INTERNET MARKETING THE MAINTENANCE EBOOK BLOG POST 1
Chapter - 1
The Biggest Mistakes
In my experience, likely the biggest single issue that internet marketing fledglings have when they
decide to attempt marketing or making cash on the net is that they come at this business from totally
the wrong angle or position.
Whilst a few individuals who have previous business experience approach the concept of working in the
same way as they approached their prior business ventures, the vast majority don’t. It's therefore no
coincidence that these individuals are commonly the ones who are most likely to bomb.
Let me ‘paint’ a fairly common scenario so that you may see why this occurs.
Individuals who begin trying to earn cash online for the first time do so because they require additional
cash. Whether this is because they have to replace the income that they have lost as a result of a job
loss or whether it's to yield a supplemental revenue to pay for holidays, better Christmas gifts for the
youngsters or whatever, the fact is, they need cash.
A Mistake
Now, let me say directly that if you discover yourself in the same state of affairs, there's nothing per se
wrong with turning to the internet to yield the extra money that you need. Indeed, as pointed out in the
institution, there are so many benefits to running a net-based business that if you don’t have any other
more obvious lucrative opportunities available, utilizing the internet to generate additional revenue
makes a lot of sense.
However, coming at the notion of making cash from the net with no other parameters, guideposts or
controls than a vague belief that you’d like to make some extra cash is an almost sure recipe for calamity
for one simple reason.
The lucrative side of the internet is a veritable jungle inhabited by thousands of different products all
competing for your attention and your cash. Every one of these products will brazenly proclaim that they're the key that you require if you're to
unlock your internet fortune. Additionally, a lot of them will make ridiculous, bizarre claims about the
amount of cash you may make that will inevitably turn the head of an internet marketing fledgling who
sees these claims for the first time.
The fact is, there are 100s of internet marketing products which range in caliber and effectiveness from
being outstanding to horrifying. And naturally, as a internet marketing beginner, it's inconceivable to
sort the wheat from the chaff without spending cash on products like these. It's therefore all too easy to
Wasting cash in this way (unavoidable as it might be) is an error that will derail your marketing career
before it's even got decently started.
You consequently need to think long and hard before you start spending cash, as once you have got the
mental side of internet marketing crystallized, the rest becomes relatively above board.
The beginning thing that you have to do is to identify precisely what it is that inspires you, or what it is
that's driving you to run your own internet business. As suggested earlier in this chapter, it might be
because your career has gone so you've no choice or it may be to put extra money in the bank for the
luxuries of life like foreign vacations, a new car or even a new house.
Whatever it is, you have to identify this ‘driver’ as each and every day when you're actively involved in
running your business, you have to keep this motivational component in the forefront of your brain as
this enables you to remain motivated and centered.
As a matter of fact, what I'd advocate is that if the motivation behind your business activities is
something that may be pictured, then why not add a picture of whatever it is that's driving you to the
wall behind your monitor or on the whiteboard that you utilize for business planning?
For instance, if its better vacations that you’re working toward; why not place exotic beach scene
pictures in a place where you can't avoid seeing them each morning or evening when you begin work? If
its toys for the children’s Christmas Day, utilize family pictures of Christmases past for precisely the
same purpose.
This helps as regardless how thorough your business plan is, you can't anticipate or foresee each
possible eventuality. The unforeseen will occur (e.g. you’re half way through creating a video and your
computer crashes) and when it does, it's often exceedingly frustrating and irritating.
Bearing the motivation in your clear line of sight will help you get over those times when it may be a bit
hard to keep going as it won't allow you to forget what got you began in the first place..
CHAPTER-2
How do You See Your Business?
Many marketers decide that they require extra cash and that the net is as good a place as any to yield
the additional income that they require.
But simply having a vague notion that taking in some extra cash from the net may be nice idea isn't the
basis for beginning a business. And, whether you've realized it or not, if you’re going to market on the
internet in an effort to yield additional money, then what you're doing is running a business, nothing
more and nothing less.
Now, realizing that marketing is a true business might not seem really crucial but it is in fact a vital
notion to accept on board. If you don’t accept and comprehend this and approach your internet
marketing activities as a hobby or interest, you've directly made it endlessly harder to accomplish
success.
Trying to make cash from the net is a serious business and ought to be treated per se. It is not a hobby
or pastime, as if you treat it as a hobby, then what you wish get in return for your work is a hobby level
revenue.
Even if you're running your internet marketing business on a half-time basis, it makes no difference. It's
a business and must be treated as such from the very start.
How You See It
It's utterly vital that you comprehend and follow this apparently simple guideline as if you do so, you'll
set yourself apart from the majority of would-be internet marketing millionaires who merely don’t get it.
If all the same you treat your marketing actions as a hobby or pastime, then the chances of
accomplishing success are almost zilch for lots of different reasons.
Consider it this way. If you were assembling a business in your local shopping center, you wouldn’t treat
that as a sideline or interest, nor would you go into it with nothing more than some faint idea about
‘making cash’. After all, arranging a business of this sort is going to cost you many thousands of dollars,
so naturally you'd take the whole thing real, very seriously.All right, so when you arrange a business, you don't need to spend 1000s of dollars on getting going.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t alter the fact that it's still a genuine business in precisely the same way that it
would be if you open a store in the shopping center. When you accept that what you’re doing when you
begin generating an internet income is running a business, then an awful lot of additional factors ought
to fall into place pretty much directly.
When you comprehend that your internet marketing actions constitute a true business, the next step
ought to be obvious. There's no successful business on the face of planet that's ever accomplished
success without having a business plan in place, and there's no reason to expect that you may buck the
trend by trying to run your net business without having such a plan in place.
Now, the thing here is that before you may put such a business plan in place, the beginning thing that
you have to know is how you’re going to make revenue. And deciding how you’re going to gain revenue
on the internet is a different hurdle or pitfall that will frequently cause issues for a newbie who is not yet
really sure of what they’re doing.
The issue here is that there's simply too much choice. There are gobs of different ways of making cash
from the internet, and 1000s of products that at least in principle teach you how to do so.
The issue is that a lot of these products are contradictory, as they frequently relate the writers or
creators own personal techniques of making revenue on the net. Whilst this means that presuming that
the product creator is telling the truth, you may follow their techniques and make revenue, this isn't
always the case.
Moreover, as there are so many different products available a lot of which tell a different story, it may
become incredibly confusing if you're attempting to find a way of making revenue that suits you.
Take as an illustration the idea of making cash by selling ‘stuff’ on eBay. Given that this is the world’s
number 1 auction site, you'd think that making cash by selling something on eBay would be relatively
above board and that there would be a reasonably widely agreed, standardized process for making cash
doing so. If however you search Google for something like ‘make cash from eBay’, you'll discover that
there's an awful lot of data available with over seven a half million results indexed.
Take a look at any of the eBay results brought back and you'll discover the big amount of data and
advice, but a lot of this advice will seem to be contradictory. Consequently, it's very hard to know to do
for the best.
Because there is so much data available, many fresh internet marketers suffer what is known as ‘analysis
paralysis’, or an excess of data in other words. As they've too much data available, they get confused as
to what works and what doesn’t, with the outcome that they do nothing because they're scared of
making the wrong selections.
This issue is exacerbated by the fact that most fledgling marketers are occasionally a bit gullible when it
comes to internet marketing products. As a outcome, many individuals who have just began marketing on the net seem to have complete trust that the next ‘latest and greatest’ product is the one that
they've been waiting for, the one that's finally going to shoot them to marketing superstardom.
As an illustration, they may see an info product that promises to show them how they can make $9,000
a day utilizing Google AdSense, so they purchase it.
They study it and maybe they begin to put into action the plan about which they've just read. If so, the
chances are that they'll not stick with it very long as they wish to begin making money fast and this
particular way of doing so doesn’t appear to be working for them.
And naturally, they've already signed up for the e-zines of all of the big names in the industry, so a few
days later, data about the next wonder product, the one that's utterly guaranteed to make their fortune,
arrives in their e-mail inbox. And naturally, they purchase it and try it, only to discover that they make
no more cash with this product than they were with the prior one, therefore they cast it away and
purchase something else that's a ‘assured winner’.
It's incredibly typical for internet marketing newbies to jump from one product to a different in this way.
As they get sucked in by the hype, it's all too simple for them to trust that the latest product on the
market is the one that they have to have, so they purchase product after product in a ceaseless search
for something that truly doesn’t exist, and naturally they waste a huge sum of money in their futile
search.
And equally obviously, whilst they're jumping from product to product, they're not centering their
efforts and attention on merely one business plan or technique, which further deepens the calamity. So,
having painted a fairly blue picture of what you shouldn’t be doing, now let me provide you an idea of
what you ought to do.
The beginning thing is to do a little research so that you may make an informed decision about the sort
of online business that you're going to run with. Whether this is making revenue from eBay, affiliate
marketing, producing niche targeted blogs that you monetize with AdSense or whatever, you have to
choose one business model and stick to it.
What you're seeking is a step-by-step guide to doing one thing well, because if you may discover a
business strategy that's proven to work and stick with it, you'll make revenue. Once you've a technique
that you're going to utilize, you're almost ready to begin producing your business plan, but not quite as
there's still one crucial factor that you have to crystallize before pressing ahead.
CHAPTER-3
What is Your Business Plan?
If you've an idea of what sort of business you wish to begin with, you have to likewise set objectives or
targets for that business.
Without having an objective or a target, your business activities are inescapably going to be unfocused
and random as if you don’t recognize where you’re going with your business, you've no chance of
attaining an acceptable destination.
You wouldn’t depart on a trip in your auto tomorrow without knowing where you’re going and either
knowing how you arrive there or at least having a map or a navigation system to help you do so.
Well, attempting to run a business without having any clue of what you wish to accomplish is precisely
the same as departing with no clue where you’re going and no clue about how to arrive there.
Now naturally, you wish to earn as much revenue as possible from your business as fast as you can, but
this isn't an objective or target. You have to specify how much revenue you wish to bring in and set a
time scale in which you wish to accomplish that aspiration or hit that target.
Direction
On the other hand, what you must prevent is setting unrealistic or overambitious targets that you've no
realistic chance of accomplishing. Irrespective of whether the sales page for the ‘how to’ product that
you have simply bought tells you that you are able to make 1000s of dollars each day utilizing this
particular lucrative business model, you can’t, or at any rate, you shouldn’t anticipate to begin earning a
fortune immediately.
Be truthful with your target, and read around the internet about the specific business technique that
you're considering following to get a thought of how much money you're likely to make. This is crucial
because it helps you to have a truthful estimate of what you are able to expect to bring in, which in turn
helps you to establish accomplishable objectives.
As an illustration, if you are going to produce a niche targeted blog web site that will be monetized with
AdSense, this is a web site that you are able to realistically expect to generate $50-200 a month as long
as you set it up properly. Therefore, if you are able to set up one a week (which should not be too hard),then after 6 months, you would have twenty-six niche targeted web sites generating $1300 a month or
more.
This may not seem a great deal of revenue, but remember that this is money you're generating without
having to sell anything and naturally, a few of your niche blogs are likely to yield considerably more than
$50, so the real figure is likely to be greater. All the same, it gives you a realistic ball-park figure to begin
with as an objective or minimum target.
CHAPTER-4
Creating and Establishing Your Plan
To carry on with this illustration, if you recognize that your objective is to build twenty-six niche targeted
blog sites over the beginning 6 months of your business and marketing career, then you may start
formulating your business plan by working backwards from this to found precisely what you have to do
to hit the target.
To produce your business plan, I'd first recommend that you utilize either a whiteboard, a really big
sheet of paper or mind-mapping software like Freemind to produce your plan.
The reason that you ought to utilize one of these resources to produce a business plan is that by doing
so, you may add different business thoughts to the ‘plan’ in a relatively random manner instead of in a
sequential way as you would if you were writing things down line by line on a sheet of paper. This lets
you ‘group’ objects together as necessary once you're satisfied that you've everything noted on your
plan which makes the whole planning process more consistent.
Your Road to Success
When you’re ready to begin planning, you have to brainstorm the questions that you have to address.
For example, if you are going to produce twenty-six niche-targeted blogs, are they all going to be in the
same market or in dissimilar markets? If for instance you had a series of blogs that were all centered on
the weight loss market, this may be appropriate in terms of linking every blog to the others and it may
make things simpler if you were to become an authority on one topic instead of being somebody who
tries to get by with twenty-six blogs that center on totally dissimilar markets.
How are you going to come across enough niche ideas to produce your blogs? Utilizing resources like
eBay Pulse, Amazon.com, Yahoo! Answers and 43 Things will help you to muster up a list of things that
individuals are searching for on the net, but what specific aspect of these interests should you produce
blogs for?
You've already decided that you wish to monetize your site with AdSense but how are you going to drive
targeted visitors to your blogs? Without targeted visitors, you’re not going to make any revenue, so this
is an essential question to address.One way that you are able to publicize your blogs is by issuing articles on major article directory sites like
EzineArticles or GoArticles but if you're going to do so, are you going to author the articles yourself or
will you get somebody else to do it for you?
What about the articles that you post on your blogs? Where are those going to come from as each of
your sites will require at least 6 unique articles, so do you have the time and the aptitude to author
them or not?
Videos are a excellent way of publicizing your activities, with 1000000s of individuals visiting leading
video networking sites like YouTube , Google video , Daily Motion and MetaCafe daily. Therefore, if you
can publish video content that's centered on the same niche as your blogs, you are able to get a ton of
free visitors, so it's definitely something you ought to do.
To do so, you require video ideas and the equipment and/or resources essential to make these videos.
Do the ideas you have demand utilizing a digital camcorder, and if so, do you have such equipment or
can you afford to purchase it? If on the other hand your videos are going to boast ‘action’ that may be
recorded from your computer display, you don’t have to purchase anything as you may utilize free
recoding software like CamStudio.
As you'll find out if you have not already, there are virtually 100s of different ways you may drive
targeted visitors to your web site, and each time you come across a fresh traffic generation technique,
you ought to add it to your business plan ‘chart’ or mind map.
This is why you ought to utilize a resource like a whiteboard or mind mapping software where you may
add fresh data in a seemingly random manner as all of your new traffic ideas need to be grouped
together into a total traffic generation sub-plan.
You ought to likewise have a content creation sub-plan and so on till you've all necessary parts of your
business plan gathered.
If you search the net, you may discover lots of places where there are free business plan samples
available. Frequently, these business plans are complex and really wordy, primarily because most are
business plans that are mainly designed for handing out to potential business investors.
If you're in a position where you’re attempting to invite outside investment into your new business,
producing an equally detailed business plan of this sort may have some value. However, assuming that
the business plan you're producing is only for your own use, it makes far more sense to keep it easy and
straightforward instead of making it overly complex and lengthy.
To continue with an earlier analogy, what you have is a roadmap that gets you from point ‘A’ to point
‘B’, not a high-definition atlas of each country on the face of the earth. The simpler and more above board you can keep your plan, the better your plan is likely to be as
simplicity makes it far easier to center on the most crucial aspects of what you're doing as there is little
or no clutter to distract you from your primary targets.
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