If you are struggling dont give up - I hope this helps and inspires you.

Hi There
My name is Mark and I have been in the IM game for a good few years now.
If you are starting out or have been plugging away for some time with little success have a read of this and I hope it inspires you to keep going.

When I initially started I had great hopes of jumping into IM and giving up the day job and living the life I always wanted to with enough money to give me the time to spend with my family and do the things I wanted to do. There is always a trade off in life between having lots of money and having lots of time and getting both money and time is everyones holy grail.

Well I jumped in both feet first and like everyone got completely overwhelmed and suffered like everyone at first with the "Shiny Object syndrome" i.e. I bought WSO after WSO and every get rich quick scheme out there I could find.

What did that get me - a big credit card bill, a hard drive full of crap and lots of unfinished projects - sound familiar.
The bottom line was I was losing money. So I took stock. I made a list of all the things I had learned and what I was good at. I made a conscious decision to get out of the IM sphere as such (i.e. trying to tell other people how to make money when I couldn't do it myself).

One of the things I was good at was producing Videos, so I created a course to show people how to create their own videos using all free tools such as Open Office, Jing and youtube.

This was my first real success and I actually sold a product and made a little bit of money. I was not showing people how to make money but showing people how to create something that they could use to make money.

It was like the difference between being a gold miner and being the guy who sold them the shovels!!
I then set up a service providing a whiteboard Video creation service and again this went well and I made a bit of money.

Anyway fast forward two years (yes this is how long it took me for the real penny to drop) I was talking to a good friend of mine who told me he had just paid £1200 to go on an internet marketing course, my jaw dropped

I couldn't believe he had spent all that money.
But the difference between what I had done and what he had done was this course he had attended was not just about IM but it was IM specific to a particular niche and that niche was horse racing - bam the penny dropped.

We had both been avid horse racing fans for many years and doing IM in this niche really appealed to me. So we got together and produced our first product - that was 18 months ago.
Now we have 3 websites that turned over over £120,000 in the first full year of trading and we now have a passive income coming in of over £5,000 a month before we sell anything else.

One of the main reasons for our success is we went out and found an authority in the market place and teamed up with him - he was a brilliant horse racing tipster with a great track record but had no clue about IM

Now I am not telling you this to brag (don't forget it has taken me nearly 4 years now to get to this stage) but to show you that by sticking at it you can succeed. I have had plenty of times that I have nearly thrown the towel in and given up.

In a rambling sort of way the main take away from this part of his missive is find something you are interested in and enjoy and its far easier to keep producing quality content and products and them go out and find an authority in the niche, be it a local Golf professional who you could team up or a football coach - just a couple of examples.

Now how did we do all this.

1) Our first product was the hardest. We had no list, no money, no website and no traffic. So we sat down and produced two products. Product 1 was a high quality free product for list building and the second was a paid product to generate income.

2) We built a Wordpress site using all the knowledge I had gleaned from all my earlier failures with a simple Video squeeze page ( see all that learning about Video finally paid off)

3) We then went out to the market place in our Niche and contacted everyone we could find who we thought may have a list. We offered them the free product for their list and a very large percentage of the sales value of the paid product. (We were scrupulous on tracking all JV traffic by using WPaffiliate and made sure that they go credited with all sales commission.)

4) We did a launch with a limited number of JVS we managed to sign up and generated a list of over 2,500 in the first week - wow were we happy with this!!

5) We then nurtured the list for a two week period and then hit them with the paid product.

6) We made over 100 sales at £99 with this first promotion. and we now had our first 2,500 on our list.

7) We then developed related products for the horse racing niche and just repeated the process, but now we had a track record with JVs, plus we could show any new prospective JVs conversion rates etc.

8) We then set up a membership site and plugged in the authority I mentioned earlier and made this a monthly membership site and again pushed this to our growing list and JVs

9) As our reputation grew in our market we were then approached by a Horse Racing Club who syndicate race horses. We did a deal and started promoting shares in race horses for them to our list and via JVs. Horse Racing has rabid fans and everyone has a dream of owning a racehorse - well now they can at an affordable price through us. Along the way we now have shares in 9 horse that have cost us nothing!!

I know this is a very broad brush overview of what we have done and don't get me wrong we have worked our little socks off to get where we are. If anyone tells you there is a magic solution to printing money on the Internet they are liars - its all down to hard work and having a plan about where you want yo go and how you are going to get there.

I just wanted to let you know that you can succeed in this game and I am now living a life I never dreamed of 4 years ago. I work from home we do everything by skype and email, I get to go racing on a regular basis, I mix with like minded people and I own shares in 9 race horses.

So dont give up, learn all you can but make sure you actually apply the knowledge to something that you enjoy.

Good luck and I hope you have been inspired to shake off any doubts you have and start building a plan of where you want to go

Cheers
Mark