Questions for Those Making Over $500 a Month With IM

You are totally NOT alone! I had an email marketing business that I thought was going to let me retire young a multi-millionaire and enjoy being "idle rich" for decades. Seriously, I thought my money troubles were over forever. Then the CAN-SPAM Act demolished everything. And I was not spamming. It didn't matter. Perception is everything and almost all of my customers ran for the hills just to avoid any possibility (however slim) of attracting federal eyes. Within about 6 weeks I went from six figures to almost nothing.

So I had to start completely over in a completely different business. Unexpectedly. I was devastated. I spent almost 2 years blowing through what I'd saved from the glory days, mired in depression and with no idea what to do. I was as low as you can get and still be alive. Seriously.

It took me about 6 months from the time I started over again in earnest to get to $500/month in IM. And that was only because I was all over the map, desperately trying everything. I had no focus. I just got lucky to even make that much. Once I focused, it all changed. It's really hard for me because I suffer from ADD, or as I now call it, IMADD™ (don't steal that, it's mine).

I felt like giving up so many times I can't even remember them all. It was horrible. Along the way I read that many famously successful people struggled and failed over and over. Thomas Edison became kind of a cult hero of mine. That guy refused to fail. That's what we have to do. Refuse. Just determine that nothing will stop you. Ever. It sounds easy, and it's incredibly hard. But it's a MUST. Focus and decide. Get mad.

Above all, pick one thing that lots of others are reporting success with here at WF and focus on it to the exclusion of everything else (work-wise). See it through. That should get you to your goal and then some. You're in the right place!

John

It took me about 2 years of working my tail off to start making money in IM. The key is to fail quickly... because theres no doubt about it, you're going to fail in the beginning. The key is to learn from your mistakes and not repeat them.

As far as the number of times I failed? I probably had 20 different "killer ideas" (or so I thought) that completely failed before I had any success.

My first month of over $500 was when I finally created my own product and put it up on Clickbank. That month I made over $3,000.

I spend most of my time now promoting affiliate products nowadays and currently have about a dozen different sites.

Hang in there man.... it sucks to fail... just make sure you take something away from each one. Your time will come!

Nothing motivates like results - and the next best thing to that is knowing that others just like you have gone through the same school of hard knocks and actually prevailed. I can definitely relate to that.

Personally, I spent years trying this and that - giving up for a while, and then jumping back in to try again. This business can wear you down emotionally and I have hit rock bottom a few times.

As far as making it past $500/month: Well, I eventually did it, but it just happened because I was too stubborn to quit. Eventually, I made so many mistakes with my sites that something positive had to happen - and it did. I am sure that there are easier ways though.

Today, I make money from organic traffic and article marketing. It's enough to live on and I haven't yet had the need to hit the bricks and find a real job

Don't give up...

Took me a couple of years too before I finally 'made it'. With me, it was when I discovered site flipping, that has made me more money than promoting affiliate products or even my own products.

I still do some niche blogs and promote affiliate products too, but the majority of my income came from site flipping.

I think the one thing that made it so successful for me was that I stuck with it until it worked. Most other things I had given up on too quickly before that - so the advice I can give is to choose something and stick with it - MAKE IT WORK!

I'm so sorry to hear you feel like you've hit rock bottom and burnt out, I have been there myself in the past so I know what you're going through, but believe me it really is possible to achieve your goals if you don't give up.

It took me about a year to bring in $500 a month, the early days where the hardest because I saw little results / returns for my efforts and I felt alone in what I was trying to achieve. And nobody really understood/believed in my goal, which did have an impact.

I was promoting one product at the time, but didn't have a formula or model to follow and made it up as I went along, trial and error, slowly finding what works.

I promise you, once you find the model or system that works for you, you'll be able to rinse n repeat as many times as you like, and your goal of $500 will seem small.

Stick with it, you'll get there.

Thanks guys, I really do appreciate the responses. I've been at IM since the end of May and I feel like I'm not getting very far very fast. I bumped into Travis Sago's bum marketing method when I was looking for a way to make a quick buck online. I start by promoting a non-clickbank product that I had tried that happened to have an affiliate program. I put up a crappy Squidoo lens, wrote 5 articles, submitted them to EZA, and then gave up after not seeing quick results.

Ever since then I've been pretty hooked into IM. I created my own product on how to start using eBay, since I'm an eBay PowerSeller I figured I should work on something I actually know. eBay shut my site down for imposing on their trademark before I could even get the product launched. Since then I've created 5 other websites, promoting various clickbank products and with Adsense. I've made a whole grand total of $2 on Adsense.

The funny thing is that the product I originally started with, the one that I only wrote 5 articles for, produces about 1 sale a week. The product pays a crappy commission, $10 on a product that sells for between $70 - $150.

It blows my mind how I put just a little effort into promoting that product and have great success with it . . . when I put tons of effort, article marketing, back link building into all of my main campaigns and come up empty handed.

I don't plan on giving up. When I started selling on eBay my goal was to be a PowerSeller. I know that not a lot of people achieve that. Just when I was about to give up, I found something that could help me attain the level of success I was looking for. It took 7 months from the time I started selling on eBay to figure out what worked. I'm hoping and praying that IM will work out the same way. In fact, aside from all of the great success stories I hear on here, that is my main motivation.

3 months.

Well, the first month was ugly. I worked full time at IM and made a grand total of $30 bucks that month.

Then I started creating products for other marketers and the word spread. And I jumped to making my own products.


For me the secret was not just learning from failure, but also learning from success. Most people don't question success. They just repeat the template that worked. Then the market changes and their template just doesn't work anymore.

So I always ask, "Why did this work?" "What's the core of it?" "What exactly about this attracts buyers?" Break the success into parts and see which parts people want the most. Can you streamline it? Can you do it better?

This way you can turn a small success into a big success.

Hope this helps,

Paul

You just have to keep at it and you'll discover what works for you. I make over $500 per month just by spending a couple hours each day as a ghostwriter. It's definitely a nice way to have a guaranteed income if you need it.

The rest of my time is spent on other projects. I definitely know what you mean about some things failing and others doing surprisingly well.

At the beginning of the year I made one blog entry on a new blogspot blog that advertises 1 affiliate product. I've never touched it since. That 5 minutes of time has provided me with $200 and counting so far. If only 5 minutes of my time was worth that much all the time

I'm a bit of an oddball because I work with affiliate sales and not PPC, email lists or any of the typical stuff people here do.

About 6 months to start seeing results, a year to reach consistent results that I could rely on.

I don't know if would consider anything I've done a failure but more of a growth process. All of my early web sites are still around, they all have organic seo traffic and the all bring in revenue. The growth process is essentially becoming a better internet salesman and learning how to convert visitors into customers. I do have some sites that are under-performing but that is mainly do to my own neglect and lack of time for them. It's easy to go on a .com shopping spree at godaddy, harder to develop each site.

Failure is not an option, I'm done with the suit and tie world.

The number of products / affiliates are under 10. I try to stick with products that I believe in and feel will convert. I'm always looking to expand with the concept of 'If you like product A then you'll love product B' but I'm not out chasing every new trend that comes along.

You didn't ask, but I think the trick is to find what you are passionate about and what you are good at. Just because IM sales technique A made one guy/girl a millionaire it doesn't mean it's going to work for you.

Honestly, I don't even understand some of what the guys/girls here do but it works for them and that is what is most important.

And last of all, my philosophy is 'rome wasn't built in a day'. Some people chase after the latest trends to make a quick buck and when that trend is over they move on to the next big thing. I'm constantly building the authority of my sites so that they will continue to bring in revenue for years while running on auto-pilot.

In some ways you've answered your own question. Find out what is working and what isn't. The one sale a week affiliate program you have sounds like a complete rip off but if you can find something similar as an informational product with clickbank, following the same footsteps, you might have chanced upon a feasible avenue. However, I was say that you havn't given your other sites enough of a chance yet. You need to write LOT of articles and get a whole network of links to get the wheels turning so if you don't like writing articles, try something else.

Track and monitor everything you do to test if it works or not. Give it a fair go until you can realistically come up with your conclusion as to it's success or failure.

I started just over a year ago. At first I was completely lost, that went on for a few months. I bought a few programmes to help but I was still having major problems. I'm quite lucky as I love to write so I was steered in the direction of article marketing then everything I had learned started to sink in once I stopped stressing about it. Once I had found warrior forum I was really ready to take on the astounding tips and information given.

I started making a half decent amount around march/april this year with selling affiliate products connected to my profession and hobbies. I have 3 main websites and am just about to create my own product.

Keep with it. You sound like you are tenacious enough to easily acheive your goals.

All the best

9ish months the first time if I remember correctly. For several reasons I decided to start over from scratch and did it again in another market in 3 months.

Like every freakin' day!

Hundreds, but I was selling ebooks. 2nd time around I started my own site.


When I first started IM, I was making something like $15-25 a month for my first 6 months. Every day I'd look at my earnings and wonder if all this effort was worth it.

Then I had one of those breakthrough "ah-ha" moments and started pulling in hundreds literally the following month. And it just kept growing from there.

The vast majority of IM'ers have been where you are. Remember that it's this stage of adversity and frustration where a lot of people quit. But what they don't realize is that success is sometimes just right around the corner.

Keep at it, listen to people who are successful, and you'll eventually find your way.

Solomon Huey

I still fail everyday.

I try something or invest in something that doesn't work at all, but it's a learning experience and the experience itself is what is worth the time, effort, and money invested.

I believe, until you actually DO, you don't understand so, if you are hesitant about investing into something you KNOW will help your business or trying something you are AFRAID of what the outcome may be...

Just do it.

You will be happy that you took the risk.

Mark

Ofthemix, I'm with you man. I have been doing this for the past 2~3 months consistently and still no results. Perhaps we'll need a bit of competition here to get motivated. First one to get the first significant profit gets a FREE macdonalds Value meal UPSIZED! LOL~!

I am not giving this up. So don't give up either! Good luck to both of us!

Edmund

I actually tried offering SEO services to companies a few weeks ago. I got the job done but I absolutely HATED doing it, so I stopped, despite the fact I was gaining a decent client base. I'm a firm believer in not doing anything that I don't like to do for a living. That sounds horrible and pampered . . . but in my logic, work takes up the majority of your life . . . and if you're unhappy with the work that you do, odds are you're going to have an unhappy life.

I LOVE writing articles, so I'm thinking that article marketing is the way I'm going to go. I enjoy doing it and I can pump out between 10 - 15 articles a day before I start to burn out. Typically, I can write 10 articles in a little over two hours, so it doesn't take me much time to do either.

Many people have told me I should write articles for other people. I tried it for a while, but also didn't like it. It's kind of like how my family always told me I should go to college to be an English major since I write so much out of liesure. I told them I'd hate going to school for it because I don't like writing about things I have no interest in. I quickly learned, from writing for other people, that it takes me 10 minutes to write a 400+ word article on something I already know about . . . it takes me an hour to write a 400+ word article on something I don't know about or am not interested in. It's not worth my time, IMO.

It's sort of a catch 22, and I'm indeed a stubborn person about it. Every avenue I could use to make short term income online I typically shy away from because I end up not liking it.

I have gathered some great inspiration from this thread and I'm actually pumped to get back on track again tomorrow. I greatly appreciate all of the support. God knows, this is one of the few places I can get it.

This probably aint going to help much! however it took me 8 years to get to $500 then 2 years to go far beyond... I was not listening to advice!

I never failed I just found 100's of ways not to make money!!

You only fail when you give up trying!!

a winner never quits and a quitter never wins!!

However as a bit of a motivater now.... I am travelling the world!! working only 18 hours a day on my busines...lol

Good luck

Danny

You have already done the hardest thing and that was starting. No reason to give up now.

The only failure in IM is when someone doesn't learn something from what they are doing. I fail everyday and try to improve on that failure. Read. Research. Apply. Tweak.

For some reason, I never got discouraged. It took about a year to get to 500$/month but every month I could see an increase... so I just kept on going.

If you're constantly improving, you'll get there no matter what. Baby steps.

I never got discouraged either, I was lucky in the sense that I was making money right from the start so I could see the potential I just never really hit it big until quite some time later.

You see you need to stay focused

FOCUS = Follow One Cause Until Success

Dont get put down by people which is a hard thing when you are skint and cant pay the olds rent for the month!!

Dont put your self under pressure = relax take it easy!

If you get a block just go for a walk or a swim

just stick to it and you will be perfect!!

Good luck

Danny

I peek into this forum regularly for the excellent advice and education but rarely post. I couldn't pass this thread, though. If I had a nickel for every time I asked myself if I should quit - well, I wouldn't have to write another article ever again.

I'm far from being an expert. I've been working at IM since Feb of this year and crawling towards the $400/mo mark. It's been a lot more work than I originally thought!

What's helped me a great deal is to find a partner trying to do the same thing. We somehow connected on another forum and our skills balance each other out nicely. When I think I'm ready to drop it all, he pushes me along and when he's feeling overwhelmed I do the same. We seem to learn twice as fast that way and we each have a person we trust and can go to if we have questions or need advice. It makes sitting at the keyboard for hours much more enjoyable.

Hang in there. If you've made $1 than you know more is possible. Take a long, hard look at each of your projects. Why do you think the one worked? Why do you think the others didn't? Each of your projects is a learning experience. Take the lessons and keep them - you earned them. Use them to guide your future projects.

Wishing you luck!

Erica

Took me about 9 months I think.

Every day when there are no sales i think about quitting.

5 products maybe??

If you already love writing articles and can honestly crank out 10-15 per day without burning out, you're sitting on a goldmine!

That's major production. Send people to a squeeze page to collect their contact info. Build a list! The money is in the list... not a trite cliche... it's real. Then sell to the list. Either write your own ebook to sell, or find affiliate offer and/or JV with others. Once your list gets pretty big (1000 or more), you can hit the JV forum here at WF and team up to greatly expand your reach.

That's what I'd do if I could write that many articles per day. You should be able to build a nice list in short order if you submit 10-15 articles per day. Jeez, that's 300-450 a freaking MONTH!

It took me a few months before making a few hundred dollars which was being an affiliate for physical products such as invitations, fishing gear and video games. I stayed at the amoun for ages and then after a 1 1/2 started creating my own products. This in my opinion (and many others of course) is actually the quickest way to make money online rather than affiliate marketing. With your own product, you do the hard work once, and then enjoy long term profits from that product while moning onto the next one.

Phil

Well, where can I start...?

I've started IM back in 2000. My 1st IM product was Don Lepree's
"fitness equipment" reseller site. His company soon went bankrupt
and I lost all my investment money.

Since then, I've bought many ebooks, memberships and coaching
programs that it amounts to $20,000. But what I made from them all
was minimal.

I've bought hundreds of domains, created softwares, built a
membership site, tried every tactic on numerous ebooks,...

But I was unable to make steady income with all these..
UNTIL I joined this forum.

You can buy so many no-hype and no-fluff making money
secrets for as little as $7 and start making money.

If you want to see some fast result, do what Zeus66 said.
Article marketing really works.

Put up a simple CPA offer on a wordpress blog (free) and
start writing 300-400 word articles and submit them to
EzineArticles (remember to add a link to your blog).

You'll start seeing result within a week.

If you want to know more, I recommend to take
Jeremy and Don's article marketing bootcamp.

In my opinion, they are the best deal.

I started in March 2009 but didn't take it seriously until May. Now I make anywhere between $900-$1500 a month in IM.

Lots of times. But I tried to think of the failures as simply one more way I learned that it wouldn't work. And I was positive that success was always just right around the corner from where I'd have decided to quit.

I only promote my own products. I create 'em. I sell 'em. LOL That's where the money is.

I can't answer because I don't make any money online
but by the end of October I'll go back to add a post here

Yeah, I'm an article writing machine. I've actually written several 600+ page novels. And I had the epiphany last night that "Hey, I know enough to market them now." :-p I see a side project in the making.

Anyways, I think I'm going to stick to article marketing. It's what I enjoy doing so far.

To josher, I sooo know how you feel about eBay. The way they keep changing things makes it near impossible to profit now a days. If they're not busy raising fees, they're taking away the seller's rights. I love how they just got rid of shipping insurance *sarcasm*. When I first started on eBay I never used it. Then I got tired of sending replacements. It seemed like I was sending someone a replacement item every week . . . then I discovered shipping insurance . . . and I used it. Guess what, the number of replacements I had to ship out went from shipping out one a week to one every two months. Now they've done away with shipping insurance so I'm going to have to hike up the prices to compensate for the fact that I'm probably going to be getting a bunch of "this item broke during shipping" e-mails again.

Blegh, I get so discouraged about it. It's like when they took away the ability for sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. I don't think there's ever been a serious eBay seller who hasn't run into at least one horribly unreasonable scam artist buyer. . . and now there's not much you can do about it. Sorry to hijack my own thread, but I thought it was worth a rant.

On a related note, I do believe I'm going to write a few books on eBay. My other one got deleted when my computer died over the weekend. That's okay though, because it won't take me long to redo it.

To Zeus66, when I still had the ebook, before eBay shut my site down, I actually was using your method, created a squeeze page, got an aweber account, wrote a ton of articles, and I was starting to build a list pretty quickly. The site was only up for maybe a month and I got 18 subscribers. Strangely, after eBay had me take my site down, I tried to same thing with another niche and couldn't get a single subscriber with the same amount of effort. I'm really beginning to think that success in IM depends largely on the product and/or niche.

Twice I've used the same method for product A as product B. Product A had great results, product B bombed. Maybe it's not that I'm going about marketing the wrong way . . . maybe it's that I suck at consistently picking out products that will sell.

Either way, I won't give up. Though trying to stick with one method is hard when I have so many other ideas bouncing around in my head. I wish there were 100 hours in a day so that I could do all of them at once.

It took me about 3 months, but then I worked my butt off and truly believed I could do it. I rarely work that hard anymore lol.

How many times did you fail and feel like giving up before succeeding?

I felt FRUSTRATED nearly everyday but I never felt like giving up. I knew I could do it and I just tried and did stuff everyday. Initially I really wanted to make $300 a week from IM, and it took me about 4 months to get there... I just worked my butt off until I reached my goal.

And how many products were you promoting at the time you reached the $500/month milestone?
I was promoting a couple of products from Clickbank, most of the sales came from one of the products I focused on, and I just kept focusing on that one.

FOCUS is so important!

haha!!

I have had many partners but yeah I just seem to be the one that does the work. I now just have skype contacts and I help them they help me we all work on different projects and thats that

My brother in law came up with a good idea i researched it built the site and he was meant to write content ect he didn't and teh agreement was that it would be 50/50 split but he told me just for me to carry on, however I oculd not run with this successful project and leave him out so now his cut I just give to my nephew!

I like working solo its exciting and I know its all my work

Danny

I'll answer straight to the point for you. Im not sure how it will help you, but here goes:

1. I started out with providing services to people so was earning $500/month straight away. But getting paid once for your work isn't ideal, though it pays the bills.

2. I still have failures to this day.

3. I now have almost 100 websites, some do well and others don't.
To relate it to $500/mth, I have one site that makes about exactly that and its been online for around 1 year. I haven't touched it for around 8 months and have done very little promotion. I did set it up well to start with, with unique well researched content, nice design, planned site structure and careful keyword selection. This is a highly competitive niche that I was able to carve into. This is just one example.

Hope this helps and gives you inspiration.

I'm currently making over $500 per month Ofthemix and in response to your questions:

1. Took me about two months to be making $500 consistently each month

2. Failed everyday until you make your first $1 then you realise it is possible to make money online, you just have to keep believing!

3. I was only promoting 1 Clickbank product to begin with then once I realized what was possible I started promoting around 3 or 4 at a time

Paul

I know its hard. Your friends and family don't believe in you. But you believe in yourself,
you have to let that trust, that all persuasive power and knowledge win.
It is hard starting out. But if you keep on learning, you will grow. It is true that some
get more lucky at some points than others. Who cares? Just compare yourself
to your past results. It took me a good three years online before I learned anything.
And when I did, it was like a fluke. Like some magic recipe just waiting to be cooked and savored by its creator. When success comes, the feeling is even sweeter because you know that you have deserved it. Hell, I've dedicated many hours, days, weeks, even months to IM because I believe it is the right thing for me. Its actually a passion.
I dont know about everyone else here, but I hate working the traditional job.
Can't stand it, never have, never will. The thing with IM is, there is room for anyone.
Its like the market is a grand genie, holding a mirror, reflecting our desires.
It helps us understand who we are, and for this reason I have big love and respect to everyone who stays in this game. Progress, is a process. Which leads to the path of the fulfillment of you goals. I read a quote the other day about destiny: destiny comes to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
You have to believe in yourself. Its quite literally up to you. You might go through product after product, but if you get just one good idea out of each.
You will begin to build a grand design that will formulate itself into larger picture.
Which will then tell you what to do next.

Listen to this voice, and listen wisely. Then make haste!
You must not waste what valuable time you may have.

We shall fight the good fight with all that we have,
as if it where to be our last actions on this earth.

Cheers.

"ofthemix" - check your PM's, as I've got a JV / business proposal for you..

How long did it take, from the time you started doing IM to make $500 a month?
3.5 years til I quit my job doing both.

How many times did you fail and feel like giving up before succeeding?

If I am not failing, then I am not running my business correctly. I expect to be failing at somethings I do, as thats what grows me. How many times would be hard to track, failing is in the mix.

And how many products were you promoting at the time you reached the $500/month milestone?




How many times did you fail and feel like giving up before succeeding?

1 site. Now the other ones I have failed on many more times. The reason, once you have done well once on a site, you expect it to me automatic, it is not, it is almost as much work as the first time with some experience.

And how many products were you promoting at the time you reached the $500/month milestone?

Take the little $10 success and replicate the hell out of it. Work it until you're a master at it. You're sitting on a goldmine...if you stick with it.

I think you should stick with cranking out articles. Find a hot product, do the keyword research and pound 'em out. It's ain't fancy, but it works. Once you've got money coming in above your expenses starting building a portfolio of niche sites that promote CPA offers, CJ stuff, Clickbank products, or Adsense. Rinse. Repeat. And, stay out of the forum 80 percent of the time. Content and backlinks make money, reading does not!! Cheers.

sometimes it is good to take a break from it all and come back in with a fresh mind. take a few days and don't read or do anything with affiliate marketing. come back in and choose one strategy and execute on it.

Took about 1.5-2 months with just one product we created; this was our first ever informational product to promote.

We had failed with an online store 2 years ago because we had never heard the word "internet marketing" before. Seriously we just created a store (spent THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS) and then did nothing to really market it except some expensive adwords. Didn't really feel like giving up though. Just our mentality I guess.

There are some days I feel down just because a bad customer or difficulties with blogs or something technical but have never thought about quitting. Keep pressing on; takes some longer than others since everything is so different from one person and one business and product to the next!

It took me four months of failing. Once I made my first sales I was very excited and ambitious. I then pursued internet marketing at full force and within the next few months I was raking in 5 figures a month.

It was hard work but it paid off pretty darn quick.