Anyone Else Take Tons of Action & Still Little Return?

Scattered focus gives scattered results?

Not trying to be a smart ass here btw. Can you list the top 5 things (top = effort/time spent) that you've done towards making money online over those years?

Identify problems, then solve them one at a time.

This is a very good thread...and I would imagine strikes a nerve with a lot of people for a variety of reasons.

Hand on heart, have I made a good return on the amount of effort I've put in? NO WAY! Will I? Maybe.

What I will say is that the amount of cr*p I get in my email inbox these days has gone off the scale and most of it is from so called Guru's telling me about the next way to get rich quick...It's gone into meltdown since Penguin.

I do think some people make a lot of money probably through singing the praises of this Guru and that Guru and sending out to lists and getting mugs to buy into the latest fad. If they're lucky the person who bought it will have bought so much of it they'll forget to ask for a refund!

I think that anyone can make money doing this properly, but it's a long road to walk.

You have to sell good products to people who want that product.

(and quite timely as I speak another Guru hits my inbox!)

You have to remember that IM (whatever strategy you espouse) is a business. Business is competitive, regardless of whether it's brick/mortar or online. It is certainly possible that you can be doing everything "right" and still be failing because the next guy may be doing it "more right" or "better" or "more efficiently".

The trick is to compete in a space that you are good at and then be one of the best at it. If you can do that, you can succeed.

I, personally, am very successful both as an Amazon affiliate and as an info product creator. With over 15 years of IM experience, I am able to very well for myself and I am also able to impart my knowledge to others.

I'm successful as an Amazon affiliate because I do my own thing and stay away from what the crowds are doing.

Just a few things and I'll leave you be.

Note that none of this is aimed directly at you or anyone else on this forum.

1. I believe that "doing everything right" includes being able to compete with others. If a competitor simply runs you over, you're doing it wrong. But maybe that's just me.

2. ^^ the same applies everywhere else in life: corporate careers, university, etc.

3. "Online business" in general is a super-growth industry right now. The opportunities are mind boggling. "Limited opportunity" is an easy excuse. Just like with everything else in life, some people love to blame "invisible forces" for their shortcomings.

4. This is an important point. Some people are born slightly, well... not as smart as the rest, perhaps? YES, there are losers everywhere in life - look around you. Such people are ARE doing it wrong - they should have chosen a much simpler career path.

In this sense, YES running a business is beyond the scope of most people, and this forum is no exception. Just like getting a degree in maths or passing ACCA exams - some people just don't have the...

No such thing as limited opportunity - some people are simply "dreamers" who fail to properly evaluate their capabilities.

Most of those who complain about trying and failing online don't even have a business plan. Blaming something/someone else for your own failures/shortcomings is a quick path to self destruction.

traffic is the key to everything

you can have the best site with the most unique content but wituout traffic your site is nothing. im using content which regularly fails copyscape but im still doing well. why? bec i spend more time getting traffic to my site than making it all unique and pretty.

just like me, have a lot of action intended for me but the web is less than expected

I understand where Builder154, and I don't think his concerns have been addressed properly. I know what it's like to look at your computer screen and want to break it ,out of sheer frustration, maybe you made a great site but some crappy site out ranks yours, or you paid some seo guy to help your site and nothing at all happen, or even worse you got penalized, these are the things the everyday marketer will go through.

Bnetwork,Paulgl,Wolfmmiii, you guys are the exception, you probably went through all that yrs ago and came out of it with a wealth of knowledge on how to make a living online, but please remember their are those out there who are still at the beginning stage of the online career.

Yes you can do everything right and see little to no results, and the worst part is it takes weeks ,months yrs to test and see what works and what doesn't .

I have to admit that I never took IM all that seriously, until I started to make some real money online, that's when I decided to do everything I could to have a sustainable income using Im. Which meant doing some testing, making more sites, investing more money etc, and in the end it all got wiped away with unnatural links notice, which was my fault, not google.

So just make sure you do things the right way from the start, give it time, do a lot of testing, make friends on wf and ask them questions, chances are they been where your at now.

Exchange numbers with a few wf members, I had a 3hr long convo with a fellow marketer and it was fun, to actually talk to someone who knew what a h1 tag is or a backlink, whenever I try talking to friends and family they treat me like I'm a jehovah witness or something and want to leave the room asap lol, no offense to anyone religion btw.

I answer dozens of questions daily. Some of those questions are 1000+ words long, lol. I'm sure that many others here do the same.

Of course it can be frustrating, disheartening and confusing at times. Some of us have been there before, but people just don't/won't listen.

What I'm getting at is this: do some work, test a few things then ask for help. If you ask for specific advice, there's almost a 100% chance that someone is going to give you a very detailed answer.

Questions like "I've done everything right. There's just not enough opportunity in this, agree?" tick me off.

The Google landscape has changed rapidly. Opportunities still exist, but they're not as numerous as they were in the past.

People are approaching the 'make money online' problem from the wrong perspective. If you want to make money you have to solve people's problems. How many new people who enter the world of IM can honestly say they're approaching things by attempting to solve people's problems. Not many would be my guess.

Following templates that used to work for others is another surefire way to fail. You're better off trying your own thing and experimenting. You will find ABSOLUTELY ZERO actionable information on forums like this one. Come here to shoot the sh** but forget the idea you'll actually ever learn anything. There are lots of charlatans and wannabes here, and many of them view themselves as your competition. Take what they say with a grain of salt.

Quality Service at Affordable Prices = No Competition

Just like it's not hard to find a job if you have the skills and are a hard worker. Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer and ask yourself... "Would I buy this product or service?"

Do not do what everyone else is doing because most everyone else is failing. You have to be innovative and solve problems for people.

Concentrate on a main project and become an expert. Don't spread yourself out too thin. If you do, you'll just be mediocre in many things and you'll never make a lot of money.

Also, ensure that your actions are actually actions that make money. Just because you're taking action, doesn't necessarily mean you're taking the right actions. Some actions...ppl are just "doing busy work".

Re-evaluate your goals and set tangible measurements. It'll click in due time - keep at it!

Thanks for all the responses. I hope the conversation continues.

I want to explain again that I'm not talking about people who are beginners and just starting. I'm talking about people who already have tweaked and tested and sought advice and implemented advice again and again and again and still just can't seem to get past the chump change phase of this.

It's not a problem of attitude because I'm talking about people who have put in the work for a long time consistently. You don't do that if your attitude isn't there. It's just that at some point, if things objectively aren't paying off, you wouldn't be smart not to stop and wonder if something bigger is going on.

It's not a problem of "doing the wrong things" because they have put in the time to learn, as much as is possible, how to do this right.

You know there are Hall of Fame players in every sport that never won a championship. Some of them are among the best to ever play. Getting over that hump has a lot of factors to it. It doesn't necessarily mean they didn't do things right.

It's frustrating when people assume that those who are making a lot did something special and correct while those who aren't must have just not done it right.

But I'm still open to the fact that there is some idea I'm just not implementing properly. I just don't really know what it would be at this point.

Like what they say, you can always build a good quality website about a certain niche, but the question is, do the web need another website about that?

It's a cliche that's said a million times... but the REAL difference between "winners" and "losers" is persistance. There is no set formula to building a successful business online. And for that reason, it's impossible to have any kind of experiment.

Making money online is an art, it's not a science. What bnetwork is saying does make sense. He's willing to put in the grunt work to continue to TEST after **** hits the fan. Most people try and regurgitate a system that they learned from someone else, and then pray that it works. Inevitably a pothole will emerge at some point in the process, and "losers" will claim that the system is faulty. "Making money online is too hard and a complete waste of time." "Winners" will dig a little deeper, and keep at it till they kind a solution.

The difference between "winners" and "losers" is the willingness to run over the inevitable potholes along the way, and keep driving till you reach the desired destination.

Bottom line is, If a person isn't seeing any results, they are not doing everything right.

You can't honestly claim your doing everything right, If your not meeting your own expectations.

I'm not picking on anyone, I'm not saying anyone is better at anything, it is what it is, you keep going until you get the results you want.

I can't remember a day in the last 6 years that I wasn't running IM test, I still make money from older projects/sites (everyday), but I never stop testing new things related to my business.

Work smarter, not harder...No need of tons of action, the need is of the right action at the right time. Split nanoseconds, focus sharply, wait patiently and press any key to continue !

No offense Builder, but you seem to spend a huge amount of time debating on the forums, often versus very experienced people - like in the Adsense thread you seemed to just want to debate and counter everyone.

I'm all for debating club, but if you spent some of the time you spent on writing all these detailed "devil's advocate" posts on your own sites you would probably see greater results.

me too. I added plenty of backlinks,shares of my site, but still no trafffic and not even conversions. I am so worry.

you will start getting traffic. don't worry and try forum commenting and blog commenting.

Dude, why are you so upset with everyone and arguing? Who cares if anyone else is struggling. The point is that you are struggling and you need to take responsibility as to why you are not getting the results you want.

Listening to you ramble on the forum clearly shows that you would rather assign blame and drown in a pool of self pity and waste time asking the wrong questions.

Stop asking who else in this forum is struggling to. Who Cares!

But instead start laying out what it is EXACTLY you are been doing step by step. And let the experts tell you what it is your doing wrong. I guarantee you that judging by your ramblings and debates with others you are not thinking like a winner.

And therefore you are getting the results you are getting in your business.

Just accept responsibility and figure out whats wrong and fix it.

Remember that its not action that pays off. It is the RIGHT CONSISTENT ACTION that pays off.

People that succeed at I.M get results because they do things in a certain way.

You realize "Keeping up with the Joneses" doesn't usually work out long term, right?

I don't understand the fascination of needing to be just like someone else.

Do your own thing & move forward with your IM business.

It's ok to pick up hints & tips on the small details, but trying to copy every single detail is obviously not working. Be creative.

I've been going six years. I have not had enough success, yet.

Hey man, what are you doing exactly? I had similar experiences for the first 3 years of my IM journey...then things just came together. Just ****in' lucky I guess, which is why I'll disagree with flip flops from my personal experience.

For example, I understood the importance of traffic and a good sales funnel with a great amount of preselling via email series. Problem was that the traffic wasn't converting! I'd get 100s of hops a day, even on affiliate sites and 0-1 sales.

Then, out of the blue, traffic started converting. I honestly didn't do anything different because I WAS doing everything right for my business model. SO I can say it was luck, or some other variable that I still don't know about to this day...I'm glad it came together though.

So all I can say is that evaluate what you're doing, evaluate your business model. If you are doing everything right then just give it more time...but always improve upon your system whenever you can.

@Builder154

Do yourself a favor and read the following books:

Think and Grow Rich - Napolean Hill
Psycho Cybernetics - Maxwell Maltz (Christian Based)
The Magic of Thinking Big - Dr. David J. Schwartz

No offence but I truly believe you have a mindset barrier that is limiting your success! The principles of success can be learned and the habit of success is developed by constantly setting goals and achieving them. An environment of pessimism will breed failure!

I think you should quit. It's clearly not for you.

Here are some stats for you to chew on! This isn't focused on IM specifically but it does include home-based business which will include various other types of businesses beside an online based business. Very interesting stats:

Small Business Success/Failure Rates | The Big Picture

Challenge:

I bet you a $100 I can build a site from scratch and get it to the $10-$20/day mark within 6-7 weeks! If you believe that success is such a rarity in this industry then this should be virtually impossibe, right?

Stop feeding the troll guys.

If you're not a troll: I sincerely hope that you find a job/career that suits you well. Quit trying to make money online and do something which you know you're capable of being successful at. And best of luck!

Actually its the profession of trial and error. You can't stop doing tons of actions. and its not necessary that you will get the return every time. So I suggest that you shouldn't be fed up. continue doing the job.

IM is the ultimate glass ceiling. You could be banging your head against it for years, making a few small dents here and there...however you could in theory remain forever banging your head against it.

When you do break through the ceiling, the increase in earnings is quite dramatic. You start to almost disbelieve it, as it takes so little time to earn more than you have in years marketing online.

What you need to do if you are doing the SAME thing for YEARS on end with no results is find out WHY you are not succeeding and change your approach based on your constructive criticism of yourself. Sometimes, it's as simple as changing from one area of IM to another, e.g. emailing to PPC, or vice versa.

This thread is highly entertaining. What a lot of opinions!

I can relate to this. I have been there. I decided to build the best sites on a certain subject, with the best content, best this, best that... and didn't get anywhere with them. They sit floundering in SERP dust and no-one gives a crap. Link building blah, 3 year old site, still no results. I literally have sites that are the best quality site out there on certain subjects and don't make me a crap of money. ****ing kills me the amount of work I put into these piles of glittering poop.

Then I have one-pager sites that have made me thousands. There is a lot of take away from this... so, as I see it:

1) Testing, Testing, Testing. You do not know if an idea is going to succeed. You need to create tests AND be able to form actionable conclusions from them. Sometimes your "best" ideas come to naught, and other times, a dumb-ass web site idea you thought of when you were taking a dump, turns out to be a gold mine. Quite often we get too enamoured of our own ideas. Don't be, that is just your ego.

2) If you find yourself hammering away at the same wall and it won't break down, stop it! Persistence is SOMETIMES valuable, but sometimes it will just give you a sore head. The REAL pros are the ones who can sense which ideas are worth persisting with, and which ones are worth cutting your losses on. You need to be driven, for sure, and focused, but not just blindly hacking at whatever or bouncing around randomly.

I will give you a real-life example: I used to build a lot of medium to large adsense niche info-sites thinking that all I had to do was rank a lot of keywords and I would be gold. A logical truth, but an ASSUMPTION that I would be able to rank those keywords. I had no idea at the time that I would never get to the top of the hill, because the authority sites in the niche were already so established that they were gaining links and power faster than my resources would allow me to catch them. In this case, when the enemy can run faster than you, persistence simply leads to exhaustion. You need to choose your battles.

Another thing I learned was that CTR is to a great extent "pre-ordained" by the niche - and that a site quickly reveals it's general CTR and therefore moneymaking potential. Now, I will only build a few pages and wait for the CTR to reveal itself.... if the CTR is bunk, the amount of effort it takes to rank the pages and expand the site isn't worth the time, I will just forget it and try something else.

There's a lot more I could say here but I have too much to do, taking the actions that will make money. Start with a super small and EASY niche, try and make a dollar a day on auto pilot and then make some conclusions based on that.

Doing it right = sending traffic to converting offer

If you are not doing that then you are doing it wrong. Writing articles doesn't matter, backlinks doesn't matter, social media doesn't matter.

Are you doing that? Or are you in the process of trying to figure that out?

I felt like that all the time, until I stopped and worked on one thing at a time. There are so many different ways to make a living online and everyone wants to pitch their idea to you. My biggest success, is with clickbank. I promoted until I could hire someone to make my own site. Now I spend my time more efficiently on other things while the affiliates do the marketing for me

Funny,

I was just reading this article by Fraser Cain who runs Universe Today. I'd say he's massively successful, getting 100,000 search engine visitors a day. He also runs Keyword Strategy.

https://www.keywordstrategy.org/1102...oose-keywords/

And what does he says:

"When you hear success stories, remember to think rationally. You’re probably hearing stories from lucky people. For an extreme example, think about winning the lottery. Lottery winners believe it’s extremely easy to win a jackpot. But go ahead and ask the millions of people who don’t win each week. This is known as confirmation bias."

So after years and years of success and more traffic than most of us will ever see in our lives, a ton of experience with building traffic and so on, he agrees with two things I've been saying:

1) Luck is very much involved and many of the people who do well and want to attribute it to doing something special and act like those not doing as well are somehow inferior or just not doing the right things are really just lucky and using confirmation bias

2) He brings up the lottery. When I brought up the lottery, I was called a troll.

So this guy has the same exact attitude and beliefs I do and is massively successful. But when I say my same beliefs I'm called "not thinking like a winner".

There are a lot of money making offers that say you need to take action to make money. the truth with most of them is they know that the people who are buying them are after get rich quick schemes so they dont take action when they see they have to go through training videos etc. A lot of people dont even get round to using these kind of systems either. I've been part of Inner Circle training groups and they will teach you the same stuff for marketing like do solo ads, banner advertising, post in forums etc and get leads to a squeeze page. The funny thing is these gurus havent actually made money in another niche apart from make money online so a lot of its just like a pyramid system where they just keep attracting new people. I would like to see these people go into other niches and try and make money.

If you don't know the proper way, every time your effort will bring the same failure. So, is not it better to spend few times and money to learn the proper way than trying the same thing again and again? Find out the exact way, focus your try on that point, set strategy, give effort to reach the target. Only than, you will get the success.

Let’s assume that 2 people were marketing the same products with the same knowledge base, marketing tools, motivation and effort.

What would make one marketer more successful than the other?
My answer to that would be his CONTACTS!

My advise is to start going to some of the seminars, meet the top guns in the business, buy them a beer and befriend them! I believe that If you do that, you will eventually get noticed, you will make a name for yourself and you will see how your "luck" changes.

Think about it, who was Tristan Bull, Alex Jeffreys or Kenster just three years ago?

They were you and they were me…struggling at IM until they figured it out, made contacts and became who they are today!

Who will rise to the top 3 years from now? It will be you and If you think otherwise you have already lost the battle before it has even begun.

Making a ton of money in IM is not easy and never will be. The competition is crazy.

There will always be those 3% ers in every aspect of life that are raking in millions. But you know what, you don't necessarily have to be the Lebron James of IM. You can be the role players who still make a hell of a living! Besides we LOVE THIS!!!!



Just my 2 cents worth.

I dont get the point of this thread. Truth is that failure is part of life and most people in any field will fail irrespective of how hard they try, or ho much luck they have (remember that lottery winner collecting food stamps). If nobody fails, everybody succeeds which is impossible. Hard work doesnt guarantee success, it only improves your chances of achieving success. By trying hard you at least give yourself a chance of succeeding (how small it maybe). If you dont try at all, you have zero chance of succeeding - you have already failed.

I'm finding this thread fascinating in seeing the lengths people will go to to avoid a simple question. I will once again ask it and see if people are able to focus on it or continue diving all around not to answer it.

Different fields have different levels of luck involved. It takes more luck and there is a wider disparity of success in certain fields like the recording industry and less luck and little bit flatter playing field in other careers like, say, being a teacher or a plumber.

Where does IM lie in this spectrum? Is IM more the type of thing like sports or music where a few huge stars make 90% of the money and most people will never make a living at it no matter how talented or hard they try? Or is it more like teaching or plumbing where most people, if they want to, can find a way to make a living at it and not a lot of luck is involved, you pretty much do the work to a basic level and you'll get by?

Yes a little bit of luck is involved in everything in life. But some areas require far more luck than others.

Where does IM fall on this spectrum? Stop dodging the question please.