You Can’t Make Money Online
By Kovich On April 17, 2010 Under Personal Development
Statistics show that you will never earn a notable amount of money online. In fact, recent studies indicate that less than 3% of people actually succeed. Now, we can draw conclusions and try to figure out why that number is so low, but I think I have a pretty good idea already: Laziness.
People want instant gratification with zero effort and absolutely no blood, tears or sweat involved. (If there’s any bloodshed while trying to earn money online, you’re probably not doing it right.) Obviously, such methods will never be successful. You will not become a multi-millionaire by sitting down and staring at your PayPal account. The money won’t simply materialize in your possession.
How do you actually make money online? This question is so simple that I can’t believe people even need to ask it! The answer? Dedication, Effort, and Motivation. Dedication, Motiviation and Effort In fact, I’ve even utilized my vast experience with Microsoft Paint to design a graphic that conveys the point I’m trying to make. I call it the Triangle of Success. Let’s start with some definitions:
Dedication is sheer commitment. When you are dedicated to something, you have made a pledge to stick with it until the end.
Motivation supports your ability to invest effort into a project and to remain dedicated. It is what keeps you going and focused. It pushes you towards your desired goal.
Effort is actually doing the work and investing the proper time and resources into moving toward what you want.
You’ve probably seen the recent hype about ‘The Secret’ and how the key to finding success is something well protected and unheard of by the masses. Their marketing campaigns make it out to sound quite mystical – much like something passed down through generations of sages. So, I’m going to refer to this post not as ‘The Secret’ but as ‘The Truth’. The three fundamentals I described above are the exact keys to success… there is no secret, no mysticism and no divine outside force involved.
“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” – Patañjali
Success often begins with a lot of hard work – late nights, tons of crumpled up sheets of paper with discarded ideas, and a high budget in place for coffee. Over time, you’ll learn to develop ways that you can work smarter instead of harder. In other words, you figure out easier ways to do things. For example, you can copy text on a computer by highlighting it, clicking edit, and then clicking copy, or you can simply use CTRL + C. See what I mean?
I’d like to warn you, however, about taking shortcuts. I wrote about an experience (click here to read it) I had with a guy who wanted to take a shortcut by driving significantly over the speed limit. He figured he would be saving time and would arrive at his destination faster… the only problem is that he was pulled over by a Pennsylvania State Trooper. Certain shortcuts may seem tempting in business and it is often the most tempting that lead us down the wrong path.
Motivation is probably the most critical component of the Triangle of Success. If you have great ideas and methods, but never have the motivation to execute them, what’s the point? Zig Ziglar once said that motivation is much like taking a shower – it doesn’t last and that is why it’s recommended daily.
When I’m working toward a goal, I like to have a visual reminder to keep me on track. Let’s say that you want to earn a significant amount of money… don’t just print out a picture of a pile of cash. Instead, look at what you can do with the product. Maybe you want a new sports car or a fancy sailing ship. Maybe you just want to pay off your debt. Figure out what works for you!
As a promotional item for this blog, I designed a motivational wallpaper that features a beautiful mountain scene with an inspirational quote by Shakespeare. Feel free to download it and see if it helps give you that daily boost.
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
- Thomas Jefferson
So, let’s do a summary here and analyze what I’ve covered in this post: There is no secret to success. Everyone has the potential to become successful online and offline. You must invest effort, dedication and motivation in order to achieve your goals. There are valid shortcuts and there are unethical shortcuts that could get you into a lot of trouble – be sure to take everything with a grain of sand (or is the phrase grain of salt? I’m not sure.) and do thorough research on something before you try it.
Whenever you develop a final goal, divide it up into smaller goals to help motivate you and keep you going. If you want a million dollars, you might first want to start with: Make $200 a week. Then, you can progress to: Make $400 a week. You get the idea. Breaking things down into smaller pieces is very important and you’ll see how it pays off once you’re doing it.
I’d also like to recommend that you don’t make profit your primary focus in the beginning. When I started this blog, I didn’t care about profiting. I wanted to produce something high-quality that I could be proud to attach my name to. I kept working, developing new content, finding new promotional methods, etc. Eventually, when people realized how hard I was working, they were much more interested in advertising on my blog rather than any other. It goes to show that when you put your heart into something, people will notice.
The biggest mistake that people make is when they see a profit start to materialize, they assume they have done enough and they stop working. Never, ever do this! You must keep a consistent effort to improve the quality of your business and to keep it moving in the right direction. If you sit down and expect it to run on auto-pilot, you’ll find that it has crashed into a mountain somewhere.
Well, what are you waiting for? Get out there and put this information to good use! Feel free to comment below and share your thoughts.
P.S. If you want more ideas and some regular motivation, subscribe to my mailing list.
Friday, 13 April 2012
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Successful Internet marketer’s Interview-John Lagoudakis
John Lagoudakis has been a full-time internet marketer since 2008. Since then he has become one of Clickbank’s top 100 affiliates. He lives in Brisbane, Australia with his wife and three children.
Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been working in this industry?
I’m 36 years old, was born in Sydney, Australia and have been living in Brisbane for past 9 years. In 2008 I became a full-time internet marketer.
What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
When I first came across affiliate marketing, it made sense to me so I gave it a go and within a couple of days made my first sale. The profit was only about $1 but I was ecstatic… it really worked!
I was sick of my job so I made a goal to build up my affiliate marketing business to a point that I could quit my job by my next birthday (which was about 5 months away). After working hard for 8 months I was finally able to realize my goal and quit my job forever! What a beautiful day that was. It was my most satisfying accomplishment. Every day after that has been great.
Another significant accomplishment was becoming one of the top 100 Clickbank affiliates. I was quite surprised when that happened.
How did you come to learn about this industry? Why did you choose this career?
By accident I learned about affiliate marketing. It was while I was trying to build up my network marketing business online and using traffic exchanges that I kept on coming across affiliate marketing guides. Eventually I bought one called “Two Minute Profits” by Alok Jain.
The reason why I’ve stuck with internet marketing, despite all the challenges I’ve had along the way (it hasn’t been smooth sailing!) is that I love the idea of being able to work anywhere in the world and at whatever times and whatever pace I choose.
Some days I’m motivated and work really hard. Other days I just couldn’t be bothered so I do something else. I spend a lot more time with my family. It’s great!
What do you think it takes to be successful as an affiliate?
To be a successful affiliate, you need to know and do the following things:
- Never give up. So many times I see people try something once, or maybe even a few times, and when it doesn’t work out they just give up. Nothing worthwhile is easy. My advice is to find someone that is having the success you want to have and follow their strategy completely until you have the same success
- Stay focused. Many budding affiliates make the mistake of buying every single new affiliate strategy that’s released. You’ll never have success this way. There are a kazillion different ways to make money online but if you spread yourself thin you won’t make a cent.
- Provide quality information. Whatever type of affiliate strategy you use, if you want to be successful, you need to give people what they want. Like Zig Ziglar says, “you can have everything in life that you want if you help enough people get what they want”.
What is the single toughest problem you’ve had to face, and how did you get through it?
The internet marketing world is constantly changing. When I first started out, Google Adwords was the big thing, i.e. setting up profitable PPC campaigns. That’s how I made my big break and a lot of money.
2 years later my Adwords account was permanently suspended (along with thousands of other affiliate marketer’s accounts). My income dropped by more than 50% overnight (literally).
Fortunately, I saw the change coming and had other strategies in place.
What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
One of the strategies I already had in place before my Google Adwords account was suspended was building a list in the internet marketing niche. A big part of that list building strategy was to do adswaps with other list owners.
My biggest frustration has been the amount of scammers that are out there, that will not reciprocate a mailout or send you junk traffic. It happens too much and other list owners need to be aware. If you’re going to do an adswap (and I highly recommend that you do) make sure you get references first.
Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
Writing articles about things that I’m not passionate about. If you’re going to get into a niche, make sure you either really enjoy it, or outsource the content creation. If you don’t, you’ll go crazy or just give up on it.
What is the future of marketing?
I really don’t know. I won’t pretend to be a marketing expert. :) At the moment, social media and video are super popular (e.g. Facebook and Youtube).
If it’s possible for you to share, are there any particular niches that you currently favor? Or that you aren’t necessarily in right now but that you would recommend?
I like the internet marketing/make money online niche and that’s where I’m focusing most of my attention at this stage. I also like to go into any hot niche that has recurring billing products. I love the idea of making a sale once and being paid over and over again.
Which methods of promotion do you favor?
I used to specialize in PPC but now email marketing is my main promotion method. Other methods I use are video and article marketing, Facebook and Twitter.
What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
Right now I’m working on creating more online content to get more subscribers. I offer a quality free video ecourse that teaches others the methods that I currently use to make money online. This free video ecourse is available at http://makemoneyonlinewithjohn.com.
I want to get as much publicity as I can for my free video ecourse so I’m working on writing more articles for my blog and more videos to share online at Youtube, etc.
What motivates you?
My main motivation is my wife and three children. Internet marketing allows me to spend more time with them and a means to give them the things they need and want in life.
What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
My long-term goal is to have my internet marketing business set up in such a way that I can easily outsource the tasks. Eventually I do not want to be doing any of the ‘grunt’ work myself. I’d like to be simply overseeing the work and enjoying the financial rewards. :)
Internet marketing is ideal for this. It’s very easy to outsource. My main challenge is to get a system into place that I can easily hand off to others.
Where do you want to be ten years from now?
Traveling the world with my family. :)
If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
I wouldn’t change anything. I like where I am right now in my life and believe that everything I’ve been through has led me here, good and bad.
What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
I strongly believe that no other success can compensate for failure in the home. I hope that my greatest accomplishment will be the heritage I leave to my family.
Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been working in this industry?
I’m 36 years old, was born in Sydney, Australia and have been living in Brisbane for past 9 years. In 2008 I became a full-time internet marketer.
What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
When I first came across affiliate marketing, it made sense to me so I gave it a go and within a couple of days made my first sale. The profit was only about $1 but I was ecstatic… it really worked!
I was sick of my job so I made a goal to build up my affiliate marketing business to a point that I could quit my job by my next birthday (which was about 5 months away). After working hard for 8 months I was finally able to realize my goal and quit my job forever! What a beautiful day that was. It was my most satisfying accomplishment. Every day after that has been great.
Another significant accomplishment was becoming one of the top 100 Clickbank affiliates. I was quite surprised when that happened.
How did you come to learn about this industry? Why did you choose this career?
By accident I learned about affiliate marketing. It was while I was trying to build up my network marketing business online and using traffic exchanges that I kept on coming across affiliate marketing guides. Eventually I bought one called “Two Minute Profits” by Alok Jain.
The reason why I’ve stuck with internet marketing, despite all the challenges I’ve had along the way (it hasn’t been smooth sailing!) is that I love the idea of being able to work anywhere in the world and at whatever times and whatever pace I choose.
Some days I’m motivated and work really hard. Other days I just couldn’t be bothered so I do something else. I spend a lot more time with my family. It’s great!
What do you think it takes to be successful as an affiliate?
To be a successful affiliate, you need to know and do the following things:
- Never give up. So many times I see people try something once, or maybe even a few times, and when it doesn’t work out they just give up. Nothing worthwhile is easy. My advice is to find someone that is having the success you want to have and follow their strategy completely until you have the same success
- Stay focused. Many budding affiliates make the mistake of buying every single new affiliate strategy that’s released. You’ll never have success this way. There are a kazillion different ways to make money online but if you spread yourself thin you won’t make a cent.
- Provide quality information. Whatever type of affiliate strategy you use, if you want to be successful, you need to give people what they want. Like Zig Ziglar says, “you can have everything in life that you want if you help enough people get what they want”.
What is the single toughest problem you’ve had to face, and how did you get through it?
The internet marketing world is constantly changing. When I first started out, Google Adwords was the big thing, i.e. setting up profitable PPC campaigns. That’s how I made my big break and a lot of money.
2 years later my Adwords account was permanently suspended (along with thousands of other affiliate marketer’s accounts). My income dropped by more than 50% overnight (literally).
Fortunately, I saw the change coming and had other strategies in place.
What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
One of the strategies I already had in place before my Google Adwords account was suspended was building a list in the internet marketing niche. A big part of that list building strategy was to do adswaps with other list owners.
My biggest frustration has been the amount of scammers that are out there, that will not reciprocate a mailout or send you junk traffic. It happens too much and other list owners need to be aware. If you’re going to do an adswap (and I highly recommend that you do) make sure you get references first.
Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
Writing articles about things that I’m not passionate about. If you’re going to get into a niche, make sure you either really enjoy it, or outsource the content creation. If you don’t, you’ll go crazy or just give up on it.
What is the future of marketing?
I really don’t know. I won’t pretend to be a marketing expert. :) At the moment, social media and video are super popular (e.g. Facebook and Youtube).
If it’s possible for you to share, are there any particular niches that you currently favor? Or that you aren’t necessarily in right now but that you would recommend?
I like the internet marketing/make money online niche and that’s where I’m focusing most of my attention at this stage. I also like to go into any hot niche that has recurring billing products. I love the idea of making a sale once and being paid over and over again.
Which methods of promotion do you favor?
I used to specialize in PPC but now email marketing is my main promotion method. Other methods I use are video and article marketing, Facebook and Twitter.
What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
Right now I’m working on creating more online content to get more subscribers. I offer a quality free video ecourse that teaches others the methods that I currently use to make money online. This free video ecourse is available at http://makemoneyonlinewithjohn.com.
I want to get as much publicity as I can for my free video ecourse so I’m working on writing more articles for my blog and more videos to share online at Youtube, etc.
What motivates you?
My main motivation is my wife and three children. Internet marketing allows me to spend more time with them and a means to give them the things they need and want in life.
What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
My long-term goal is to have my internet marketing business set up in such a way that I can easily outsource the tasks. Eventually I do not want to be doing any of the ‘grunt’ work myself. I’d like to be simply overseeing the work and enjoying the financial rewards. :)
Internet marketing is ideal for this. It’s very easy to outsource. My main challenge is to get a system into place that I can easily hand off to others.
Where do you want to be ten years from now?
Traveling the world with my family. :)
If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
I wouldn’t change anything. I like where I am right now in my life and believe that everything I’ve been through has led me here, good and bad.
What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
I strongly believe that no other success can compensate for failure in the home. I hope that my greatest accomplishment will be the heritage I leave to my family.
Friday, 30 March 2012
Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Sunday, 25 March 2012
5 Steps to Affiliate Marketing Success
To be successful in affiliate marketing requires the willingness to put in the time and the effort necessary to operate your business properly. It is a business, not a hobby, and you must treat it that way. There are certain steps that you need to follow in order to be successful and bring in those big commission checks that you have been dreaming about. If you leave out any of the steps then ultimately your efforts will fail. No matter what niche or specific product within that niche you have chosen to affiliate yourself with, the process to promote it successfully is the same.
That process consists of these five steps:
1. Build your own site. It is possible to get started in affiliate marketing and make money online without your own site, but to bring in the big checks and truly be successful you need to have your own site. And not just one site. You should have a separate site for each affiliate offer that you want to promote. If an offer is not worth the few dollars that it costs to get a domain name and the few minutes it takes to add the site to your hosting account then that offer is not worth promoting. You must build it before they can come.
2. Start your own newsletter. You want to brand yourself as the expert within your niche. There is no better way to do that than to publish your own newsletter on a regular basis. Promote it at least as heavily as you do any of your offers. Give something away to get people to sign up to your mailing list to get your newsletter. Go easy on the affiliate offers with your newsletter, keep it mostly content and provide good information. You will be getting affiliate offers in front of your subscribers with the autoresponder series you will set up in the next step.
3. Get an autoresponder. You should already have one for your newsletter, if not then get one now. You want to be able to use it for your newsletter and for a series of preloaded messages that your new subscribers will be getting over time. You can write the messages, stick them in your autoresponder, and set it to send them out to every new subscriber that you get over a specific period of time. You can have your autoresponder loaded up and ready to send out your affiliate offers for months or even years. Just make sure that any affiliate offers are evergreen so that you don’t have to go back and change them.
4. Start article marketing. You want to get your name and your articles out there in front of as many people as you possibly can. If you don’t like to write then you can outsource the articles. Articles that you have submitted to article directories will make you look like an expert in your niche, bring in traffic, and provide you with much needed back links.
5. Expand your linking campaigns. Back links are one of the most important aspects of getting your sites to rank highly in the search engine results. Set up a reciprocal link program on your site where you exchange links with other webmasters. One way links are even better. Get busy and start posting in forums, commenting on blogs, and writing more articles.
Follow these five steps and your affiliate marketing business will be off to a good start. A good foundation is the key to your affiliate marketing success. Get ready to start cashing in those commission checks.
This is a guest post written by Thomas Alling from http://makemoneyhelper.com
That process consists of these five steps:
1. Build your own site. It is possible to get started in affiliate marketing and make money online without your own site, but to bring in the big checks and truly be successful you need to have your own site. And not just one site. You should have a separate site for each affiliate offer that you want to promote. If an offer is not worth the few dollars that it costs to get a domain name and the few minutes it takes to add the site to your hosting account then that offer is not worth promoting. You must build it before they can come.
2. Start your own newsletter. You want to brand yourself as the expert within your niche. There is no better way to do that than to publish your own newsletter on a regular basis. Promote it at least as heavily as you do any of your offers. Give something away to get people to sign up to your mailing list to get your newsletter. Go easy on the affiliate offers with your newsletter, keep it mostly content and provide good information. You will be getting affiliate offers in front of your subscribers with the autoresponder series you will set up in the next step.
3. Get an autoresponder. You should already have one for your newsletter, if not then get one now. You want to be able to use it for your newsletter and for a series of preloaded messages that your new subscribers will be getting over time. You can write the messages, stick them in your autoresponder, and set it to send them out to every new subscriber that you get over a specific period of time. You can have your autoresponder loaded up and ready to send out your affiliate offers for months or even years. Just make sure that any affiliate offers are evergreen so that you don’t have to go back and change them.
4. Start article marketing. You want to get your name and your articles out there in front of as many people as you possibly can. If you don’t like to write then you can outsource the articles. Articles that you have submitted to article directories will make you look like an expert in your niche, bring in traffic, and provide you with much needed back links.
5. Expand your linking campaigns. Back links are one of the most important aspects of getting your sites to rank highly in the search engine results. Set up a reciprocal link program on your site where you exchange links with other webmasters. One way links are even better. Get busy and start posting in forums, commenting on blogs, and writing more articles.
Follow these five steps and your affiliate marketing business will be off to a good start. A good foundation is the key to your affiliate marketing success. Get ready to start cashing in those commission checks.
This is a guest post written by Thomas Alling from http://makemoneyhelper.com
Friday, 23 March 2012
Tuesday, 13 March 2012
Feedback
Hi guys. I just wanted to ask if there is anything specific you would like me to go through that you are unsure of. I will try my best to give a good reply and if I don't know the answer I will find out for you.
I could start a small course on starting out with specifics on what you ask for. Feel free. Thanks
I could start a small course on starting out with specifics on what you ask for. Feel free. Thanks
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