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Hello, I'm Very Experienced at Partial Success

by Marcus Cross
20 replies
Hey everyone! I am not new to the Warrior Forum, but I have not posted before so I wanted to introduce myself before I start getting involved here.

What Am I Writing This?

I have a long history with internet marketing and trying to make money online, but I'm struggling. This post will contain some of my back story, so obviously if you're not interested in reading through it all, that's fine.

I've broken it up into subsections with sub headings, so you can skim down if you want to. See, I know how to write for the web!

But if you do read to the end, you will understand why I now want to become active on the Warrior Forum...

2008-2012: My Many Attempts at Making Money Online

I first started trying to make money online way back in 2008. I've tried a lot of stuff over the years including:
  • Travis Sago's Bum Marketing Method.
  • PotPieGirl's One Week Marketing.
  • George Brown's Google Sniper.
  • Dan Brock's Profitzon (now Deadbeat Super Affiliate).
  • Wealthy Affiliate.

I also used various tools such as:
  • Scrapebox.
  • SENukeX.
  • Various article spinners/posters.
  • Other backlink building tools.

Over the years I created various niche websites and earned some money but never very much.

2012-2014: When I Gave Up for a While

Eventually, I got to a point where I decided to give it all up. I had put so much time and work into it all, but it just wasn't bringing me the money I'd hoped it would. So I decided maybe I needed to find a normal job after all...

2015: My 2nd Attempt at Wealthy Affiliate

In January 2015, I decided to give internet marketing another shot. I rejoined Wealthy Affiliate, hoping that this would finally hold the key to my success.

I set up several niche websites, some of which earned me some money, but again still not enough.

I also got sucked into the Bootcamp course and sucked into the whole thing of promoting Wealthy Affiliate by writing reviews saying everything else is a scam. That method actually does work, which is why they teach it. And it's the method that has earned me the most money from Wealthy Affiliate.

But I didn't stay in that mindset forever...

2017: My Falling Out With WA

Over time, I started to drift towards a more honest approach. I started giving my honest opinions about things, whether good or bad. Eventually, this led me to rethink my overly positive review of Wealthy Affiliate, so I wrote a new WA review which contained some negatives too.

Then things went a stage further when I saw there was an in-depth attack on WA by SiteSell, the owners of SoloBuildIt. I decided to take a look at it and write my own thorough assessment of their attack. I was fully expecting it to be full of nonsense, but I actually found that there were a lot of valid criticisms of Wealthy Affiliate.

Not only did I write a thorough article about it all, containing my totally honest thoughts on the matter, I also got into a lengthy discussion in the comments section with the owner of SiteSell. I don't want to post a link to the article I wrote because I don't want to be accused of spamming the Warrior Forum, but if you're interested to read it, just ask.

Anyway, after that, I made the mistake of posting an external link on WA which led to other training. This got marked as spam by WA members, and I lost my write access there. I've never got my write access back. I think this is because the owners of WA saw the things I said in my article and the comments section and decided I was too much trouble for WA. I guess I'm too honest, too willing to question things and criticise.

Why I'm Here

So I'm now here at the Warrior Forum because I realize that this place looks like a damn good replacement for the community at Wealthy Affiliate. Now I'm saying "goodbye" to WA, I want a place where I can talk with other internet marketers.

I used to lurk in the Warrior Forum a lot. Years ago it used to be my "go to" place to find out what people thought of new MMO products and techniques. So now I'm here, ready to be involved properly.

So, What Now?

To be honest, I'm at a difficult point. As the title of this post says, I've tried internet marketing for years but only ever partially succeeded. Sure, I've earned money, but never enough to replace a job. I'm sure that must be true for many other people too.

So I'm now at a stage where I need to reassess what I've done and where I go from here.

Don't worry, I'm not expecting immediate solutions from anyone. I just thought it would be worth putting my presence here in some kind of context.

See you around, and hopefully, we can help each other somehow...

All the best,
Marcus.
#experienced #partial #success
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  • Profile picture of the author Frank Donovan
    Marcus, from what you write it seems your history of internet marketing consists of trying to make money on behalf of others. In that game, the people who profit are the program or membership owners who rely on and exploit an army of willing promoters.

    Being part of a community or network can certainly help, but to be successful, you need to think for yourself and stop looking elsewhere for solutions. And simply becoming active on this forum isn't going to change your results unless you accept responsibility for your own success.

    It's going to take a shift in outlook.

    Rather than pinning your hopes on shortcuts, loopholes, the current "method of the month" etc., think about what it is that you can do to provide consistent and long-term value to a market. That's the way to shake off that job mentality and to begin building a sustainable business.
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    • Profile picture of the author Marcus Cross
      Excellent advice, Frank. Thank you for your honesty. I respect that.
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  • Profile picture of the author ab1962
    Hi Marcus

    What a very nice and honest post. You are right about there being lots of guys still struggling to make that income that can replace your day job.

    What I can suggest is that you read a lot of posts on this forum about what the successful IM do and how they approach every part of this IM system.

    Use the search function on the forum and search and do lots of research on lots of topics just to see all the really valuable post and ideas you can find on here.

    If you really struggling to find answers after you tried to find your answer with the search function, then sure come and asked your Question here, but give as much info as you can in your question so that the other Warriors understand exactly what the problem is you are struggling with and I am sure you will get some good and valuable answers from the other warriors on here.

    I am also just a normal guy trying to get out of rat race but have to say I always read a lot on this forum and most of the times I find some really great valuable post that I learn something from Lastly just a little advice from me is that you must try to focus on one thing at a time and try to master that one thing first also focus on one Niche at a time until you mastered making a success and then move on. If for instance you are struggling to get traffic then go and search for all the info you can get about getting traffic and take action until you mastered it and then focus on some other aspects you want get better at and just remember the most important thing of all, NEVER give up the success might just be around the coner!!

    Good Luck with your future IM efforts and may you find success soon and be blessed.
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    • Profile picture of the author Marcus Cross
      Thanks. Yes, I definitely agree that focusing on just one thing at a time is the best approach. In the past, when I did the early courses I tended to set up as many sites/pages as I possibly could. I would spread myself too thinly.
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      • Profile picture of the author GordonJ
        Originally Posted by Marcus Cross View Post

        Thanks. Yes, I definitely agree that focusing on just one thing at a time is the best approach. In the past, when I did the early courses I tended to set up as many sites/pages as I possibly could. I would spread myself too thinly.
        Thanks Marcus for your honest post and your experience, it seems to be one shared by many here.
        So, what does your day look like on Sept.1, 2018?

        Where are you? Physical location.
        What are you doing? How much time are you spending daily on your IM?
        What are the activities?

        You are looking for SUSTAINABLE and steady income, right? So far, you've experienced hit and miss, sometimes money coming in, and often in spurts...
        but you have not set up any sort of a recurring income system...is this correct?

        ONE thing to focus on, at a time, is a good concept, but most focus on the wrong ONE thing...they focus on a system, method, technique, software, new and shiny object, when the ONE thing they should focus on (as has been mentioned) is

        themselves. Focus on YOU. What will YOU be like in one year? The financial part is just one thing, and often the easiest once you have taken control of you day...

        solving YOUR problems in the direction of YOUR goals, and allowing the money to flow to you from the value you provide to others.

        It begins with a goal (purpose). And one year is not too long to imagine, is it? You know what you were doing in Sept. 2016, eh?

        What will be different in 2018? Cause, if you don't change directions soon, you are going to get where you are headed. The problem, most don't know what that direction is.

        In Sept. of 2018...fill in your blanks:

        My monthly income from Sept. on will be ________ which will come to me from my activities in IM, including ______________ and by giving the most value I can to my customers who will be satisfied and become repeat customers. I do this by ____________.

        Start with a financial goal, 3k, 4k ($3,000.00 to $4,000.00 USD) a month. How many sales do you need to make? To whom? Where?

        Set up a goal for next year, then BACKWARD CHAIN the activity it is going to take to get there, and you create your own PLAN OF ACTION. Then, you find out how truly motivated you are to execute YOUR plan, or if another shiny object distracts you.

        Good luck in your journey.

        GordonJ
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        • Profile picture of the author Marcus Cross
          Originally Posted by GordonJ View Post

          Thanks Marcus for your honest post and your experience, it seems to be one shared by many here.
          So, what does your day look like on Sept.1, 2018?
          Thank you so much for your excellent advice and questions, Gordon. I don't have answers to your questions yet, but I have made a note to come back to this soon and have a really good think about it.
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  • Profile picture of the author ChrisBa
    It looks like you've been putting in effort which is more than 90% of the people!

    How long do you spend on each of your ventures? I'm just trying to figure out if you might be giving up on them too soon and moving on to something else?
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  • Profile picture of the author discrat
    Yep, I remember Bum Marketing. In its hey day people were slapping up Articles on EZA and making money by putting aff.links in Resource Box. Easy money for the most part !

    Marcus , thanks for your Post and the honesty within it.

    Sounds like you have had some Success which is a good thing. And there are some solid people here to learn from.
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    Nothing to see here including a Sig so just move on :)

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  • Profile picture of the author Gedd
    Hi Marcus, I thought I'd wrote that! been lurking myself, must be the time of year for us lurkers to come out of the shadows. I can sympathise with you, similar story, only making a few dollars here and there. I went away from IM to Self Help for a while, but wanted to come back as it's a passion.
    I'm trying a new approach with a Mentor,I have tried some overpriced ones before, but I hope this one will be the missing link.
    I will let you know how I get on.
    Good luck to you.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gambino
    Marcus,

    Frank broke it down nicely above. I'm in a completely opposite boat than you... I'm trying to spend less time on this forum and other places that I "hangout" online and more time building my businesses.

    It's rare that a thread here catches my eye. But, you're one of the few people of late that have laid out their experiences instead of asking something like "how can I make $20 a day?" So, just based on that and your ability to write/communicate, I think you have some potential to grow and build an actual business. And honestly, you remind me a lot of myself 5-10 years ago when I went through seemingly every method to "make money online" in rapid succession.

    It wasn't until I moved away from making money and moved toward creating something great that I started to see success and my vision and focus became clear.

    To me, making money online and owning a business are not synonymous with one another. Online is just one of several places that a business can communicate with their audience and potentially make sales. I don't care if my money comes from online or offline or anywhere else.

    You've spoken a lot about your past - but you didn't say much about your future. What are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals? What problems or ideas keep you up a night?

    I would encourage you to think about what people need and find a problem that you're hell-bent on solving. Something that makes you wake up in the middle of the night and run to your computer. Something that makes you lose track of time.

    Once you have your solution(s), making money becomes the easy part. It is much, much, much easier to bring a highly valuable product to a company with an established customer base and license or sell that product to people know to buy than it is to create a product/service, market that product/service and build your own customer base.

    Simply put, create a solution and the money will find you.
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  • Profile picture of the author Gedd
    I forget who said it but it was something like " Don't make customer's for your products, make product's for your customers." Either that or I just made up a great quote!
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  • Profile picture of the author Marcus Cross
    Originally Posted by discrat View Post

    Yep, I remember Bum Marketing. In its hey day people were slapping up Articles on EZA and making money by putting aff.links in Resource Box. Easy money for the most part !
    Yes, I did that for a while. I got into that just after EZA had banned having direct affiliate links, so I would buy up cheap .info domain names and redirect them to the affiliate links. Back then the minimum word count on EZA was only 250, so on some days I would churn out 10 articles. Made some money but not much.

    Originally Posted by Gambino View Post

    You've spoken a lot about your past - but you didn't say much about your future. What are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals? What problems or ideas keep you up a night?
    You see, here's the thing, I'm not convinced that going with what you're most interested in is always the best approach. This is the one big flaw I saw in Wealthy Affiliate's training. They say to just go with whatever you are most interested in. The result is that WA's hosting is filled with passionately created hobby sites that probably only earn a few dollars a month for their owners.

    I have various interests, but some of them I'm sure wouldn't be sensible foundations for a business. Also, the thing with interests is that they change over time. The problems and ideas that keep me up at night now might not be the same problems and ideas that keep me up at night in a year or two.

    There's a great TEDx talk about this topic:
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  • Profile picture of the author Profit Donkey
    You see, here's the thing, I'm not convinced that going with what you're most interested in is always the best approach. This is the one big flaw I saw in Wealthy Affiliate's training. They say to just go with whatever you are most interested in. The result is that WA's hosting is filled with passionately created hobby sites that probably only earn a few dollars a month for their owners.
    There was a really interesting thread on here a few months back about whether or not you need passion for a product/service in order to market it and make money from it. On that thread two primary schools of thought emerged - either that your passion can drive you when the going gets tough (as happened with OP) and is therefore necessary, or as one poster summised it - that his passion was making money, and he would sell whatever product/service allowed him to do that.

    I think it ultimately comes down to asking yourself what you're in the game for. You might see a WA site about baking or gardening that makes pocket change each month, but the owner might be happy to simply be monetizing their passion. The reality is that if you want to be making a comfortable full-time living off marketing a product that isn't yours, you either have to be very, very (like one in a million) good or very, very lucky.

    Personally I completely agree with Gambino. Finding a gap in a market that you can fill is much easier said than done (if it was easy we'd all be millionaires), but creating and driving your own ideas will be more profitable - and far more engaging and enjoyable - than working your ass off for beer tokens (if of course this is what your goal is; as I say many people are happy with a bit of extra pocket money). Maybe something worth thinking about.

    Great post anyway, I'd be interested to hear where you go from here.
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  • Profile picture of the author Marcus Cross
    Oh, I'm sure it's a lot easier to stick with an affiliate website if you are interested in the topic. That is definitely better than choosing a topic you have no interest in at all. But that doesn't mean that the topic you are MOST interested in is the best choice for a business out of your interests.

    Also, is affiliate marketing the best way to make money online? What about arbitrage or running your own store? Then you don't necessarily have to spend lots of time writing articles about the topic, you just find what people want to buy and you sell it to them, right?
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  • Profile picture of the author Ravi Shardul
    I have been through the similar Journey. I am firm on one opinion though... Nothing beats passive or leverage income.
    I did MLM through my teenage to the early 20's for 4 years and achieved huge success! Went back to 9 to 5 for 12 years until I got introduced to internet marketing. As I had an experience through MLM, I was very careful about choosing the right one. As we all know that there are hundreds of MLM companies out there and it's very important to choose the right one, which has 3 strong P's( Product, Plan, People behind the company) Good MLM companies also have a very strong education system.
    The same principles apply to the IM I would say. There are heaps of affiliate programmes out there. It's very important to choose the wise one.
    It may not be the best way to be wealthy but Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways I think is to be wealthy. As long as you get a proper education, use it wisely, be Patient and provide Value to your customers.
    Just sharing my experience!!
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  • Profile picture of the author Valerie Pagliara Bomar
    I went thru every thing and the like...you need to focus on one or two things...it get's to be information overload...pick something...learn it inside and out...implement it! then try a new venture...rinse n repeat...Give Value and truly try to help people...this comes from a better place and you'll not only be at peace, you just might make a few dollars you can be proud of...

    Best wishes n
    Good Luck
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  • Profile picture of the author ryanbiddulph
    Hi Marcus,

    I'd do a few things.

    #1 - Let go the past, aka, the old stories, the struggles, that you experienced. Said stories do not serve you.

    #2 - Pick a niche you feel passionate about. So the work is the reward. And so it is fun to practice.

    #3 - Practice skills related to your niche, based on solving a problem. I write thousands of words daily and create 3 live videos to improve my content creation skills and to solve my pressing reader problem: figuring out how to build a successful blog

    #4 - Pick 1-2 mentors in your niche. Learn from them. Take notes. Study.

    #5 - Do not believe tools or systems will make money online. You already tried buying a hammer believing it will drive a nail into a wall on its own. Now you understand that you need to be the skilled carpenter who practices with the hammer, aka, honing your online skills, to get the job done.

    Thanks for sharing, and keep yer head up!
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  • Profile picture of the author Rory Singh
    Your story resembles many success stories...before they were successes'.

    There is always a 'story' behind the story so to speak.

    Thanks for sharing yours honestly.

    When people think of a 'super affiliate', they think of luck, secrets and overnight success.

    But in truth...any marketer that is experiencing phenomenal results have been in the game off and on for years.

    For some even a decade (or decades).

    Well now may finally be your time.

    But just remember the days when you got frustrated and quit.

    There will always be days like this coming ahead of you.

    And the main reasons anyone quits always comes down to excuses...

    - This is too hard
    - Too many people already doing it : Saturation
    - SEO is too difficult
    And on and on.

    So next time frustration steps in (because it will), remember your WHY.

    What is your prime motivator?

    Someone referred to a past thread about passion.

    Yes you will need this.

    Passion for FREEDOM or something else.

    But here is another idea...

    It's called PAIN.

    As human beings, we are attracted to pleasure but avoid pain.

    The people who have succeeded before you, had some passion yes.

    But most likely the idea of NOT Letting themselves succeed was a lot more painful than the work, sleepless nights and the sacrifices they made!

    The people who succeed online would be in more pain by failing (and not getting what ever it is that they were after)...

    Than the pain it will take to succeed.
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  • Profile picture of the author RazvanRogozC
    @Marcus

    From an action taking perspective, you have more experience than 80% of the people here. My advice is to curate the content you're going through and to be very careful from whom you are taking advice. It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to see that 80% of the things posted here are false, not very effective, fairy tales or simply, generalities that help no one.

    The other 20% though are earning a lot of money and they are great teachers.
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  • Profile picture of the author Marcus Cross
    Lots of interesting and helpful replies. Thank you. Gives me things to think about...
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