Attention Newbies - 7 months of Internet Marketing, Here's Where I Am
This is for newbies who are contemplating whether to jump into the Internet Marketing "pool". I've doing this for 7 months now, and since I'm still fairly new at this, I wanted to share with you some insights and let you know where I'm at.
I learned about IM through a thread on an unrelated site about IM, which comprised nearly a thousand posts. I took me a few weeks to read the posts, but after I read them, I purchased an e-book by one of main contributors to the post, and his ebook gave me a very basic and general overview about IM.
In Feb of this year, I started searching for a keyword, and after the keyword I went on Clickbank and found a product I liked. Then it too me about three weeks to build a site through a template that came with the ebook that I bought several months earlier.
After finishing the site mid/late March I started article writing the first week of April. From the first week of April, I committed to writing two articles a day/5 days per week, and submitting them to EZA which gave me 40 articles after a month.
I had a dismal CTR rate for my first batch (I think about 12-14%, I don't remember). After writing the 40 articles I took some time off article writing to go on WF and get feedback on my articles and how to write better articles. I also spent time submitting my articles to sites other than EZA (goarticles, amazines, article ally, idealmarketers, articledashboard, and one more that I can't remember right now for the life of me
)
While I was getting feedback, I got my first sale, which was about a month after I had gotten started.
After doing more research I took to taking action again, and committed to writing another 2 articles per day, 5 days per week. My second batch had a higher CTR rate (about 22% if I remember correctly). One even was listed as one of the top viewed articles on EZA for my niche.
After writing my second batch and checking my site stats of visitors through Google Analytics,, I became increasingly discouraged about how many potential clients I was throwing away because I didn't have an opt-in page to capture the names and emails of people who visited and didn't buy, so I decided to work on my free report. That took me the better part of July to complete.
When I finished my free report (which was almost 40 pages), I then shopped around for a autoresponder site and on the advice from several people on this board, decided to go for Profollow, which, from what I'm told, is a white label product of Aweber, except cheaper.
It took me a little over a week to get acclimated to Profollow, but once everything got set up, I started getting people opting into my list.
It was from here that I decided to convert my site over to a Wordpress site, being I was told that google LOVES wordpress, and also because the template I had wasn't as flexible as I would've liked it to be to match the colours of the affiliate product sales page I was promoting.
Converting my site over to Wordpress took the better part of September and had a HUGE learning curve, which,, I guess, was worth it.
Now everything was "straight" I decided now I was ready to learn how to drive traffic to my site on a larger scale, build my list, and hit my goal of having my first $100 month by November 30.
I started writing articles again with a goal of getting to 100 articles in my niche.
Here's where I stand now:
* I've made four sales so far since I started in April, about one sale every other month.
* I have 54 subscribers to my mailing list.
* I hit #2 in google, yahoo and bing for my keyword over the weekend, only to check just a few minutes ago and find out that I was knocked back to #11 by google (the top of the second page). I really don't understand the fluctuations.
* I'm ready now to take this thing to the "next level" which is $100 per month.
* I've gotten emails from three different subscribers telling me how helpful my emails are. One even asked me when I'm going to come out with my own product. :-)
Here's my advice:
* Take CONSISTENT Action - This means find a plan and then STICK to it. It could be working on your business 7 days a week, or 6 days a week, or even three days a week. The point is, BE CONSISTENT. There's a phrase by a marketer by the name of Mike Littman, "Either your consistent or you're non-existent."
* Be where you're at - By this I mean be honest with yourself about your strengths and your weaknesses. In the past I found that I procrastinated because I thought I had to work myself to death when taking action. I would read of people taking massive amounts of action and get scared and intimidated and would procrastinate and procrastinate while months passed and nothing got done. Luckily, when I got into IM, I learned that everyone is different, and people work at different paces. When I committed to writing articles consistently, I knew writing four a day was too much, three, from what I attempted was also tedious, one would've have been TOO easy, and two articles a day was just challenging enough, so I COMMITTED to writing two a day. Taking consistent action with two articles a day for 30 days gave me the confidence that I needed to know that I can take consistent action and also started to make me think that maybe I can actually write three a day. It's all about learning how to work with YOU.
I also know I get obsessive, so rather than deciding to NOT take action until I get this problem "fixed," I decided to work with my "weakness." I only allow myself to check Clickbank for sales twice a month, because I know if I checked everyday and saw that I didn't make a sale, I'd get discouraged and start thinking about giving up. Instead, since you need to know how you're doing so you know what changes to make, I give myself twice a month the check. It's funny, that by doing this over time, I'm starting to become comfortable to the point that I'm thinking of relaxing my rule to checking once a week instead of once every two weeks.
* Never let the line go slack - Let's face it, we ALL get busy and some pressing issues come up in life which may take away from the time that we'd like to put in our business. Right now I'm working on a very important project having to do with one of my life dreams, and this has taken away time from my IM business. Yet, to stay consistent, I make sure I do SOMETHING every day (well, five days out of the week.) On nights I had other pressing issues and had to wake up early, instead of writing and submitting an article to EZA, I'd write it one night and then submit it the next night. Or, if time was running out and I had to get to bed, I'd go to EZA, pick out an article I had written and add it to my blog (I initially had a static site and converted to Wordpress several months later, so most articles were in articles were in article directories but not on my site). Or, I'd put up one post on a site related to my niche where I can thus get more backlinking to my site with my keyword.
* Just do it - Here's another quote from the same marketer Mike Litman, "You don't have to get it right, you just have to get it going." Before IM, I was always in analysis paralysis, trying to wait for the right time where everything was aligned before I decided I was ready to take action, Now, I accept the fact that the best way to learn is by just doing it. From all my fiasco adventures in the past, I came into IM with wisdom from my past mistakes, so I didn't sign up to a hundred mailing lists, or buy 300 hundred products. I resolved to just do it and learn from mistakes along the way. I can tell you what it feels like to eat a strawberry, or you can take the strawberry and eat it for yourself.
* Learn the dance between action and "non-action". After taking action for a period of time, you do have to sit back and evaluate your results, but of course, you can only evaluate results AFTER you take action. After taking action regularly, it become detrimental to your future progress if you don't take some time to sit and evaluate what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, and what you need to improve. If you're driving a car and don't take time to look at the map to see whether you're going the right way, you may wind up driving off a cliff. Some days were simply just spent asking questions on Warrior Forum and reading the answers to see how I can go forward the right way, see the next step I needed to take, and also get advice as to how to do something properly. Sometimes it is good to learn things on your own, other times is good to learn from others' experiences so you can save time by not making the same mistake.
Here's what I need to work on:
* Now I'm teetering between the top of the first page and second page of google, I feel that with another solid period of steady backlinking, I will remain consistently on page 1, so in that regards (SEO), my work is ALMOST done. Now I need to work on writing better copy, headlines etc to convert the traffic better because I'm not too pleased with my traffic conversion rate right now.
* I still need to work on driving larger volumes of traffic to my site. The keyword I chose isn't a large volume keyword (1,800 hits globally per month), but I have still heard of people attracting 50 to 100 and over visits per day. How that is done is completely beyond me. I have to learn about more methods.
*I need to know start participating more in forums relating to my niche. As a matter of fact, I've slowly started to do that. On nights where I'm busy with my other project that's been taking up most of my time, I'll simply go to one of them and post a reply to some thread. I am assuming that you can get a lot of qualified, targeted traffic from forums in your niche as you start to build a name for yourself and people begin to know you and trust you as an "expert."
* I need to join the War Room. I'd heard enough about it that when I have the extra money, I will invest it in War Room membership.
* What I believe I truly need is a mentor, so I'm putting my intention out there for one. If anyone out there is looking to mentor someone to mentor, know that your FREE services will not be taken for granted for as you can see, I already take consistent action.
I learned about IM through a thread on an unrelated site about IM, which comprised nearly a thousand posts. I took me a few weeks to read the posts, but after I read them, I purchased an e-book by one of main contributors to the post, and his ebook gave me a very basic and general overview about IM.
In Feb of this year, I started searching for a keyword, and after the keyword I went on Clickbank and found a product I liked. Then it too me about three weeks to build a site through a template that came with the ebook that I bought several months earlier.
After finishing the site mid/late March I started article writing the first week of April. From the first week of April, I committed to writing two articles a day/5 days per week, and submitting them to EZA which gave me 40 articles after a month.
I had a dismal CTR rate for my first batch (I think about 12-14%, I don't remember). After writing the 40 articles I took some time off article writing to go on WF and get feedback on my articles and how to write better articles. I also spent time submitting my articles to sites other than EZA (goarticles, amazines, article ally, idealmarketers, articledashboard, and one more that I can't remember right now for the life of me
)While I was getting feedback, I got my first sale, which was about a month after I had gotten started.
After doing more research I took to taking action again, and committed to writing another 2 articles per day, 5 days per week. My second batch had a higher CTR rate (about 22% if I remember correctly). One even was listed as one of the top viewed articles on EZA for my niche.
After writing my second batch and checking my site stats of visitors through Google Analytics,, I became increasingly discouraged about how many potential clients I was throwing away because I didn't have an opt-in page to capture the names and emails of people who visited and didn't buy, so I decided to work on my free report. That took me the better part of July to complete.
When I finished my free report (which was almost 40 pages), I then shopped around for a autoresponder site and on the advice from several people on this board, decided to go for Profollow, which, from what I'm told, is a white label product of Aweber, except cheaper.
It took me a little over a week to get acclimated to Profollow, but once everything got set up, I started getting people opting into my list.
It was from here that I decided to convert my site over to a Wordpress site, being I was told that google LOVES wordpress, and also because the template I had wasn't as flexible as I would've liked it to be to match the colours of the affiliate product sales page I was promoting.
Converting my site over to Wordpress took the better part of September and had a HUGE learning curve, which,, I guess, was worth it.
Now everything was "straight" I decided now I was ready to learn how to drive traffic to my site on a larger scale, build my list, and hit my goal of having my first $100 month by November 30.
I started writing articles again with a goal of getting to 100 articles in my niche.
Here's where I stand now:
* I've made four sales so far since I started in April, about one sale every other month.
* I have 54 subscribers to my mailing list.
* I hit #2 in google, yahoo and bing for my keyword over the weekend, only to check just a few minutes ago and find out that I was knocked back to #11 by google (the top of the second page). I really don't understand the fluctuations.
* I'm ready now to take this thing to the "next level" which is $100 per month.
* I've gotten emails from three different subscribers telling me how helpful my emails are. One even asked me when I'm going to come out with my own product. :-)
Here's my advice:
* Take CONSISTENT Action - This means find a plan and then STICK to it. It could be working on your business 7 days a week, or 6 days a week, or even three days a week. The point is, BE CONSISTENT. There's a phrase by a marketer by the name of Mike Littman, "Either your consistent or you're non-existent."
* Be where you're at - By this I mean be honest with yourself about your strengths and your weaknesses. In the past I found that I procrastinated because I thought I had to work myself to death when taking action. I would read of people taking massive amounts of action and get scared and intimidated and would procrastinate and procrastinate while months passed and nothing got done. Luckily, when I got into IM, I learned that everyone is different, and people work at different paces. When I committed to writing articles consistently, I knew writing four a day was too much, three, from what I attempted was also tedious, one would've have been TOO easy, and two articles a day was just challenging enough, so I COMMITTED to writing two a day. Taking consistent action with two articles a day for 30 days gave me the confidence that I needed to know that I can take consistent action and also started to make me think that maybe I can actually write three a day. It's all about learning how to work with YOU.
I also know I get obsessive, so rather than deciding to NOT take action until I get this problem "fixed," I decided to work with my "weakness." I only allow myself to check Clickbank for sales twice a month, because I know if I checked everyday and saw that I didn't make a sale, I'd get discouraged and start thinking about giving up. Instead, since you need to know how you're doing so you know what changes to make, I give myself twice a month the check. It's funny, that by doing this over time, I'm starting to become comfortable to the point that I'm thinking of relaxing my rule to checking once a week instead of once every two weeks.
* Never let the line go slack - Let's face it, we ALL get busy and some pressing issues come up in life which may take away from the time that we'd like to put in our business. Right now I'm working on a very important project having to do with one of my life dreams, and this has taken away time from my IM business. Yet, to stay consistent, I make sure I do SOMETHING every day (well, five days out of the week.) On nights I had other pressing issues and had to wake up early, instead of writing and submitting an article to EZA, I'd write it one night and then submit it the next night. Or, if time was running out and I had to get to bed, I'd go to EZA, pick out an article I had written and add it to my blog (I initially had a static site and converted to Wordpress several months later, so most articles were in articles were in article directories but not on my site). Or, I'd put up one post on a site related to my niche where I can thus get more backlinking to my site with my keyword.
* Just do it - Here's another quote from the same marketer Mike Litman, "You don't have to get it right, you just have to get it going." Before IM, I was always in analysis paralysis, trying to wait for the right time where everything was aligned before I decided I was ready to take action, Now, I accept the fact that the best way to learn is by just doing it. From all my fiasco adventures in the past, I came into IM with wisdom from my past mistakes, so I didn't sign up to a hundred mailing lists, or buy 300 hundred products. I resolved to just do it and learn from mistakes along the way. I can tell you what it feels like to eat a strawberry, or you can take the strawberry and eat it for yourself.
* Learn the dance between action and "non-action". After taking action for a period of time, you do have to sit back and evaluate your results, but of course, you can only evaluate results AFTER you take action. After taking action regularly, it become detrimental to your future progress if you don't take some time to sit and evaluate what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, and what you need to improve. If you're driving a car and don't take time to look at the map to see whether you're going the right way, you may wind up driving off a cliff. Some days were simply just spent asking questions on Warrior Forum and reading the answers to see how I can go forward the right way, see the next step I needed to take, and also get advice as to how to do something properly. Sometimes it is good to learn things on your own, other times is good to learn from others' experiences so you can save time by not making the same mistake.
Here's what I need to work on:
* Now I'm teetering between the top of the first page and second page of google, I feel that with another solid period of steady backlinking, I will remain consistently on page 1, so in that regards (SEO), my work is ALMOST done. Now I need to work on writing better copy, headlines etc to convert the traffic better because I'm not too pleased with my traffic conversion rate right now.
* I still need to work on driving larger volumes of traffic to my site. The keyword I chose isn't a large volume keyword (1,800 hits globally per month), but I have still heard of people attracting 50 to 100 and over visits per day. How that is done is completely beyond me. I have to learn about more methods.
*I need to know start participating more in forums relating to my niche. As a matter of fact, I've slowly started to do that. On nights where I'm busy with my other project that's been taking up most of my time, I'll simply go to one of them and post a reply to some thread. I am assuming that you can get a lot of qualified, targeted traffic from forums in your niche as you start to build a name for yourself and people begin to know you and trust you as an "expert."
* I need to join the War Room. I'd heard enough about it that when I have the extra money, I will invest it in War Room membership.
* What I believe I truly need is a mentor, so I'm putting my intention out there for one. If anyone out there is looking to mentor someone to mentor, know that your FREE services will not be taken for granted for as you can see, I already take consistent action.
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