywords, look at their links, their paging structure, how they are reviewing their affiliate products. Take it all in, learn everything you can, and never stop.

- Learn organic SEO. Start with learning the very basic of HTML coding for a single page. The easy stuff, like <html <head <title <body <p <h1's <h2's <h3's etc...A well coded page using just the basics will give you brownie points from the spiders. Once you have a solid background in HTML basics, you can move onto the smaller, more technical aspects of SEO; things like keywords in your title, using post-title for your slug (slug is the sub-directory name, like blah.com/article-about-blah/ <---/article-about-blah/ is the slug, typically it would default to some sort of date/category combination, specifically if you're using WordPress. Changing this is a great little SEO tweak and will further add keywords (hint, use keywords in the slug! to help your page get indexed to the first few pages). Learn it all, and if you can't, never stop trying! Because one day, you will.

- Once you've got a solid technical/SEO foundation, it's time to start thinking creatively and finding your niche. A niche is just something that interests you, that only a very specific demographic of people are interested in. You can think of a niche like this...

General Idea >> A More Specific Genre of the General Idea >> A Very Specific Idea within the Specific Genre

Let's take music as a great but very basic example. You love music, but how would you go about finding a niche? You've always been a fan of guitar even though you can't play it, and your Dad listened to a lot of Classical music when he was growing up, so you know a bit about it...hmm, this could lead to something beautiful ^.^ so lets break it down like this

Music (the General Concept) >> Classical Music (a more specific genre of the concept) >> Classical Guitar (here's your basic niche!)

So with classical guitar as our basic idea of a niche we'd be interested in (when you first start out, it is much easier to be motivated about the LOADS of work ahead of you if you are researching/writing/coding/endlessly tweaking about something you enjoy) we can further break it down to very specific topics to begin building our first business.

The niche: Classical Guitar
Ask yourself, can I break this down further? Breaking a niche down even more precisely will put you ahead of the game because you will have a strong understanding of the demographics of the traffic you need to drive and the market you are serving finely tuned. The answer is yes, we can! Things like...
- Classical Guitar for Kids
- Classical Guitar for Beginners
- Advanced Classical Guitar
etc etc.

Pin-pointing these even more specific niches in your already specific niche will lead you to a much better ROI (you'll see income much faster and you'll pay less money if you start using paid adverts like PPC to drive initial traffic), not to mention you'll easily gain substantial page ranking on your own just for being so specific provided you have a solid understanding of basic SEO.


-Be sure to do market research about who you're going up against and how many competitors you're up against. Again, break down the sites of your competitors. Read through their content and pick it apart. Is it well written for SEM? How hard will it be to push past their search rank? The less specific you get, the more competitors you deal with (in theory), and the competitors get exponentially harder to overtake on search (good luck out ranking walmart, barnes and noble, amazon, or any other corporate giant that dumps $15 a click and thousands a day to keep their page ranking up). Pick your battles! Especially your first one, as it could very well make or break your success, and more importantly, your heart.

-Once you have a niche, do keyword research. Regarding keywords, you have to decide if you want your actual site to be ranked, or if you are going to have specific pages that you want ranked. These two things are very different, and doing both is complicated especially for noobs like us! If you're going to just try to get your site ranked (i.e. you want your index.html to be high ranked) you'd probably want to build a site with at least 4 different pages of content, none straying too far from the sites entire concept. For instance...

I want my site, how-to-teach-kids-guitar.com to be ranked, I don't really care about the specific pages. The best way to go about doing that would be to stick with a very relative keyword set across ALL of your pages. Our main keyword phrase is "how to teach kids guitar". You should always, always strive to get your MAIN keyword (the more specific the better) as your domain. This is step one of good ranking. Step two is creating a very closely related keyword theme that can be applied across your entire site, while always utilizing your main keyword.
For example...

Main KW: "how to teach kids guitar"
Index KW: "how to teach kids guitar"
Page 1 KW's: "how to teach kids guitar" + "how to teach kids guitar scales"
Page 2 KW's: "how to teach kids guitar" + "how to teach kids to read guitar sheet music"
Page 3 KW's: "how to teach kids guitar" + "how to teach kids to perform guitar recitals"

Note that we are always using variations of the main keyword which we want our entire site to be indexed for, however we have come up with many useful and relevant keywords that are close variants of the original, and if you noticed even contain the main phrase in them. This setup would really get your site noticed by the spiders if you did it right (at least from what I've researched!)

Now, on the flip side, if we wanted to just make a very general website (not too general that the domain isn't relevant) and then have our separate pages be the stars of the show, we could build keyword themes like this...

The domain: honest-fitness-product-reviews.net
This gives us some very general keywords that are relevant to the very specific niche pages we'll be making. Use common sense here. You don't want to buy dog-tricks.com if you're building sub-pages about how to cut a cats claws safely...duh

Moving on, so we have a good, general, relevant URL that accurately describes our main idea. This time however, we dont care where our home page is ranked. We care about getting the specific pages we make to #1. So...

honest-fitness-product-reviews.net <---describes our purpose, honest reviews about fitness products, but WAY too general to get ranked for, and way too competitive, it however provides a really great relevant "category" for our sub-pages that will be VERY specific.

So we'd write a nice little site intro telling the consumer about our great product reviews and how honest we are, starting the fire to warm them to the sale if they happened to check the home page first...

Then, we'd go on clickbank, and pick one of the thousands of fitness products to review. Having done our RESEARCH we'd be familiar with all the stats clickbank uses to describe products and their performance and could effectively pick a decent one. Once you pick the product, you need to develop a strong set of tightly knit and extremely relevant keywords for it. This is easily done by going to the vendor's sales page and just reading it, then taking the major ones you find and dumping them into Google AdWords "contextual placement tool" which will give you a whole slew of relevant, long-tail keywords you could use.This specific keyword set should be formatted into your product review and should, in theory, give you a nice page ranking on its own. Add backlinks and submit those product reviews to directories and you should be good to go!

You can do this with Product A, B, C, D, E...all the way to Z! Eventually you'd have a massive product review site that consumers in the fitness world could utilize and you could be the "go-to" guy for anyone up in the air about that new "Abs in a Week" program that came out last month, and could be closing sales left and right before you know it.

Whoa, whoa...I think we're both getting a little too excited here As noobs we need to take our lack of experience, expertise, and knowledge into consideration. We can't take on too much, we have to start with the basics, and definitely with a nice, small, easily managed project. Your first goal, above everything else, should be to find success in whatever it is you decide to do.

So, once you figure all that out, launch your site! Upfront investment will be about $17 dollars to start-up (10 bucks for a domain for a year and 7/mo for hosting), and about 8$ per month there after for hosting. Sell one thing for $20 in your first month and you've already made a profit. Sell something next month and you've covered your overhead and also made a profit...as long as you are always making any kind of profit OR breaking even you are still good to go. If you are losing money you need to start rethinking your plan of attack.

Well guys...I've effectively written a mini-ebook here it seems and I really apologize for the TLDR post if anyone feels that way about it, but I just got so excited...that and it's 3 a.m., I tend to ramble when it gets late xD.

I love writing if you can't tell and I love my new career and am just ecstatic about it all. I hope some of you new guys like me who are having trouble finding these small but very important successes early on that provide the motivation and hope to keep pushing forward find them soon, and see from my story that they are indeed possible and attainable even for the noobs!

Just remember.
With good research, comes great knowledge.
With great knowledge, comes proper application.
With proper application comes success.

Read, read, read! Read some more! Equip yourself with the knowledge to succeed before you attempt or you will be sorely disappointed.

Lastly I'd like to note that I haven't bought any of these coaching WSO's or other products out there that tell you how to make millions...guess what guys? This is the internet. Anything anyone could sell you is out there for free somewhere, at least until SOPA is implemented (god forbid) xD. But seriously, I'm sure having a coach is wonderful...but I personally believe that true success is figuring some things out on your own and really putting forth that effort to discover the knowledge on your own, it's out there, in these forums, on other forums, by reverse engineering a top affiliate's website, asking jeeves, opting in for free information on a dummy email but never buying anything they pitch to you (but thoroughly reading the free tips you opted in for!), etc...again, it's the internet!

Nice to meet you guys, my name is Adam, sorry for the super long post, but hope I helped to inspire some other newbs out there Best of luck and if anyone ever needs help I'm here in any way I can.

Cheers

--edit--
As it stands, I am a newb and I apologize if any of the "advice" or points I made are wrong. Wrong information is the last thing I'd want to give anyone! Just in-case. Nite

Hi you just need to work at it, their is no such thing as failure you are simply discovering how not to do something, just tween what you are doing, keep learning and keep going

I guess you could be doing something wrong for a really long time until you get it right. I think your question here is more like when to give up?

Absolutely correct my friend. It really takes a lot of time for a beginner to see such results that they expect. Hardwork, discipline and patience for long will give you benefits and to become better in the near future, rather than just making money in a short amount of time.

Hey warriors,

Just one word, you just have to "ACT".

i agree with Aesop87...

It took about 2 years before I got my first payment. While I still have a LONG way to go before I recoup my IM costs (I've spent probably over $1k+ in various outsourcing, wso's, etc), I consider all of my IM costs equivalent to an education course.

It's going to take a while before you find a method that best suits your skills since not everyone can do certain ones (I started in article marketing, but I can't write). Just remember that ALL methods do work, but it's different strokes for different folks.

Once you find that one you think fits your skill, work on that method and you'll see results eventually. The most important thing is to NEVER give up.