What Was Your Biggest Mistake In Internet marketing?

Your posts crack me up Celente! Bring on the rolexes!

I am hammering Instagram at the moment building up followers. I have added over 100 in the last 24 hours. I post content daily, no sales at the moment.

We need to push again with PPC again and Clickonomy. I need to see the money spent on clicks as an investment and just take a hit in the bank balance. Need to get the list generated so that I can start sending them content and then make money back later with promotions.

I am in 4 niches, one of them IM.

But the majority of my income in non related niches.

stick to stock market, health, diet, relationship niches.

These are the best, as we all way more money, more sex, more health, living longer and want to look better for the other sex.

I also have contract work for a multinational company here in Australia and do all their inhouse and outhouse marketing. direct mail and also email marketing. Their lists are in the amount of 3million addresses. emails, but most of them do it all wrong. So I am paid a nice amount to do their mailing outs, and have rediculous results.

Oh, I'd bore you rigid if I talked about how I got started. But I will anyway, haha. Long story short: I'd been fooling around with web design. Non-monetized. Just for fun. I think it was a summer or a Christmas holiday (when I was a student) and I got a job at a hotel to bolster the ole CV (resume). I was working the reception desk. They mentioned needing a new website, so I offered to build it. That was the start. Soon after I got talking to a friend who told me about affiliate marketing. They had ads on their site, they showed me, that earned them a cent or more (I forget) for each click they received. Blew my mind. Folks click that stuff and you earn money? I thought to myself. I'm in! Well, soon after that, I fell in with the right group of people. For whatever reason they took me under their wing. These were people who would sometimes receive a car from a network as a gift for the traffic they'd sent. I think because I was different (and, I suppose, part of that was being British) and nice and polite and respectful, they took a liking to me. I learned more valuable things from them than anything I'd picked up at uni'. And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, sort of. Whenever someone says that (and the rest is history) it's never really as simple and clear cut as it sounds. For the sake of brevity, though, and keeping you awake - rest is history.

If you're new to IM, mate, or thereabouts, I can tell you about my second biggest mistake. Might help you out. I hope so.

Second biggest mistake in IM, then: failing to collect my audience. Which, on the surface, sounds bad enough, but life (and IM) is never as simple as black and white; there are layers of grey. In other words, if you forget to collect your audience you lose quite a few things:

• Growth. You lose the power the audience has to give you a bigger audience (they can syndicate your media, for instance);
• Earnings. You lose the power of earning money from them into the future (if someone takes action once on your offer, then why not multiple times?);
• Ranking. You lose the power they afford you to rank your media (engagement on media - like videos or pages or images - is the biggest ranking factor in modern search engines)

You lose more than those 3, but those are the biggies.

To explain, let me give you 2 business models. (And it sounds like this may be similar to what Celente's coach does for a living. I'm not the coach. Just an educated guess.)

Business Model 1.

Joe Marketer has a dating blog. He monetizes his blog posts with PPL dating offers. (PPL = Pay Per Lead. These are usually free join offers that pay you a commission between $1 and $8 or so.) He syndicates his blog posts around the socials. He even ranks a few for halfway decent long-tails in Google. His articles get around 10,000 uniques a day, sending 1,500 to his affiliate landing pages, earning him an EPC (earnings per click; in other words, the average amount of money he earns from a single click to the lander) of 20 cents. 1,500 X 0.20 = $300. So our mate Joe is doing okay. Three hundred bucks a day, or around $9,000 a month. But is he doing okay? Well, no, not really.

Business Model 2.

Josephine Marketer has a squeeze-blog hybrid. In other words, her website amounts to this: squeeze page on the front, blog on the back. She gets traffic in just the same way as Joe (syndicating her articles) but she directs that traffic to her squeeze first. Instead of someone simply arriving on an article, seeing a contextual link, clicking it and winding up on a dating lander, the people arriving on Josephine's website take a different route:

• They arrive on a squeeze page.
• They double opt-in and arrive on a thank you page.
• Then they arrive on the incentive/ freebie page.

On the freebie page (which is a pretty outdated term, but we'll use it) you have the thing that made each subscriber opt-in in the first place. Nowadays, it'll be a combination of eBooks and videos (probably). Now, unlike Joe, Josephine doesn't encourage each person to join 1 PPL offer, nope. She encourages them to join a handful. This is usually anywhere between 3 and a dozen. On average, instead of earning 20 cents per person, clever Josephine is earning 60 cents (they join 3 offers) and that's just on Day 1. She collects her audience. Meaning: she has all of the power that comes from a collected audience. Joe earns $9,000 a month. Josephine earns $27,000.

Question is, what if Josephine was not just clever, but really clever? What if she concentrated on passive traffic and paid VA's to update her hybrid?

Answer: she could have a lot of those businesses.

Basic stuff, mate, but you get the picture.

You don't have to use email marketing. (In fact, nowadays, you really need to be looking at additional types of audience collection; think about what people in 2017 like to join). But, however you collect 'em, make sure you do.

- Tom

I run interior design blogs, do you think I should work on building my email list and then try selling home related products through the emails? I want to spread into email marketing but I'm not sure how.