“I’m a new Internet Marketer and like you, I plan to focus on blogging and affiliate marketing. I make about $500 a month now.

What’s the best way of doing this? I want to be the next Darren Rowse! I’m planning to quit my job by the end of the year after getting my bonus if this gig works out for me…”

My answer:

It’s great to hear you’re taking action on your goals, Ken, especially as you’ve found that the Internet lifestyle gives you more options.

I don’t think newer Internet Marketers can successfully master two areas, unless you’re very disciplined. You probably should focus on one area.

Between blogging and affiliate marketing, although the two fields are related, I’d recommend you focus on affiliate marketing as that activity directly generates income. With blogging, income tends to be a secondary focus (unless you’re highly skilled at monetizing your blog).

I’m more concerned with the fact that you’re generating $500 from your Internet Marketing efforts now.

Have you calculated your monthly expenditure?

It could be in the range of $2,000 (if you’re single and living in a small community) to more than $5,000 a month.

So you might want to hold on to your “Quit your day job” ambition till your income stabilizes to a level you’re comfortable with before taking the big plunge.

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Every Monday I answer readers questions in the “Monday Question” series. If you’ve a question, you can send it in via the contact form.

Note: Due to the volume of emails we receive, we may not be able to answer every question.

If you haven’t yet, take some time to read his “About Ruck” page and more importantly, his post “What Led Me To Believe I Could Work Online Fulltime“. It’s certainly worth spending some time reading the post, and more importantly archiving it for reference.

Are you an Iron Man?

If you were to look inside yourself, do you know if Internet Marketing is in your blood?

Or is it merely one of the hobbies like network marketing, forex, options trading, eBay that has recently come into your “biz op inbox”?

Here’s what the ebooks don’t typically teach you…

You need to have a driving force inside you. A little voice that pushes you on at 2am when you’re rushing to put a site up.

A hidden, subsconscious need to be the best, to be number 1.

If that’s lacking, all the goals you’ve written, to be a millionaire, to buy that dream home, to go on that trip around the world is just going to be a mission statement you’ve written on a sheet of paper that you carry around in your wallet all day.

It’s not what happens when things are easy that determine the path you’ve chosen for yourself, it’s what happens when things get tough…really tough…

What happens when the going gets tough?

When you encounter difficulty, are you likely to fight, take flight or freeze?

Do you say to yourself “How do I get out of this one?” or do you instead ask yourself “How do I overcome this challenge?”

The questions you ask yourself, determines the answers you will get, and ultimately the quality of your life.

Are you sitting in a cave alone in the dark?

It’s easy to forget that you have the most powerful tool, even greater than the most powerful computer in the world, at your disposal…It lies between your ears.

Creativity and imagination open up your options. It worked for Einstein and it’ll work for you too.

When you hear “mind over matter”, the reason why marketers fail is because their mind has given up before it’s addressed the matter at hand.

Sure, there will be skeptics who post pithy comments like “it won’t work” or lazy ones who ask “Why don’t you do a campaign from start-to-finish and post every step you take in detail”. If you did that, however, there’s no guarantee it’d work, much less get anything near the same level of results.

What the books, and what the courses don’t and probably won’t ever capture, is that fact that highly successful people will have the deep hunger to succeed. It’s something that might come naturally, it could be something due to environmental factors, but if anything else, it will be the biggest factor in your success…

If you are ready to be inspired by one man’s success, here’s a PDF I rendered of his blog post:

–> What Led Me To Believe I Could Work Online Fulltime by Ruck

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Iron Man movie images courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment

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.

The rates seem pretty cheap. Each HIT (or Human Intelligence Task) has a time rating and a cost rating.

I’ve seen tasks get farmed out for $0.01 for an hours work.

Take a look:

$0.09 for an hour’s work entering UPC (universal product code) information from food cans in your kitchen.

I guess it might not be too shabby for someone staying at home or in a less developed country where the median monthly income is about $100.

So the base rates are pretty low (although as the service gets popular you could expect it to get higher).

The other innovative feature is an API (application programming interface) which allows you to batch submit jobs to Mechanical Turk.

If you’re compiling keywords for a PPC compaign, you can automate quite a bit of work.

If you’re a direct mail marketer, you can get quite a bit of work done too.

I’m not sure how telco connections would be like, but I’m thinking you could buy your outsourcer skype credit and get them to do some phone work for you too.

Given Amazon’s data mining technology given it’s vast book and other product inventory, tracking and analytics on the outsourcers. It’s mentioned that “Requesters (the person giving the job) can specify that people who work on their HITs must first complete a qualification test, giving Requesters the opportunity to vet the skill level of the people working on their HITs beforehand.”

The freelancers are aged 18 or older and must have an Internet connection (I guess some of them might be on dial-up….)

How much does the service cost?

From their FAQ, Amazon “collects a fee of 10 percent on top of what Requesters pay to have tasks completed. For example, if a HIT pays $0.20, Amazon Mechanical Turk collects $0.02. The minimum commission charged is $0.005 per HIT. ”

I would not suggest that any Internet marketer start doing HITs, your time is better spent doing something else. The list of tasks outlined is quite insightful…

How do I use the Mechanical Turk?

You need a US billing address and bank account. Or if you’re an individual, a US driver’s license (incidentally I earned my US driver’s license in about 7 days, so take a 2 week holiday if you don’t live in the US or register a US corp…)

Is it any good? Mechanical Turk is a subsidiary of Amazon and the Turks are being used on projects like Amazon’s A9 search engine.

I would think the Turks should be good for article submissions, directory submissions, possibly content rewriting and a lot of the ‘grinding’ type tasks.

For more information, visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk website.

Many newbies find making their first dollar online intimidating. But you can do a mind shift and see some interesting results.

Download audio file (WhoIsAndrewWee.com-friday-podcast9.mp3)

For the notes, click “more”…

Encountering Difficulty

Do you see it as a challenge or opportunity?

When faced with an obstacle, find a way to overcome it.

Inventions and progress are a result of overcoming an obstacle.

The newbie Internet Marketer’s mental obstacles:

• Making your first $1
• Making your first $100
• Making your first $1,000
• Making your first $10,000
• Making your first $100,000

>>> The sky IS the limit

The problem was that till now, there hadn’t been many resources available to address this need, which was what drove backend sale specialist Alex Nghiem to launch the Backend Cash Manuscript.

Andrew Wee and Alex Nghiem

I had the opportunity to spend time with Alex on the sidelines of Matt Bacak’s Marketing Madness Live event in Atlanta, Georgia.

And it is astonishing how many marketers could easily have bumped up the value of their products by many times just by investing an incremental effort in their product development stage.

As a content creator, I know that it’s easy to get stuck in the ‘product creation’ mode and neglect to think out of the box for a moment, put in a few more hours and magnify the value of your product.

In a specific case study with a prominent Internet Marketer, Alex helped him increase the value of a $29.95 ebook into a $697 product with a minor amount of additional work. What’s even more interesting is that the Internet Marketer is currently working on a $997 product…!

Value creation goes hand-in-hand with the characteristics of information products which already have the advantages of relatively inexpensive to create, having low overheads, and the advantages of easy fulfilment.

To go one step further and magnify your sales, you owe it to yourself to check out Alex Nghiem’s:

>> Backend Cash Manuscript

And then I find out the Internet Marketer has only filed one or two weeks worth of posts before giving up.

Here’s a strategy of developing blog content quickly.

• Multitask

As you’re surfing the net for research, build a file of interest content, note down their URLs, network with your fellow Internet Marketers, catch up on trends.

• Develop a Position/Opinion

Think of how the development affects you, or your niche. What is the impact, what are the implications? How will it affect your current plans. Come up with 3 points in which it will impact you.

• Corroborate Your Content and Position

Check your sources and see if it checks out. If you’re unfamiliar with a particular niche, you’ll want to confirm that your information is accurate, so it doesn’t affect your credibility.

If you exercise the steps above, you’ll be able to generate content easily and do your research at the same time.