Resources for Internet Marketers

YES, FOCUS IS IMPORTANT if your eyes steadily go south as you get older and everything turns fuzzy. New glasses or contacts can clear up the fog.

But I’m not talking about that kind of focus here. No, there’s another kind of focus—the kind where you pick something to concentrate on and then focus your time and efforts on it. The problem—and its not limited just to those of us who do Internet Marketing but pretty much everybody—is that we don’t focus in tightly enough.

• We get distracted
• We try to do too many things at once
• We jump from one thing to another—what some have called “chasing the next Shiny Thing”
• We start but don’t carry through

And I’m not immune. Internet Marketing has so many ways to make money. And you can’t do them all at once. Shall I do Clickbank? CPA? PLR? Amazon? Adsense? Offline? Membership sites? WSOs? List marketing? Video?

Well, I”ve steadily honed in on the two areas I plan to pursue through the rest of this year—and likely beyond. First, I’m continuing my efforts as an Amazon Affiliate—with which I met with some modest success last winter. I’ve completed the one site I intend to focus on now with a vengeance—a site about the recently released Canon EOS Rebel T3i digital camera. Now, you’re welcome to pick up your own T3i through my site (!), but my intent in providing the link is so you can see what I’m up to (which, I realize, you’ve been waiting with baited breath to find out!). My challenge for the foreseeable future is to steadily do offsite SEO each week to pump as much traffic to the site as possible.

Second, though, I’m also focusing on developing some digital e-books to upload to Amazon’s Kindle site. Recently, I picked up the Kindle DX, and as a writer, I’m all stoked to see if I can generate some $$$ from my own Kindle titles. Besides Amazon Affiliate and Kindle as my areas of focus, I’m also interested in video marketing. But that can be part of my SEO for the Canon site.

I still have a day job running my own editorial services company, so I don’t have full time yet to devote to my Internet Marketing efforts. But every minute I can spare, I’m going to FOCUS now on just these two Net Marketing avenues.

What about you? What are you focusing on this year? Too much at once? If so, let me urge you to zero in more tightly. And success to both of us!

A LOT OF YEARS AGO, I met a lady named Hope who had two sisters named Faith and Charity. Their Mama took their names from the Bible (1 Corinthians 13:13), which says, “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three…” The verse goes on to say “…but the greatest of these is charity,” so I always wondered if that part caused any sisterly friction as the trio grew up.

To these three sisters, I’d like to add—for those of us “doing” Internet Marketing—another female name: Patience. And Patience is sometimes the hardest to come by. As a kid, I helped plant the family vegetable garden. But at the first hint of green sprigs in the row of carrots, I’d pull up a few to see how they were doing. That approach doesn’t produce a very good crop, I can assure you.

And sometimes, we get in too big a hurry to see results when we invest time in Internet Marketing. If one “path” doesn’t produce fast enough, we abandon it and try something else. And this process can repeat over and over, as we give up too soon on one approach and race off to find something that makes Carrots of Cash faster. But that impatience virtually guarantees failure. It takes time to nurture and build any given approach. I spent untold hours building Amazon sites late last year, then doing Read more…

SOMETIMES, IT SEEMS THE STEPS you take in Internet Marketing are so small that you can’t really tell if you’re even moving—much less whether you’re moving forward, backward, or sideways. Other times, it’s as if you take a huge flying leap toward your goals.

My own journey has now brought me to a place where I hope what I’m about to do will turn out to be a quantum leap forward. I’ve become convinced that for me, two logical “next steps” await. First, building a list—and second, taking the plunge into social media marketing, which for me means Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

“The Money Is in the List.” How many thousands of times do I have to hear it before doing something about it? No, I have no intention of abandoning my affiliate marketing efforts, or efforts to sell my own information products. But I’ve become convinced that the road to truly big income numbers lies in developing a well-targeted list of buyers eager to purchase what I can offer them.

Social Media Marketing, I see as a hand-in-glove fit for building a list. Not only can these avenues help build the list, but they can also be a great place to drive traffic to an offer. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube each require some specialized knowledge and their own unique approach, so there’s a learning curve ahead, for sure.

The Internet Marketing Journey is a “work in progress,” and requires mid-course corrections and an ongoing adjusting of goals and plans for reaching them.

LISTEN, IF YOU’RE EVEN HERE on this site and reading this, you share—with me—The Dream. You know the one I’m talking about. The dream of developing a part- or full-time income online. Some few somehow make it work for them in a hurry. For most of us, it takes a while. Hit-and-miss. Two steps forward, one back. Tons of time (and money) invested, with not much to show for it.

This week, a good friend with whom I’d shared my efforts at building income-generating websites said to me, in essence: “Everyone knows those things (the websites) just don’t work and don’t pay off.”

Well, I can tell you that for months, I’ve spent every spare minute toward my online income efforts. I’ve bought a LOT of training programs—and because I’ve been very selective, steering clear of the overhyped Big Launches—nearly all of the ones I’ve bought have helped me enormously. Some of the best are in the right-hand ad column here.

But here’s what I also can tell you. Yes, it’s been hard work, and I Read more…

“YOU CAN’T MAKE MONEY ON AMAZON,” the so-called “conventional wisdom goes. Bunk and balderdash! Even though the payout of the Internet’s original affiliate program begins at just 4 percent, it goes higher as more sales are made. AND…some very ordinary people are making a killing online as Amazon Associates.

One of them is—scratch that—two of them are…a couple of ladies “down under” who are averaging $10,000 a month every month on Amazon. The good news for the rest of us is that they have put their step-by-step process into a program called the Amazonian Profit Plan. I have it, and I’m putting up five sites right now using their exact approach (Christmas, after all, IS coming!).

Reason I’m mentioning this is that the Amazonian Profit Plan, which regularly goes for $97, is on sale for $67 right now. That’s the good news. The bad news? It’s only on sale through midnight, Tuesday, October 19. So if you want to grab it, now’s the time. See the little ads over there to the right? The right-hand box of the top row will take you right to the sale page for the Plan. Or, you can just click here!

AND HEY, I really would like to hear from some of you out there as to what YOU are up to right now in your I.M. efforts. Here’s what I’m doing at present:

• Continuing to pursue my Amazon efforts. Have five interlinked sites up now, based on Craig Kaye’s Info Product Killer approach (see the five Canon camera sites on the About page). Have also reviewed Dan Brock’s excellent Profitzon course that I bought a while back, and am gearing up for a trip through Paula and Wanda’s Amazonian Profit Plan. This is my primary focus, and since I’m targeting the Christmas selling season, time is of the essence.
• Going through Brad Callen’s FREE 7-day SEO course. The creator of SEO Elite, Keyword Elite, and other packages really knows his stuff.
• Am finally and belatedly gearing up to start a mailing list, and as a major help in that direction, will soon use here on my site a fantastic new WordPress plug-in from the MaxBlogPress people, called Subscribers Magnet. More soon on it after I’ve done some test driving.
• Picked up Matt Carter’s FREE new WordPress Affiliate Theme…and am really getting a lot out of the also-free 12-part video series he adds on. Super stuff!
• I love hanging out on the Warrior Forum (premium membership is $37 for 20 years…best I.M. money I’ve probably ever spent, bar none). Now and then, I can’t resist one of the WSO’s (Warrior Special Offers) advertised there at super-low prices. Just picked up Steve Wagenheim’s video series on making money with Google Trends. Fascinating package.

So that’s where my time is going (along with my “day job” as a contract book editor/page designer). Tell me/us what YOU are finding worth investing your time on these days.

A WHILE BACK I HAD A DAY WHEN I did my best to convince myself that I had the I.Q. of a sack of hammers. Spent hours and hours trying to get Google Feedburner to burn an RSS feed for a couple of my sites. Every blithering time, Feedburner would kick back one error message or another.

Now, you long-timers may laugh that anyone could not know how to do this, but some of us newer to I.M. have plenty of gaps in our knowledge base. I ransacked the Net for info, and somebody said, just add “/feed” after your domain. I did that for one site, and Read more…

ANYBODY STARTING OUT at Internet Marketing can be quickly overwhelmed with the sheer volume of options for generating income: Adsense, Adwords, Amazon, CPA, PPC, YouTube/Video Marketing, Facebook, Twitter, Online-Offline Hybrids, Clickbank, Niche Mini-Sites, Blogger (Blogspot) blogs, WordPress blogs, Review sites, Warrior Forum WSOs, Commission Junction and other Affiliate Directories, Article Marketing, Squidoo, MMO sites, Site Flipping, eBay, Craigslist, Mailing Lists, Membership Sites, Consulting, e-Books, PLR articles….yeeeeeeesh! Enough to make your head spin like Linda Blair’s “Regan” in “The Exorcist”!

A while back, I put all the options—the pathways—I could think of into a spreadsheet. I divided them into the following categories: Read more…

OH, DELIVER US! somebody groans. That’s all this world needs…one more MMO (Make Money Online) Internet Marketing blog! Well, friends and neighbors, I’m under no illusions that this will become the Greatest Net Marketing Site of All Time.

No, my aspirations are far more modest. I simply want to chronicle my journey from “Newbie” to what I am fiercely determined will become my new and primary source of income. Along the way, I’m planning to be brutally honest about where I stub my toes and also, where I stumble onto something that works. I’ll share the “gurus” and learning packages I have personally found of greatest value. Right up front, Read more…

AND YES, FOR ANY OF US choosing to take the plunge into Internet Marketing, it is indeed a journey. The largest I.M. forum on the Net—the Warrior Forum—has more than 180,000 members, and each one of them has a story to tell of their own journey into Internet Marketing. And beyond that one forum are millions of others seeking to generate income online.

Each of us has our own motivations. Some need a new income source after losing a job. Others need to increase their income by supplementing their regular paycheck. Still others dream of developing an income large enough to achieve true financial independence.

My first glimmer of interest began back in about 2000. I worked in a publishing house in an office with another editor. One day, Read more…