Back in November/December last year, it seemed a good idea to set aggressive business goals, if you’re into the business of creating New Year’s resolutions. You might even have gone aggressive to set something that was 10x what you achieved last year. In motivational/NLP talk, you’d call this a “stretch” goal.
We’re half a month into 2011 and there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that half your competition, who had set aggressive goals/resolutions, have given up on what they had said they would do. Maybe it was because they woke up the morning after and decided it was too much work. Some might have hit the first bump on the road and given up immediately. So whatever competition you might have foreseen in your niche might have just taken themselves out of the game, 2 weeks off the starting blocks.
Here comes the bad news.
If you’re unlucky, you might be one of those who’ve also dropped out on your plans to step up to the next level. Maybe you’ve decided to settle for the “same-old same-old”.
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So the one thing that isn’t taught in any ebook, seminar, course, or $50,000 mentoring/coaching programme is how to kick yourself in the pants to be hungry enough to put in the time and effort to reach the goal you had set for yourself.
Sure, most of us would like to buy that Ferrari, big house, go on a round-the-world trip. But the reality is probably only 1 out of 1,000 marketers are there will actually do it.
The other 999 are probably happy to sit on their butts, dream about what they’d do with the cash, and conveniently forget about putting in effort to get the whole thing moving.
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To help your online business prosper and thrive, it needs to be more than just “work”. Ideally it should be something obsessive that drives you to want to keep working till you find the winning formula.
Maybe times it might be a specific website target or keyword for a PPC, PPV or media buy campaign.
It might be a particular cost-per-sale (CPS) or cost-per-action (CPA) that you find is going gangbusters for you.
Whatever it might be, you need to figure it out.
This will likely require having to grind to get yourself there.
Does it mean that everyone who puts in 8 hours of solid work in your online business is guaranteed to succeed?
Not necessarily, but your chances of success are significantly higher.
Looking for more ideas to kickstart or grow your internet business? Be sure to check out my “Making your online business work in 2011″ post“.
Although I haven’t been blogging as often in recent months, I’ve been receiving emails about getting your online business started and scaling your sales and profits. I’ve been responding to many of these emails and will probably post the most frequent ones here as many readers have the same type of questions.
Here’s a recent one on getting started, especially if you’re:
- new to internet marketing
- struggling to generate a profit, if you’ve been trying out stuff for some time.
Here goes:
Advice from friends/how to get started: Does PPV work/is it tricky?
Before taking anyone’s advice, I would look at my friend’s internet business to determine how credible he or she is.
In most cases I will ignore how long they have been doing it for, and instead get a feel for how successful their business is.
Are they making $100/day? $1,000/day? $10/day? $10,000/day? $1/day? $0/day?
That would be my first guide to how successful they are and whether I should follow what they say.
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Using free vs paid traffic:
Everything has a price.
Paid traffic requires capital.
“Free” traffic requires time investment.
You need to know the value of your time.
If your hourly worth is $x/hour, that means each hour you work – whether at McDonald’s, at a 9-to-5 job, working on elance/odesk, etc, you could be making $x/hour.
So if your internet business is making $1/hour, and you could be making $6/hour at McDonald’s, you would probably be better off working at Mickie D’s.
The exception is if you’re able to scale your online business from $1/hour to more than $x/hour within a reasonable timeframe, you should focus on your online business instead.
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How to grow your earnings from $x/hour (your current income level) to $y/hour (your intended income target).
You could:
1) read blogs, forums (usually free)
2) buy ebooks
3) buy courses
4) purchase a subscription to a membership site
5) attend workshops
6) invest in coaching (Marketing expert Jay Abraham has coaching programs costing $250,000 per year, plus a percentage of your revenue)
The options I’ve listed above are listed in order of cost, from lowest to highest.
Sometimes, you could get high quality training from a cheap source, like a blog like Mr Green or Finchsells.
A lot of time, you will get parity on your investment (ie: you get what you pay for).
My recommendation for the past 2 years has been to invest in PPV Playbook, a paid membership site. (be sure to check out the PPV Playbook discount code if you might be interested)
Although PPV Playbook’s focus may seem to be on PPV marketing, the paid forum also has comprehensive sections on SEO, PPC, media buys, social media. It also has other sub-forums focused on growing your business, managing your time and business assets.
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Is PPV Playbook for everyone, including newbies?
Probably not, if you’re not serious about your business, you probably won’t take action anyway, so you probably will have difficulty growing your business anyhow.
If you’re broke, you will probably struggle to find the time or cash to do anything effective, my advice is to build your capital.
In starting any offline retail business, you’d probably need at least $50,000 of operating capital to get started – fitting out a retail shop space, purchasing inventory, rent, utilities, etc.
So while an online business is low cost, to say it will cost nothing, in terms of time or investment, is not being entirely honest.
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PPV Playbook has a series of tutorials (including videos) and is constantly being updated.
It also has case studies and members share tips and strategies to help you set up and optimize your campaigns.
The focus is on building a long-term profitable business.
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Affiliate marketing training: the bottomline
I take a look and have gone through most of the products and training in internet marketing and affiliate marketing.
Everything from $10 ebooks, all the way up to high ticket coaching programs.
I’d put PPV Playbook among the top resources for these types of products.
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I can’t say that EVERYONE will benefit, but if you’re serious about generating online income (especially if you’re tried for some time and aren’t getting the results you desire), you might like to try PPV Playbook for at least a month, and get some campaigns up within 7 days of joining (not taking action is a recipe for failure too.).
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Interested in checking out PPV Playbook?
Be sure to mail me for a discount code.
