One of the pleasures I enjoy is sharing some of the techniques I’ve experimented and refined in the art of Internet Marketing. So Lee Dodd’s “Webmasters Inspiration Month” competition was a fun exercise.
Check out my entry in their Blogging segment: “Ruthless For the People…A Blog Story” and see if it brings your blogging efforts up a notch.
Launching a new product? A new book? Or a new product? If it’s mass consumer-related, you might want to take a leaf out of FakeSteve (Jobs) book, Options.
Fake Steve Jobs (AKA Forbes senior editor Dan Lyons) has been penning the Fake Steve satirical blog of the Apple co-founder to the bemusement of folks in the Valley. With potrayals of Microsoft boss Bill Gates as “Beastmaster Bill” (both Bill and the real Steve are fans of the blog), it’s garnered nothing less than a rabid following.
But I think they don’t quite know which party they’re talking about. See this screed where some Javatard says Apple has been spitting in his face because we didn’t include Java 6 in Leopard. Or something. So he says he’s selling his Mac. His headline is, “So long, Apple. The party’s over.” Well he’s right about one thing. The party is over — the Java party, that is. Glad to see the Javatards have finally figured that out.
In contrast to the numerous “I am new to the Internet, I have no money and I don’t have a computer (I’m typing this to you at work), I want to make a full time living online as a Super Affiliate. Please advise me” emails I received [Do send me the answer to that because I don’t have a ready answer…], I’ve got a more realistic question this week:
I am willing to learn, I have bought a number of ebooks, and have made a few affiliate sales (about $50-100 worth of commissions each month), but at this rate, I doubt I’ll be able to quit my day job and live on my online income anytime soon. What do you suggest I buy next and how much do I have to spend before I make a full time online income? Thanks!
Here’s a list of what I bought:
[A list of about 5 ebooks follow. I’m guess she’s spent about $300 on them]
Patty
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My Answer:
It’s encouraging to see new Internet marketers take responsibility for their actions and I think the fact that you’re generating sales from your website each month shows that you’re taking consistent effort.
To make the gap between generating “hobby money” (I define this as less than $2,000 a month in online income) and a living based on your online businesses means that you need a couple of ingredients:
A Game Plan
Have you defined what income level you’re aiming for? ($1,000? $10,000? $100,000 per month?). More importantly, have you listed the amount of time and resources you’re willing to put into this?
Most new marketers write down a $20,000 a month goal when they start out, and they put in barely 2 hours a week into their business. There’s a serious effort-reward gap in the equation…
An online business still follows the effort -> result equation. You don’t just need to dream big, you need to put in the sweat equity at least in the early stages.
Focus and Consistency
Do your research before you begin. What niche are you going to focus on? Is it a niche market? Is the demand sufficient to sustain your revenue (and profit?)?
Is it a competitive market? Can you compete effectively?
What’re your monetization strategies? A goal of 100 Adsense clicks a day might be a good start, but are they only paying $0.10 a click? Are there affiliate programs available? Would you create your own product?
Once your research has concluded and you’ve decided on your business model, you need to be focused and consistent in your efforts. There was an Internet marketer who built their blog up to about 500 visitors a day, she left for a 6 week vacation and the visitors dropped to about 5 a day when she returned. It took another couple of months to build it up to her pre-vacation traffic level.
Go Beyond Costs, Focus On Results
Here’s one takeaway from my buddy, Amit Mehta’s post “What’s Your Investment Plan?“, you need to figure out what your expect return or result is from any investment you make…
It’s not just a cost issue, you need to take stock of (more…)
Josh Wexelbaum over at ScrappyBusiness Idea Blog mentioned this new service in a recent post “Amazon Mechanical Turk for Fun and Profit” and Internet Marketers can rejoice as some of their outsourcing woes are answered.
Besides your finances, the other major constraint for any Internet marketer is time – there’re only 24 hours in a day.
And Amazon’s new outsourced service boasts a few interesting innovations…
Amazon’s Turk moniker comes from the “Turk” chess playing machine which toured 18th Century Europe, seemingly beating chess players. It was later revealed that a human player hide within the contraption. (Maybe a clever “ghost in the machine” or Ex Deus Machina jibe might be apt…).
So how does the Mechanical Turk differ from the other freelancer services like elance, rentacoder, workaholics et al.
Having a foot each in the info marketing and PPC (Pay Per Click) space has been eye-opening and there’re a number of possibilities for hybrid marketing, especially given the pros and cons of each side of the divide as I’ll go into details here…
Information Marketing (or Info Marketing) is where I started out, marketing ebooks and digital products and gradually developing my own products.
Traffic generation and list building are the bread-and-butter for info marketers. The mantra “The money is in the list” applies.
As an info marketer, you should be keenly aware of the lifetime value of each customer. That’s the value of commissions or product sales you’d expect from each of your customers over the lifetime that they do business with you.
[If this is new to you, you need to work this out immediately, as it had direct implications on your business]
If you have compelling and sticky content and treat them well, you can expect to grow very loyal customers.
What’s a loyal customer?
Take me for example, when it comes to digital cameras and camcorders, I’d look at what Sony and Canon offer. If they don’t have what I’m looking for, I’ll consider other options (only with great reluctance).
The old time marketers would call this “brand loyalty”, the Internet Marketers would call this (more…)
