Well, it has been a little longer than usual since I posted on this blog and for those of you who visit regularly, I apologize for the break.
However, I am happy to say that, although I almost gave up on this project – the fact is I am back and so, I haven’t given up.

So firstly, back to something I wrote in one of the earlier mindset posts:

Never, ever, ever give up! (top 10 qualities of successful entrepreneurs)

Roadblock

There is no such thing as an overnight success!

As I listen to the stories of the successful internet marketers that I admire, I am struck by the similarity in their stories. There is always a big reason why they have pursued the internet marketing dream. Also, they had to experience a lot of failure before they achieved success. For most of them, the road to success was neither short nor easy and there were many obstacles that needed to be manoeuvred past along the way. Most of the successful internet marketers spent at least a couple of years honing their craft.

I have found, this week, that when I became discouraged about my lack of progress both on this blog and on other projects that I have been working on, it is good to stop and listen to the experience of others.

I visit the blogs of James Schramko, Yaro Starak and John Carlton fairly regularly to get an information fix but when I need some encouragement to stick with it and keep going there is nothing better than listening to the story of a successful, internet entrepreneur and how they got started. When you listen to story like this it makes you realize that their success didn’t happen overnight. It did not happen easily and they faced as many obstacles as I am facing right now. The reason that they are able to tell their story and that many people listen to them (and buy their stuff) is because they didn’t give up.

As I learn more about internet marketing and the things that need to be done to bring traffic to a website I have realized that although most of the work is not hard to do – it takes a lot of time and is definitely not that exciting!

One of the many ways to get traffic to your site is to develop backlinks. There are many ways to do this and I will go into this in further detail when I get to the traffic posts. But the fact is, to get traffic to a website you need to complete many small repetitive, time-consuming tasks on a regular, consistent basis. For me, I have two problems with this – one I get bored easily and I don’t like doing repetitive, boring, time-consuming tasks. I decided to pursue internet marketing because I am interested in giving myself more time to do the things I enjoy doing, not to give myself an extra job which is more tedious than the one I already do!

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As a result of an amazing training seminar that I attended last weekend I have had a complete shift in my attitude to my Internet Marketing Business.

Let me tell you a little about the training before I tell you how things are going to change…

Play to Win  – Frontier Trainings

The 3 day seminar that I attended last week end is called Play to Win. It is presented by Frontier Trainings and the dynamic founder and lead trainer of Frontier Trainings, Clinton Swaine. Play to Win is a personal development and leadership training unlike anything I have experienced before. All the lessons are learned through a carefully crafted set of games that included all of the participants in the room (last weekend there were about 120 participants). There are games that concentrate on team building while others focus on presentation skills. The atmosphere in the seminar room is often very intense which makes the lessons learned that much more powerful!

I’m extremely glad that I was able to experience the first Aussie Play to Win - I know that there will be many more. I learned much about myself at this training and most importantly it has really taught me that in order to succeed I need to play a much bigger game. This applies to my whole life and also to my Internet Marketing Business. I plan to implement a set of new strategies that now seem easily attainable because of my new millionaire mindset.

Internet Marketing Tool

As I take a look at what I have been doing over the last few months with regards to my Internet Marketing Business, I realize that whilst I have gained many essential skills, I have been playing a very small game. This small game is reflected by my small results. I have not been treating Internet Marketing as a business but rather as a hobby. I have not been willing to invest too much capital but this is completely the wrong approach. My motivation for starting an Internet Marketing Business was to free up my time to spend it doing more of the things I enjoy. But when I look over the last couple of months I have been spending way too much time on things that I don’t enjoy. Things that I could easily pay some-one else to do for me.

So now, in public, I commit to playing a much bigger game in Internet Marketing!

To become a successful internet entrepreneur I am going to concentrate on the things that I enjoy doing and outsource the things that are time consuming. I also find that the things that I don’t enjoy doing take me much longer to start – procrastination is the enemy here. Another of my mentors Raymond Aaron says that to deal with procrastination all you have to do is offload the tasks that you procrastinate to other people. This sounds like advice I should have listened to the first time I heard it.

So now that I have declared my intentions I want you to think about yours. You have obviously found this blog because you are looking for information about how to start making money on line.

Are you looking for a new hobby or do you truly want to succeed online?

Are you playing a big or small game?

Are you Playing to Win?

I am no longer an internet virgin! I finally made my first sale of an affiliate product. So now I have achieved step 1 and step 2 of the Internet Marketing Plan and I’m really to take on step 3. It will be even better when the money hits my PayPal account – then I will really believe it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make the sale from the affiliate product that I have been concentrating on – it was one of my other sites and frankly I’m not too sure how my customer found it but that doesn’t really matter.

Emails and Auto Responders – Keep It Simple

I also found out that I have had 2 people subscribe to my “10 Newbie Mistakes to Avoid” free report. I would have found out sooner had I not made yet another newbie mistake!  This one is about  email accounts. When you set up your auto responder to notify you of any new subscribers to your list make sure the email notification is sent to an email account that you regularly check.  Although it is a nice surprise to find new people on my list (welcome if you are reading this post and thanks for joining me on my journey) I would have preferred to have been  notified by email at the time. Read more »

Well good news and bad news.

First the good news (I always like to hear good news first)

No longer am I languishing on page 4 or 5. I am happy to report that for a couple of my keywords the Internet Marketing Newbie Diary is on page 1 of Google ready and waiting to be a resource for all of those newbies out there searching for good information.

Here’s what happens when I type my keyword into the Google search box

See down here at result no. 8 on page 1

Visitor rates are gradually increasing (it’s good to know that someone is actually reading my stuff)

Bad news – no optins yet for my free report “10 Newbie Mistakes to Avoid” but that will happen all in good time.

I have started working on an affiliate site and I have something on page 1 of Google for that keyword too.

All in all a good weeks work!

Within all of the posts about how to become a successful internet marketer I will give you updates on my progress.

So here goes with update no.1

There are many times on this internet marketing journey where you will either have a major aha moment or kick yourself when you finally figure out something that initially seems impossible. Once you have figured out the solution you realize that it was entirely obvious and staring you right in the face the whole time!

Here’s a moment when I wanted to kick myself -

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