Feeling Lost Need Some Guidance

Maybe it isn't the path. But local lead generation has a lot of posts here from people who are doing it, use the search feature of the forum. As for selling high ticket, you've proven to yourself that you are not a salesperson, so you might want to reconsider that one.

I think you need to get your "house" in order, decide what you want, rather than some cloudy idea of becoming a "successful Internet Entrepreneur"...

Perhaps, instead of taking more training programs, you sit down and come up with what you really want...and if making money is at the top of your list, then you need to obtain the skills necessary to run a business, and make profitable decisions. It just sounds like you may not be up to the task, however, good luck.

GordonJ

A couple of things.. I see you have done eBay.. and you tried a Shopify store.. Then you write a ebook about Amazon? and yet you feel it a dis-service in selling Chinese junk? Not trying to be mean here.. but seriously - look at that.

So what separated the "success" of the eBay option vs the Shopify option? Clearly it is the built in traffic of eBay.. so obviously eBay would be a path in your case that actually has an amount of success, just not financial success.

So let me ask.. do you live in the States? If you do.. then the answer is kinda right here: https://www.warriorforum.com/warrior...days-ebay.html Stop selling Chinese junk and start selling used junk or junk that happens to still be new in box.

$500 a month would be a bad month for me. and sourcing product really is not that hard. I literally found a listing on Facebook marketplace today for a FREE Large Format (36") printer scanner copier.. listed it and sold in 2 hours of listing for $2500 - on the same Facebook Marketplace no less.

Granted that is an extreme.. but read the above thread, and you will better understand with eBay for every dollar I spend on physical in my hand product I am making $3.00. TRIPLING ( or greater ) my money with every sale... EVERY sale.

I cant say I have ever dropped shipped on eBay, but from what I understand it is half a pain in the neck and can be time consuming.. and you are making Pennies - well ok Nickels and you want to be making dollars.

The path is there.. you have proven success. All you have to do is change the ownership of the item being sold.

Hope that Helps!

You said you feel like you don't create much value for your buyers. Maybe that is part of the problem. Maybe you are not motivated only by money but want to sell/create something of substance. In that case, it's more about figuring out what kind of value you want to provide and then how you can provide it.

Hi WorldMaster,
I'm completely new to this and have yet to make anything but I have been researching affiliate marketing. One thing I hear people say is that it's good to try to develop multiple income streams to do really well. With affiliate marketing the big goal is to get interested customers to buy products using your affiliate links.

One thing you might could also try is putting affiliate links in youtube videos relating to your product. According to similarweb, youtube is the 2nd most visited site on all the internet with over 28 billion visits a month. I haven't tried any of the other stuff you're doing though(aside from a little ebay). Anyways, Good luck

Maybe you are not motivated only by money but want to sell/create something of substance. In that case, it's more about figuring out what kind of value you want to provide and then how you can provide it. dgcustomerfirst

The last sentence on your post is the most valuable thing!
Some methods to make money can work for you and some won't work for you, what you need to do is just don't give up and truly believe in what you said in the last sentence. Trust me, if you want to succeed badly, eventually you will succeed, there is no other way, but remember, do NOT give up, ever.

There are tons of methods that can make money, but it doesn't mean that all of them will work for you. Keep trying, keep working and I am sure you will find the one. To try a method doesn't take long and doesn't require much efforts, what is hardest is to change your mindset.

Fail 100 times and 101st time you will succeed.
I have tried hundreds of methods too, spend a lot of money and time without any luck. Yeah I have made some profits, like you said, but it wasn't constant and it wasn't growing, so i just dropped everything and started a new method, new business model. After you try many methods, you mindset will start transforming into the correct mindset, slowly you will understand what is working, how it's working, you will learn from mistakes and gain more and more experience. One day you will 100% know what you want to do, what business you want to run and you won't wander ever again.

Good luck!

Thank you all for the great advice. You have given me a lot to think about.

I probably should have mentioned this before but I am also an illustrator/cartoonist. I'm a recent illustration college grad just starting out on that journey as well. A couple of you have said that maybe the money isn't my motivation and I think you hit the nail right on the head. The dream that I've always had was to become a great storyteller and ultimately share these stories as graphic novels and tabletop games. My fear has always been though that most artists are poor and that is why I started on my journey to create an online business. The business's sole purpose was to fund my life while I create what I'm truly passionate about.

You guys have already provided me so much value, but if you could help point me in the right direction as to where I could learn the skills in order to market and monetize this dream It would be amazing.

Thank You All

Hello there -

I'm also a bit new to the making money on your own thing and understand what you're going through.

It's great that you have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to make money to support your passion. Don't let go of it!

Reading your story though, it sounds to me like perhaps you're getting a bit ahead of yourself. Everybody is different and some people choose to go and find business ideas right away. Others (like yours truly), try to take a less risky path before jumping in.

I'd say that your first priority is to find a stable 9-5 that pays the bills (what I did). And then, during your free time, pursue your true passion as an illustrator on the side. Call it a side hustle, if you will. The idea here is that slowly, but steadily, your side hustle will become your full-time job. You can even do it from home after your regular job.

There are many ways to make money from home. Just run a quick Google search to see how other people make money online. In your case, you could start offering your services to sites like upwork and fiverr.

Those places will take a cut off of your fees, but it will get you started with your portfolio. Once you get some gigs done, then you can create a website and showcase you work to others. You can find a lot of simple ways to set up a website in "youtube university."

This is literally my very first post here, and don't know the forum very well, but it looks like at least some of the folks here would be willing to check out your illustration services.

Apologies that the post has gotten too long. But the TLDR here is, find something more stable that pays the bills. Start with the placement office of the university/college where you graduated, network with fellow classmates who are employed, etc. Then, on the side do what you like, build your portfolio and later, a few clients later go full-time entrepreneur.

Hope that's helpful,
Jay

I think affiliate marketing with Clickbank can be good for you to get started. You don't have to create your own product(since you struggled getting sales with your own product).

You can simply promote somebody else's product. You will not need any blog to promote the promote. You will only need a squeeze page that will convince people to sign up their emails and you will also need a system that will do all the work for you even if you not there.

I have seen so many beginners in affiliate marketing struggle because they promote products without a squeeze page and a system. They send traffic straight to their affiliate offer. And they are not aware that the are chances that 99% of the people won't buy the product for the first time. So that's why having a system is so important because once people get captured to your system they become part of your email list this gives you a second chance to promote more products for them.

whatever you're doing, if you don't feel good about yourself doing it, you're probably on the wrong path, and youre wasting time. churning out tons of garbage blogs to somehow, miraculously get a ton of traffic is preposterous. figure out what it is youre very interested in, and think whether that can be monetized in some form. you need to sell a product or service, that is the nature of business. if you cant profit with paid traffic, you dont have a business. digital products are easier to profit with for obvious reasons, and you can start with that. i would not recommend affiliating at first.

You mention your an Illustrator and that your trying to make money to persue that passion right.

Why not use that skill to make money there are lots of ways a illustrator can make money you can sell your service on fiverr, freelancer etc... you can make ebooks with tutorials on how to make illustration, you can make your own website and video series, you can make illustrations and sell them on sites like shutterstock.

If your passion is in creating illustration why not use it at least the content and products your creating are probably of quality and you probably have fun creating them.

One of the biggest problems i think people (especially the ones starting) is in getting traffic its just time and money consuming creating websites or blogs with fresh content everyday and ranking them to promote affiliate links or your products etc... We have to try new creative ways of getting traffic sure you can pay for it but if your starting you probably dont have much money and paid ads cost you a lot especially with the mistakes you make along the way.

Hope it helps.

Best of luck

I think you have tried 3 things, 3 platforms. It seems like you are jumping from sth to something else. Focus on one thing stick to it and learn its secrets.

One of the best ways to start making money online is affiliate marketing but it's not easy. Work is involved.

There is so much to learn about it, but try to invest in a few ebooks, courses and some coaching. They show you the path.

There is no secret but there is investing in the mind and finding a solid informations that leads to help others something to grow like you.

Good luck

I think you're on the right track, because that's pretty much what every successful marketer did - they all jump from one thing to another, changing business. One guy started and failed in 13 different businesses before he achieved some success.. his video about that is here:
It takes time to find out what you can do that can work well for you... focus on your strengths I guess, e.g. what you prefer writing, audio or video? Perhaps take some personality tests too.

World Master, there is a lot of great suggestions here, I noticed one thing about your post that jumped out at me. You mentioned eBay, making the maximum of $500.00 one month, then Shopify drop shipping which you shutdown after 5 months, and also writing an ebook which did not do so well either.

Each one of these opportunities have different success requirements as well as some general requirements that are the same.

For instance, I think someone above indicated eBay has a great audience (shoppers), that said, this by itself does not mean your business will be successful, eBay like Amazon have million's of buyers, which is good and bad, as the keywords and categories your listed in, as well as what your selling and to whom, will depend on the amount of traffic to your listing gets as well as the number of sales. Of course eBay is a different marketplace than Amazon (sort of) . eBay a lot of items are still auctions even though some are becoming more fixed price sales like Amazon. Just like on Amazon, on eBay your product has to target a certain market (buyer), the prices have to be right and that target market (your buyer) has to want what your selling and at the price it is selling for in order for you to have success. If you look at the large eBay sellers or Amazon sellers, they are providing products to a large market, and their products are getting in front of the buyers which converts to sales.

This has to happen with a Shopify store as well, however, you or organic traffic have to drive the right buyers to your store and they have to be potential buyers of your product. If your not selling, it means no one knows about your product, or your product is not the right product for the audience (target market), or the price is not right for that market/product.

I think starting out most people give up way to soon and they don't try multiple ways of driving people to their products. When starting out, send people to your products need to be organic not by use of Facebook/Instagram Ad's in my opinion. (Note: There is always exceptions to ever rule, if you have a great product that will convert and you can send traffic via Social Media which converts and makes more money than you spend consistently, then have at it.), however, for the most part you need to organic traffic, and then you can leverage Social Media to grow more. Figure out the organic traffic and keywords required to drive traffic and convert that traffic first.

You mentioned becoming a Affiliate marketer, well that is probably harder than the things you already tried in my opinion, as to be successful in this area, you need to become established, you need followers that trust you and build that trust with an audience where you provide valuable advice. Once that connection is created then you can start making recommendations for affiliate products. This can take even more time then the adventures you had above.

For success, you need the following:

1. Don't stop, keep trying, make changes, set goals, and time frames for meeting the goals.
2. Develop a plan, what would it take to be successful doing X, how many do I need to sell, convert on my affiliate recommendation. How can I get that many X, who are the X's, why should the buy from me and not someone else, etc.
3. By the way, everything from China is not junk, I manufacture a tool here in the states, and sell 2500 - 3000 per month at $4.00 each, some of my parts come from China (vials) as they are the #1 manufacturer of them. I needed a tool to cut rubber, in the States that tool was $6000.00, I bought one in China for $800.00 plus $200.00 shipping and it work great, It took a 3 day job of cutting rubber for our tool to a 4 hour job.
4. The key, find the right audience, (Target Market), find out what they need or want, (Product), Determine the right price, and the most important, find out how to get you product (ebook, physical product, Affiliate link, etc.) in front of that target market (this is the hardest part by the way). Use a blog, do split testing if you are going to use Ad's as you might not get it right the first time, also fine tune for the best success.

DON't GIVE UP, AS YOU CAN NEVER BE SUCCESSFUL!

Hope this helps,
Kyle

It sounds like you've been jumping around too much.

I like the affiliate strategy. If you can make profit with drop shipping then driving traffic is very similar. Why not give it a shot?

I've been generating leads for over 19 years, which is my core business. However, I generate nationwide leads rather than local because it's much less work / far more scalable for me

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross-promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals (niches) I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the PPL offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. You don't want to get too caught up on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same or possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

I have also done just as good with dating website sign-ups and pretty good with free trial + S/H offers. I also promote a very limited number of offers that are straight sales. For them, mass appeal is still the number one thing I look for and I also look for one of the following...

1) The product is new and/or novel-unique and you can't purchase it locally or even something similar. I don't waste my time with it once something similar shows up in Walmart.

2) The buyer can truly get what is being offered at a decent discount.

3) Solves a house is on fire type problem.

However, I mainly promote non-PPL offers on the backend.

Bottom line, it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

I drive traffic and build responsive email lists by acquiring different forms of email data. Essentially what I'm really doing is monetizing the data using PPL offers.

Fresh / targeted 3rd party data, which is email leads of users that have shown an interest in a specific PPL niche or offer and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record of each user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

Generate real-time Co-reg, which works by placing an ad for a specific PPL offer on a co-registration network and their publishers display it and users that view the ad can request more info about the offer. When a user requests more info, their contact info is automatically imported into your ESP (autoresponder) account / campaign and they are immediately sent details regarding the offer, along with future follow-up messages. You pay on a per lead basis.

There is also rev-share data, which is basically 3rd party data (typically fresh / targeted) that you get for $0 upfront costs and you split the revenue generated from sending it with the data provider. Those that provide rev-share are typically just aggregating the data and aren't marketers and provide it to those that know how to monetize it.

So with the above, I am getting fresh / targeted leads specifically for the PPL offers I'm promoting. However, they are not typically as responsive as a high-quality opt-in list that you build yourself. So to compensate for this you need to work with higher volume. This is not a big deal since the cost is much cheaper and highly scalable compared to traditional list building methods.

When mailing, you want to skim off the top any fast-track conversions and then for long-term success, you want to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting and removing unresponsive users...converting the leads from quantity to quality and into responsive lists. Which you can then also cross-promote other offers on the back-end.

So basically the real reason I promote PPL offers because they provide the path of least resistance to generating conversions / $$$ and converting the data into cash-producing assets.

There's actually more to it than it sounds, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes down to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

The above isn't for everyone and alternatively, you can use PPC to drive traffic. It's just not my cup of tea.

One other thing. Once you have experience promoting PPL/CPA offers via email, you can also find companies that have opt-in and/or buyer lists that do little with them or nothing at all via email marketing and help them fully monetize their data.

These are mainly companies that call all the users and or don't know anything about promoting affiliate / CPA offers. This requires more work because you have to find the companies, wherewith the other options above it's easy to get access to data. This is what would be considered 2nd party data, as you manage the companies data and monetize it for a percentage of the net profits generated.

Something to think about.

Hi WorldMaster--nice to meet you! I was looking at your post and wanted to ask--what are you passionate about? People can usually see through authenticity vs. just trying to sell something to people for the sake of earning $. Also, never try to sell/promote a product that you don't personally use yourself=scammy.

DIABLO highlighted some great points. People are more prone to do business with someone they trust vs someone they don't know. Focus on establishing trust with your buyer--trust leads to conversions.

If your new you shouldn't be digging so deep into your own pockets for advertising. There are plenty of traffic providers giving decent advertising credits/coupons for first time users i.e. google $75 free for new users Bing has some Youtube ads have some linkedin ads have some & many more.

First thing we teach are students in our affiliate marketing is to get over $800 worth of ad coupons, with which they earn theire first commissions as they learn tocreate campaigns, target audiences and track conversions & blah blah blah.

No offence but if your course didn't teach you this you ought to get a refund.

Out of curiosity how much did you pay to join your program? (Not trying to sell, Just scouting the competition)