The Internet Marketing Trap
Being a Newbie in internet marketing can be a blessing. However, building a internet marketing business can be extremely costly. Newbies as well as experienced entrepreneurs it can become addicted to buying products rather than selling them.
As you probably already know 98% of new businesses fail. As a part of that internet marketing is one of the worst because there are lots of distractions. It's kind of like walking through a casino with all the noise, bells and lights to distract you as you attempt to walk to dinner or maybe to see a show. It is hard not to stop and throw a few bucks onto a craps table or drop a few coins into a slot machine, when all you originally wanted to do was go to dinner.
Where To Start
There are hundreds if not thousands of ways to make money online and there almost as many people trying to sell you internet marketing solutions or training.
So the problem becomes where do you start. I have been in the internet marketing arena for nearly 15 years or so. I started my first website in 1998 and made my first dollar on ebay probably around 1999. There are a lot of so Called Guru's that will tell you want they think you should be doing regarding internet marketing. The only problem is as a Newbie how do you cipher threw all the stuff they are peddling, not to mention all the scams and just plain junk?
In addition to that there is a trend that I have noticed recently regarding the big Guru's which really Causes me serious caution these days. The internet marketer guru's use to provide really good training but today I have seen a scary trend among nearly all the largest internet marketers and that is they have begun to sell re-hashed junk and not only that but poorly created rehashed junk. It has become a recent trend, very scary.
I am not just saying this so you will listen to me, I am saying it because it is true. I am not sure why it is happening, but I think it has to do with 3 things. Not that it matters, but if you are a newbie you should know what's going on in the market place.
90 Percent of all the big named marketers got involved in E-commerce which took there focus off typical internet marketing. Now that E-com has become so crowded with competition and trainings and sellers, the profits have fallen way off. Pretty normal, too much competition in a market reduce profits massively. Another reason is because other than Facebook advertising not much has changed in the internet marketing community, so selling rehashed products seems logical. And Finally the Really big Guru's forget what it is like to start out fresh as a real Newbie. No different if you were to become wealthy and a couple of years go by and all the sudden you have no idea how much gas or bread costs. It doesn't take long before a person forgets the struggles they had to persevere.
So, that is one reason I started this blog. The other reason was because I believe that all internet marketers Newbie or experienced internet marketer, will require an email list. This is something that all marketers are made aware of almost immediately, but it is usually the last thing they build.
Newbies are told to build an email list and all the guru's will tell you that and even sell you programs to create your list, however, it rarely if ever works.
So if you have read any of my other posts you will see why, I will briefly cover some of it here but just know you have to be building an email list now, today, if you are not, then you will find building an internet marketing business in the future very difficult maybe even impossible.
So lets cover a couple of basics, Internet marketing may sell products directly via a simple link or advertisement but these days most places like Facebook and Google don't allow it. There are ways around it but if you get band you are pretty much out of business. So back to the primary subject, selling directly is only a small portion of how marketers make money. Selling directly through email is probably there largest portion of revenue, likely around 75%.
So as a Newbie, you might be asking what Internet marketing is, well I can't cover all that in this simple post, but for the most part it is anyone one selling something using the internet. That can take hundreds of different forms. It can be affiliate sales, CPA, Direct sales, Partner Sales, and on and on.
For the most part I will only be covering Affiliate sales, although I will be touching on CPA, ebay, Amazon, Partner sales, Direct Sales, and more. Again my main focus will be affiliate sales via email marketing but these techniques work the same for nearly everything.
They Say affiliate sales is the easiest way to get started in online marketing. I think you will have a different opinion, if you look at the diagram below. I could never figure out why I wouldn't complete a project. All the guru's say well the reason people fail is because they jump from shinny object to shinny object which is what I was talking about regarding the casino story, but the reality is that the Guru's don't tell you the whole story.
Unfortunately, once I began to set down this year for the first time and really go over my strategy I began to realize why all those programs didn't work, and why I would just stop working on them. once I realized it, I was finally able to build a real strategy that I felt would work.
Maybe it was timing but the funny thing is that what triggered the idea was another internet marketers training I had seen from a newbie, and then I saw another one from another newbie, and even though one or the other alone would not have been successful for most people, it did make me realize exactly what was missing. It turned out that most everything is missing. What triggered it when I saw the newbies training was that they both covered stuff I hadn't seen before and I have been doing this for over 15 years. But even with both of those training that is what made me take a hard look at the path between selling the original product to selling additional products at least with affiliate marketing sales.
Affiliate Sales
So the typical path with affiliate product sales is you, as an affiliate must provide some type of product to give away. Typically a free product. You need to provide a product in order to get people to subscribe to your list. In order to give away a product you first must have one.
Then you have to create and ad for the product and then you have to create a pre-sale page where the people who click the ad go. Then you have to have a clickable link from the pre-sale page to a form or landing page or capture page that captures the email address from the customer or prospect. then you have to send them to both a thank you page and to an email auto responder. Well I will stop there but, you get the idea.
If you ever wonder why people fail, well I think it's obvious. There are very few people who will struggle through all of this while working full times jobs. The below image reflects what I am talking about.
IT”S A BOAT LOAD OF WORK AND TIME…..
Internet marketing for couples would be a good thing right about now, you are going to need the help. So why do big Guru's have success, well its because of two things; 1 they have a team of 20 people doing all the work, and 2 is because they have an email list of 100k people.
Since the average persons email is worth about 1$ to a marketer and to the big guru's probably double that, well that's why they can sell crap and make money and be successful.
Internet Marketing Solutions Don't come Easy.
So, here are some things that you need to know as a newbie to keeps things real and cost effective..
- No matter what the sales copy says, software won't help you make money.
- Find the straightest, simplest path and don't deviate.
- Do not Buy DIY products in this market place. I have even seen marketer say they always buy it, DON”T. If you join my membership you will see why.
- Simple simple simple.
- When you start just focus on that first sale, that will teach you a lot.
- You can use short cuts and if you follow my membership you will see how easy it is.
- If you buy a program stick with it until you have made at least one sale.
- If you don't follow these recommendations, I can tell you, you will get trapped into and endless loop of buying internet marketing products and become someone else's customer instead of making money.
- One of the biggest problems newbies have, is they don't have a product to sell, so they start buying other people DIY products or crappy PLR, or similar. There is another solution.
- Join my email list which will allow you to become a free member which will allow you informed solutions that you maybe looking for, and if not, then simply unsubscribe. It's that easy !