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!

Secondly, because I wear a lot of different hats (wife, mother and worker) and my paid work does not have regular hours, I have found that the only time I have to pursue my internet marketing business is late at night when I have already done a full day’s work and I’m not very efficient or effective at this time of day. I end up getting distracted by blogs and forums very easily, or playing solitaire on the computer! (I’m sure that I am not alone in this confession).

I have learnt an important thing about myself – I enjoy the challenge of learning a new strategy or technique and implementing it one or two times, but once I can do something adequately – I am ready to move onto the next thing! Unfortunately, this won’t work in the world of internet marketing!

Luckily, while I do devour a fair amount of internet marketing information, there are other people whose stuff I listen to as well and they help immensely when my mindset becomes slightly negative as it did last week! The fact that I am back in a positive frame of mind with a new plan of attack is wholly due to the fact that I have some awesome mentors whose blogs I follow.

John Carlton is having a huge launch of his Simple Writing System which is a copywriting training course for internet marketers – I am a huge John Carlton fan. Anyway I received an email from John Carlton which explained that as part of his launch he had a heap of free stuff that he was giving away at his blog and probably because I lost my focus last week, I downloaded some of his stuff.

It was a whole lot of interviews with some of the leaders in internet marketing and I decided to listen to Yaro Starak first because I am familiar with his stuff – he is an extremely successful Aussie (like me) blogger. Yaro and John did a great audio interview on blogging – this lead me back to Yaro’s blog again and I found a post about outsourcing. I have to say that I have been exploring the notion of outsourcing for a couple of weeks so naturally I listened to  Yaro interview John Jonas.

It’s really interesting how sometimes, when you lose your way and think that you are just goofing off and wasting time, something is leading you to exactly where you need to go. For me, that was John Jonas. He has a free 90 min audio that you can access from here . In this audio he explains exactly how he outsources to the Philippines and the level to which he outsources – he tells a couple of stories that illustrate the level of trust that he has in his “guys” – AMAZING!

For the last couple of days I have been struggling with the decision should I invest in John Jonas’ membership program and take my internet marketing business to next next level or not?

The truth is staring me in the face – I need to get the stuff done and I don’t want to do it, I only want to spend time doing the things that I like, not the things that I hate so I guess that I’m off to hire a virtual assistant because I’M NOT GIVING UP!!!!!

Post from: Internet Marketing Newbie Diary

Internet Marketing Newbie Update

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?

Post from: Internet Marketing Newbie Diary

Internet Marketing Newbie Update No. 4

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.

I was also getting a bit discouraged thinking that no-one had signed up yet!

I think that every time you have a new domain you should have an email account associated with the domain name – something like info@mydomain.com or support@mydomain.com. It gives a much more professional look to your website if you have an email address linked to the website rather than a gmail account or  hotmail account. Setting up an email account  is a really simple thing to do once you get the hang of navigating around your c-panel. ( I can’t believe that I have actually paid someone to do this for me in the past!) So rather than having to log into numerous different email accounts to check your email you can set it up so that all of the emails are forwarded to a central place like a gmail account that you can check from anywhere.

I recommend that you have a web-based email account so that you are able to check your emails from anywhere not just home or work. Use a gmail, yahoo or hotmail account and have all of your other email accounts forwarded to the one central account.

Another email tip that I can reveal is how I manage giving out my own email address. If I need to fill in my email address for a free report or to check out a competitor’s email campaign I often use a gmail account that I reserve for this purpose only. There are 2 good reasons for this separate email account. One,  I don’t get distracted by other people’s offers when I am checking my main email account and two I can more easily follow an email sequence if it is not mixed in with all of my personal emails. You can have as many gmail accounts as you like.

Paid Traffic

Lastly for this update I have taken the PPC plunge. I have started my first real PPC campaign (actually it is my second but the first one doesn’t really count because it was for the ill fated keyword and I didn’t even get any impressions – no-one even saw my ads!). My ads have been shown several hundred times and I have had a few clikcs on them but so far no-one has bought my product. I will keep testing and refining. I have set up the PPC campaign so that the daily spend is capped and therefore I am in total control. Maybe this week will be my week for PPC success – here’s hoping.:-)

Post from: Internet Marketing Newbie Diary

Internet Marketing Newbie Diary – Update No. 3

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!

Post from: Internet Marketing Newbie Diary

Internet Marketing Newbie Diary – Update No. 2

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 -

Google Analytics

I will definitely teach more about Google Analytics when we get up to it – but for now all you need to know is that it is a piece of code that you obtain from Google that helps you to track traffic to your website. Basically it tells you how many people are visiting.

This blog has been running for a few weeks now – so it’s really just getting started and I don’t expect much traffic yet but when I kept checking my Google Analytics  there was none, zilch! ( This makes you feel very sad, lonely and unwanted!)

What I found out was that it important to check that you have actually put the Google Analytics code onto your site. If the code isn’t there then Google won’t be able to monitor your traffic!

After a few weeks without traffic I started wondering… then I checked my website and sure enough I hadn’t saved the Google Analytics code properly and it wasn’t there (doh!)

When I went into the cpanel for the website (this will be explained later in much more detail too) I found that I had had about 70 unique visitors to the blog -yay!

This prompted me to check how the blog was going in Google for organic search engine listing and to my surprise, for my keyword I’m on page 5. Now I know that page 5 is NOT page 1 on Google ( as my teenage daughter told me “No-one EVER goes to page 5″) but result no. 41 out of over 1 million results is pretty damn good for a newbie!

Page 1 – here I come!

Affiliate Marketing Update

I have just finished my first affiliate website and will work on getting traffic to it now and making sales.

The Plan

Still on step one of the plan. Click here to find out the master plan

Post from: Internet Marketing Newbie Diary

Internet Marketing Newbie – Update No.1