When you start out on your internet marketing journey there are many mistakes to make and if you find someone whose information you trust then you may be able to learn how to avoid some critical internet marketing newbie mistakes as well. Subscribe to my internet marketing newbie top 10 mistakes to avoid report for some of the most common mistakes to avoid.

Internet Marketing Mistake

If I can offer some advice on making mistakes it is this: make as many mistakes as you can as fast as you can. You will not become a successful internet entrepreneur without making mistakes so make them early when the impact on your bottom line will be less.

This a mistake that I relate from personal experience that did NOT make it onto the report above (maybe I shouldn’t have stopped at 10!)

Backup is Critical!

Imagine that you have been busy working away at your internet marketing business for a few months and have quite a few projects on the go, when one morning you wake up and go to your computer to check your email. You gently nudge the mouse to wake up your computer and nothing happens (a bit like trying to wake up your teenager for school). Another nudge, this time a bit more forcefully and still nothing. You check that the power to the computer is on and try again – still nothing. It’s time to try rebooting – it takes forever and a few worrying messages are displayed then it gets stuck halfway through the reboot.

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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 »

Not only is the auto responder an internet marketing tool – it is an essential internet marketing tool for internet marketing newbies. Now that you understand how to put a website live on the internet you need to know how to build and manage your customer database.

What is an Auto Responder?

For a definition of auto responder I went to wikipedia (well actually I went to my trusty friend, Google first and then to wikipedia).
It seems that there are two separate definitions for auto responder but only one relates to internet marketing. The first definition is an email program that automatically answers email sent to it. An example is the out of office reply that you have no doubt received if you have sent an email to someone who is on vacation.

The definition of auto responder that relates to internet marketing is a software application that automatically delivers information by email.

Why do Internet Marketers Need Auto Responders?

An auto responder is a program that sends emails but it is sooooo much more as well. Most internet marketers would use a web-based auto responder service (I don’t know of any other kind really). The auto responder, as well as being a program that sends emails is a program that stores information about your customers or subscribers. It is a customer database system!
Basically, you keep all of your customer details in the one place and when you want to send them some information or let them know of a special product that you are recommending you can just write an email and send it to all of your customers or only those customers that would be interested in that information. An auto responder service allows you to manage an unlimited number of lists so you can have you customers organized into different categories and using this auto responder software you can choose to send an email message to part of your customer database or to all of your database.

There are two ways that you can send out an email message to your list. Firstly, you can send out a broadcast which means that you send out the same email on the same day to all of the members in your database that the message would be relevant to. This is useful for time sensitive information such as a discount or sale on a product or an upcoming event such as a live training or a webinar.

The second way is to set up a series of messages usually referred to as an autoresponder series. You can specify the amount of time between each message. So you can have constant communication with your customers without the need to write an email every couple of days. You can set up your autoresponder so that your customers get an email from you every couple of days and there is no limit to how many emails that you can load into the autoresponder series. You can load a years worth of emails if you like and then it is really set and forget. The advantage of using an auto responder service in this way is that no matter when someone joins your list they always start at the beginning and don’t miss out on any of your valuable information. So you may have one person in your database that is receiving message no 29 on the same day that someone else is receiving message no 5.

How Do I Get Customers for My Database?

You might be thinking now that it is very time consuming to enter all of that data into the auto responder software. If you already have an existing database of customers then you will have to transfer that data over to your auto responder service and the way to do this is to search in the help or support area of your chosen autoresponder. Read more »

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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