The drop out rate of people that try Internet Marketing and then give up is in the 90% plus bracket. Not a great statistic but if you are thinking about it then as long as you are well informed and avoid these common mistakes you will be in the 5-10% bracket of people that do make it!

Mistake #1

Fast Cash.

The number one reason for people dropping out is because they expect too much, too soon. When they don’t get it they quit. Starting up online for the first time is learning a brand new industry and there is a lot to take in and learn. When I started I made a loss in my first year, I set my expectations before I started though, I was setting up my own business and had so much to learn. I was still happy after my first year loss because in that 12 month period I had learned what doesn’t work and was starting to see what could and did work. I knew year 2 was going to be different and it would be worth the wait!

Mistake #2

Trying Too Many Different Techniques.

Online marketing has many sub categories, for example Affiliate Marketing, MLM, Adsense etc. Each can take time to master and the more you attempt the less you will achieve. Everyone will tell you that Internet marketing is about multiple streams of income. Yes this is true but the only way to achieve this is to take on one and master it first. Only when you have done this should you take on the next one. This links partially with the next mistake…

Mistake #3

System Hopping

When you pay your money and join one of the many online business systems, after a short space of time of not making any money there will be the temptation to hop to the next system you see being marketed. Save your money as the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. A good, experienced Internet marketer will take any of these systems and make an absolute fortune with them. Equally an inexperienced newbie will make nothing with any of them initially. If you are in a system already and not making money and thinking about investing in another don’t. Your money will be much better invested in some training on generating traffic or something equally relevant to your personal development in this industry.

Mistake #4

No Help Or Support

Many online business systems promote the person you join through being your mentor but unfortunately a lot of the so called “mentors” are so busy making their own fortunes they have little interest in helping you. Please don’t be tempted to go with the mentor with the pictures of the flashest car or home unless you have tested them first. Try and make contact with them before you sign up if they don’t respond in an acceptable time take this as a warning. You want an approachable helpful mentor. With the drop out rate I mentioned at the top of this article the mentors can get very rich and still have time to help dedicated, committed people. Any online business system has many people promoting it so ask what the individual will offer over someone else. Also what incentives they will offer to join them over other individuals. My help came from my mentor but also the other people in my marketing support group. When friends and family don’t understand or support your online venture having friends and support online makes all the difference.

Starting up online is a fantastic way to make a living. Patience and determination are key to success but having the right attitude about your online venture is very important. It is a business and should be thought of in that way. It’s not about getting a few websites up and pestering your friends and family to join your downline. It’s a real business and you should have a vision for where it is going, you should have a business plan and if you really want it to take off then a marketing budget is a must!

Yes, all the top online mentors will help and show you the best free methods of marketing, how to use social networks and other similar methods to get leads for your business but do you think they rely on the free methods alone? No they don’t. They will have newspaper adverts in the press, Google Adwords Pay Per Click ads running, they will purchase leads, rent lists and many other paid resources that are available.

I fell for all of the usual mistakes when I started online. I went directly to the newspaper to place my ads, this was before I knew about the brokers that exist that can place ads in these newspapers on your behalf for cheaper than going direct to the newspaper. The brokers buy advertising space from the newspapers in bulk so can offer it you for cheaper. The broker I use in the UK even has a late deal mailing list so I get emails when they are trying to fill a space in one of the papers and you can get it even cheaper than normal.

The money is in the list right? Did you know you can rent a list of about 20,000 people for one email broadcast for about £400-£500.

Structured correctly with a profitable product for sale and you could double your money easily and remember when someone has purchased off you they are your customer and you can contact them again with more offers in the future. People buy again from people they’ve purchased from before and trust.

Pay Per Click! This has grown my business like no other means! However be warned!! The likes of Google make it very easy for you to set-up a campaign and get your advert online in a few minutes but unless you know what you are doing then all this will do is empty your bank account into Google’s and you’ll have nothing to show for it. It’s worth taking the time to master this. I wasted so much money in the early days by trial and error with Pay Per Click. I fronted up $500 for a PPC Mastery Course and that was one of the best $500 I’ve ever spent! The techniques when you know them are very simple but make so much difference. I’ve spent £30-£50 before this and only got 1-2 opt ins to my list. They weren’t very targeted either. These days I’m paying around the £2 mark for a lead and they are highly targeted that often convert.

It is your business, take it seriously and if there are things you don’t know or understand take the time to find someone that has the knowledge and will teach you. Even if it costs you it is an investment in your business that should be well worth the time and money.

If you are new to Internet Marketing then no doubt you have found yourself going off at a tangent or getting distracted. This is bound to happen, Internet Marketing is such a vast area and even within a specific area there are different niches and different ways of doing things.

Personal discipline will help and creating a plan will keep you focussed on what it is that you are aiming for.

Decide what you want to achieve on that day and stick to it, write a “To Do” list and put the amount of time you plan to spend on that task and don’t go over it.

In the early days and now I get a lot of leads for my business from Twitter. Twitter is great there are tools available to help to you manage your followers and even schedule your tweets for when you are not about. As I learnt though you can quite easily spend a lot of time on Twitter, Facebook is the same, you think “I’ll just check my social network sites” and 3 hours later you are wondering where the time went and what you actually achieved in those 3 hours. Remember spending so much time on these sites might get you some leads but unless you come away from them and follow up on these leads you are not going to make any sales!

It is inevitable that you will come across information and tools of interest as you start out and many will open up a whole new avenue you didn’t know about before. You may be researching Private Label Resale Rights products and come across Affiliate Marketing. This is good as it is all a great learning curve but bouncing around from pillar to post in your research is going to eat hours, confuse you and stop you completing any actions on that all important To Do list. It is very easy to spend a whole day reading on the internet but there is a good chance you’ll be confused.

Have that to do list next to you. If you read about something you want to look into further write it down on another list. Refer back to this later but for now carry out the actions you have set yourself. In a lot of cases it will be an email or Facebook message that sends you off on a tangent from your plan. A great way to tackle this is to write your to do list first thing in the morning. Reverse the order of what you plan to do. Step one in many cases will be check email. Later you might be planning to record a video message for your blog. Do the video first. Before you open your emails, check your Facebook or Twitter do those one or two tasks that will mean you have accomplished something. It takes time for that video to be uploaded to the internet anyway, an ideal opportunity to check your emails then.

If you spend the afternoon going off at tangents or get carried away with Twitter and Facebook then at least you have some tasks complete that day.

You can allocate hours in the day to going back to the list you have started of things to look into further, in this time concentrate on that topic only. If you come across something else jot it down on the list and carry on with what it is you are researching today.

If you are marketing online already you will have no doubt found yourself in this position at some point.

If you haven’t started yet and you are reading this as part of your research into internet marketing I have some further advice for you. One of my favourite quotes is “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going…” this is so true! Internet marketing is a vast area that spans many niches, if you are going to spend any sort of money to invest in a business you would be crazy not to do your due diligence first but on the flip side if you plan to read up on internet marketing in it’s entirety before actually starting then I imagine you will be still reading as they cart you to the old folks home. When you’ve found an area of internet marketing that takes your interest give it a go, it could be affiliate marketing or resale rights products, whatever, get cracking and learn on the way. In a short space of time you could be writing your own product on “How to Get Started as an Internet Marketer – Volume 1″

Whichever it is I wish you luck.

No matter what you sell online you can be sure that you will need traffic! With the search engines changing the rules all the time and Pay Per Click being costly unless you know what you are doing people want FREE methods of getting traffic to their websites and capture pages. Here are my top 7 ways of getting some quality traffic for FREE.

1. Social Networks.

They are free to join and easy to find people in the niche you are promoting in, I prefer twitter for this as there are many websites to help automate the experience. There are websites for automatically following people that tweet about the keywords you would be looking for, my personal preference is TweetSpinner.com You don’t have to be sat at Twitter all day long posting out your links as there are also websites that allow you schedule tweets, spending half an hour in the morning is all it needs to set up some schedule tweets throughout the day, check out Socialoomph.com If you’re followers are targeted based on keywords then the more followers you have the more potential people will see your tweets. Just don’t spam, people want helpful information and quotes etc as well as a link to your site every now and again.

2. Forums.

Forums are a great untapped resource for traffic. Check the rules on the site prior to posting but usually you are allowed a bio box with a link or two. These get automatically placed at the bottom of each and every post you write. Don’t put your links blatantly in the posts (this is usually against the forum rules anyway and will get you kicked off the forum) Just post helpful information and respond to other peoples questions. If you help someone they are likely to check out your links and bio box. You will get the instant response from the person you helped plus remember forum content stays around for years so there is a lot of people that could see your posts. There is usually a forum in every imaginable niche so whatever you promote have a look.

3. Blogging.

Blogging is great as the search engines love blog posts so they rank highly. You may have noticed when ever you search for anything online there is usually someones blog post that appears high up in the rankings. If you use blog software such as WordPress these usually “ping” the search engines when you create a new blog post. Pinging is letting the search engines know you have updated your blog. If you don’t use WordPress or are unsure if your blog “pings” the search engines then try a website called pingomatic.com it will ping several search engines for you.

4. Video Marketing.

YouTube is very big now and many people are using this to promote their business. When you upload a video you can assign it key words, you can place these videos on your sites too. Viral is best though! How many times have you received a funny video on you tube and forwarded it on to 20 people, no doubt 20 of their friends forwarded it on to 20 of their friends too so you can see how quickly it can spread. If the video has a link to your site on it then that could create you a lot of traffic.

5. Article Marketing.

OK I admit I’m writing this article not only to help you out but also because I know if you do find it useful there is a good chance you’ll click my links at the end and find out more about me and what I do. Again articles are liked by the search engines so write an article about what you promote and that’s another way to get traffic. Again articles are around for a long time so can be seen by many.

6. Responses (Blog and Article)

If you read a blog post or article you like and it relates to what you market in leave a comment on it. Most blog and article responses will ask for your website. It’s just another place for your link to be seen and the more links available to be seen means more traffic.

7. Free Classifieds

Yes these do exist, funded by the paid adverts on the websites these are a great way to get targeted traffic, there are many so search in Google but my recommendation would be Phinditt.com Choose the area you wish the advert to be seen, select a category and section for your advert then come up with a great headline that will inspire people to check out your ad. I would recommend putting a picture in the advert, people are more tempted to open an advert with a picture in it.

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