I have been in Internet Marketing for almost 5 years and in that time I have spent over $20k on IM education such as ebooks, video courses, traffic cources, private coaching, coaching courses, WSO`s, clickbank products you name it I have bought it

I spent most of this money though within the first couple of years of being online and trying to crack this IM stuff and these days I rarely buy anything

You maybe reading this and you`re in the exact same position as i was a few years ago, confused, info overload and just damn right fed up and not sure who to believe

Or..

You may already be doing well online but just want to see if you can pick up a few helpful pointers

Which ever the case I hope you can take away something from this post which will help you in your business

These 13 things are the most important things that i have learned in the last 5 years of being online. This information is the results of a hell of a lot of money, a lot of head scratching, thousands of hours of study and a lot of blood sweat and tears so don`t take this information lightly

1. You must get focused

If you want to create some type of income online then choose 1 method and stick to it - I will say that again in case you missed it. Choose 1 method and stick to it and hammer the living daylights out of it, give it everything you have and keep doing it until you see results

It`s that simple. If you put all of your effort, and i mean everything you have into the method you will get results

You don`t need to re invent the wheel, use methods to create an income that have already been proven to work

2. Start building a list as soon as you can BUT...

Building a list is important, however don`t just dash off and just put something together just so that you can start building a list. You have to make sure that the information you`re giving away to build your list is top quality

If you give away crap then your subscribers won`t ever want to hear from you again.

Giving away crap to build a list is more harmful than not building a list at all

If you need to wait until you have more IM experience under your belt then so be it

Your free gift, course, video series etc does not have to be ground breaking but it does have to be quality

3. Don`t be tight and try to avoid paying for tools

If you are trying to building an online business then you need to start taking things seriously

You need tools so stop trying to dodge buying them

The basic ones which you need are

hosting - i use hostgator
domain name - i buy mine from name cheap
autoresponder - i use aweber
file hosting - i use amazon s3

you can run a nice little business with these tools alone so stop thinking that you can use all free tools to run your business. You may not need all of them straight away but the hosting and domain name are vital from day 1

4. Outsource the things your not good at

If there are things that you hate doing or worse you suck at them then outsource it

If you hate or can`t write articles, outsource them

If you can`t create good graphics outsource them

Theres lots of warriors for hire in here and also you have Fiverr at your disposal so make the most of it

5. Don`t be scared of paying for traffic

I used to think that paid traffic was the devil and it was very risky because you could lose your shirt

Yes it can be if you don`t use common sense but most of the time paid traffic is really good fun and you have the ability to send a lot of traffic to a page and test conversions really quickly

Start off small even if it`s just $5 per day and then go from there

If you have a good sales funnel in place, paid traffic can be very very profitable so don`t be scared to learn about paid traffic

6. There`s no such thing as FREE traffic

This is a myth that many people including myself fell into because FREE traffic is not really free

You either pay for traffic with money or time so free traffic is using your time and for most people our time is very valuable, i know mine is

So next time you spend days or weeks trying to generate traffic from facebook to your page consider just paying for the traffic instead

The same goes for SEO, you can spend months trying to rank, but just think how much time you have used trying to rank you`re site. Don`t get me wrong SEO does have it`s place but just start to value your time more

7. Don`t put all of your income into SEO

I can honestly say that i have never been hit hard by any google update, especially when i was making most of my money with SEO. I did however see the light and started to diversify my income streams as soon as i realized that 90% of my income was made from SEO

I have heard far too many horror stories about people losing all of there income and many good friends too so learn by the mistakes of others as much as you can not your own

8. Treat it as a business not a hobby

When you`re working online treat it as a business not a hobby

As they say, treat it like a hobby you will get hobby results, treat it as business you will get business results

This means closing all your distractions when working such as facebook, skype, tv, put phone on silent, sit down and close the door. You will be far more productive if you do things like this more of the time

9. Discipline yourself

This is a big one. You need to start getting serious and start disciplining yourself when at work

You need to make sure you know what you should be doing at the start of the day and then discipline yourself not to stop working until that work is done

If you get into the habit of doing this you will be way way more productive

A quick example is i would set myself 3 new videos to record for my membership site at the start of the day so i won`t do anything else until these are complete!

10. Write things down

Don`t under estimate this one because it is super powerful and i really mean it

When you write things down it`s a proven fact that things are absorbed more and much easier

Try writing things down all the time such as short term targets, goals and jobs for the week and each day

You will find the more you write things down, the more crystal clear things become

I have a couple of white boards which i write stuff down on

I also use these white boards to map out my sales funnels so that i can see where i need to make changes, its very effective

11. Don`t under estimate youtube

We live in an age where we can learn pretty much anything we want all in one place...youtube

I learned a lot of stuff from youtube from around 2008 - 2010, i spent thousands of hours watching and learning lots of things to do with IM

so next time you are stuck weather it is something to do with camtasia, how to ftp, how to use phototshop, how to get more traffic, how to build a website etc etc

it`s all there in youtube so make the most of it

12. Be sales funnel focused

This is quite possibly something which took me over 3 years to really grasp because i never thought it was that important (and probably because i didn`t understand it either)

once you start to build lists and create products you need to become funnel focused

this means you should be focusing a lot of your time on your sales funnel and getting people into it

you need to start focusing a lot more on creating new products, adding new products into your funnel, adding upsells, downsells

some simple tweaks to parts of your sales funnels can make a massive difference

13. Stop the excuses and NEVER give up

If you are still struggling to see any results with creating income online then you need to stop the excuses and just keep plugging away

use my advice from tip 1 and choose 1 method and don`t quit it until you`re seeing results and making money

and lastly never give up, too many people in my opinion give up way to easily after hitting a couple of road blocks. Instead of getting all depressed that something didn`t work and you feel like a failure use it to your advantage and look at it as education instead

that is now 1 more way which you know did not work

i hope you have enjoyed all of these tips and as i said these are the most important things which i have learned in the last 5 years of being online and i hope they can help you too

if there are any extra things that you would like to add to the list which you have learned, leave them below

Thanks for reading

Paul