Have You Started Earning Your First Dollar as an Internet Marketer? If Not, Here's How

If you have started earning your first few dollars as an internet marketer, are you enjoying the way that you are doing so? If so, common sense would suggest that you should continue what you are doing, but get better at it. On the other hand, if you are really not enjoying what you are doing, then a change of direction is probably called for, because enjoying what you do every day is an almost essential element of doing it well!. This is especially true, of course, when the only person that drives you on every day is you.

Once that decision is made, here is how you proceed:

1. Follow a successful model.

Most successful marketers are following a business model or system. Find the model or system that best suits your style, ambitions and abilities and model what you do on that system. However, the idea is not to copy exactly what others are doing, because what works for them may not work in quite the same way for you.

You should also be aware that many systems or new marketing ideas work best before the market becomes ‘saturated’ with people who are all doing exactly the same thing,
For example, a couple of years ago there was a vey successful product that taught people who bought the product a system for setting up blogger.com blogs for maximum profitability from AdSense advertising. The product creator had done very well with his system, made a good deal of money and held nothing back when he sold the system manual.

The problem was, however, that the reason that he had been so successful was that he was the only person doing what he was, and for that reason, people in droves were clicking on his AdSense adverts. By the time the hundredth and then the thousandth person started to do exactly the same, however, the idea was no longer or original, and therefore not nearly so effective. Consequently, many of the people who brought the system made little or no money at all when they used it. So, the secret is, find a system that seems to be working and then see whether There is anything that you can do that will improve that system.

Such improvements can only be measured by tracking and testing, which is something that we will look at again a little later. As an example, bum marketing is a money making system that has been around for quite some time now, but is still extremely effective. In fact, the precursor of bum marketing, article marketing, has been actively used by hundreds of successful marketers for many, many years, and has always been one of the most effective and popular methods of driving visitors to a monetized website.

Moreover, bum marketing costs very little money, and will drive traffic to your web site on a longer-term basis, rather than being something that is here today, gone tomorrow. For these reasons, bum marketing as originally conceived became an extremely popular marketing method very quickly.

However, to at least a certain extent, using bum marketing ‘straight out of the box’ is what a newbie would very probably do, whereas someone who was moving beyond that stage would be looking for their own system ‘tweaks’ that would make it even more effective and profitable.

This is why there are so many people who have posted threads on the Warrior Forum site about the little tricks that they have discovered which have made the bum marketing system even more effective for them.

2. Discover your own unique selling point

To continue with the previous example, bum marketing is clearly effective. If, however, you could come up with your own variation of the system that is considerably more effective, then not only would you be able to earn a great deal more money by using that system yourself, but you would also have the basis of an infoproduct that you could sell to other marketers.

There are lots of forum members who are coming up with their own tricks and tweaks for the system, so it is evidently possible to make improvements even to such an effective and successful system. Therefore, rather than using the system ‘as is’, you should take the original concept, mix in all of the other good ideas that people who are using the system have come up with, and then see how you can develop the whole thing still further.

As suggested previously, the only way that you can actually establish that any new model you come up with is an improvement on the old one is by testing. Assuming, for example, that you believe you have built a superior bum marketing package, then you need to have a system in place to test that new model against the old on a back-to-back basis.

In order to do this, you might have to do things a little differently to the way
that you did them in the past. For example, if you have been an affiliate marketer, then in all probability you started off by sending traffic directly to the product vendor’s sales letter as a way of generating sales and therefore commissions.

If you continue to do this, however, it is going to be extremely difficult to track your results, unless the original product vendor will allow you to place a tracking code on their sales letter page (which is extremely unlikely unless you’re making a huge number of sales for them).

In this situation, what you would do is create two landing pages of your own, with each of these pages should be identical to the other as far as your site visitor is concerned. This is because what you are testing here is the effectiveness of two different systems or models, and if you use different landing pages, then that introduces another possible variable which might skew your results. Publish these two landing pages on the net under your own domain name and web hosting account.

The landing pages should be designed to offer your visitor a free gift in return for their name and e-mail address. Once you have ‘landed’ this information, then you automatically redirect the visitor to the product vendor’s page.

Using landing pages in this way means that you can add a percentage of your visitors to your mailing list, and that single step represents a very significant advance in your long-term business building efforts.

Each of these landing pages should contain a different tracking link to the other that you can create entirely free using Google Analytics.

With these tracking codes installed on your to landing pages, you can then track which page (and therefore ‘system’) is sending most business your way. To do this, your web hosting account will in all probability feature several statistics packages which will enable you to track where your visitors are coming from. If your hosting account is using a cpanel, then look for the ‘Web/FTP Stats’ icon: By clicking on this icon, you will be taken to a list of different statistical analysis packages, from which you should select either AwStats or Webalizer: Both of these programs will tell you where all your traffic is coming from, and that will, in turn, indicate whether your modified or improved system is actually performing better than the original.

If it is doing so, and the improvement is significant in terms of visitors coming to your site, mailing list signups and sales generated, then you have a product from which you can generate increased profits, and also one that you might like to bring to the market as a product for sale to other marketers.

3. Invest in your own business and future.


When you reach the point where there is a reasonable level of money being generated by your business, you should avoid the temptation to think of it as income or money in your pocket.

Instead, this money should be considered to be seed capital for growing your business even more. Even when using a system as simple and as costeffective as bum marketing (as an example), there are tools and resources that you have to pay for that will improve your effectiveness significantly.

Many online marketers who are using articles as a primary way of advertising and promoting their business will manually submit those articles to the top half-dozen article directory sites. In order to maximize the effectiveness of those submissions, they will go to the time and trouble of rewriting their articles so that a unique variation is submitted to each of the directory sites from which they hope to generate visitors.

The advantage of using only the top half dozen directory sites is that the whole thing can be done manually and therefore at no cost. On the other hand, there are several hundred article directory sites on the net, and it would obviously be considerably more effective if it were possible to submit a unique article to hundreds of directories, rather than to a small handful.

Doing this manually would take for ever, but it can be done using a program like Article Post Robot. Whilst it is therefore obvious that using such a program would massively increase the effectiveness and therefore the profitability of submitting articles to the directory sites, a program such as this one which would enable you to do it is not free.

Once again, we return here to the difference in the mindset needed to advance from being a newbie to a position where you begin to be a serious marketer. In all probability, most newbies earn money from their internet marketing activities and pocket it.

As someone who is intent on becoming a serious marketer, however, you must understand the reason for plowing some of that money back into your business. If, for example, you were previously earning $100 a month, it clearly makes sense to invest that $100 if by doing so you can earn $300 a month.

In this scenario, if you take the original $100 and spend it, then your income level will stay at the same level, so your monthly profit is $100. By investing that money in software or resources that increase your monthly earnings to $300, in the first month you will increase your profits by 200% (i.e. you earned but then spent $100 to gain $300, a profit of $200).

In every subsequent month, however, the whole of the $300 that you receive will be profit, assuming that you do not choose to spend some of it on other tools or resources that will enable you to increase your profit levels still further.

This extremely simple example illustrates why, in order to move beyond being a newbie, you have to be willing to invest some of the money you earn from your online activities back into your business. In some ways, this is, in fact, one of the clearest signs that you are treating your business as a serious one, rather than as a hobby that pulls in a few extra dollars a month. That in itself is an indication that you are moving beyond being a newbie internet marketer!

Blog post summary:

· Locate other successful online marketing businesses, and model what you do on those businesses. However, do not slavishly copy them · Whatever business model you choose to follow, try to improve and upgrade the system if possible, so that you can add your own unique selling point or angle.

· Be willing to invest in your own business. This is one of the surest signs that you are treating your internet marketing activities as a serious business, and also one of the quickest ways of accelerating your profits.

Some specific examples of ‘stepping up’… As an affiliate marketer… We have already considered one of the best ways of improving the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing efforts when we looked at creating landing pages in the last section.

As a newbie affiliate marketer, obviously your primary consideration was on how much money you could earn the most by selling other peoples products. This is, however, the kind of short term thinking that would characterize a newbie, because, whilst this might put money into your bank account, it is a completely ‘one-off’ deal. Once that customer has bought whatever product you’re promoting from the vendor’s sales letter, they are lost to you forever.

Listen to any internet marketing expert or guru, and they will tell anyone who listens that the single most important asset that any online business can own is a mailing list of responsive customers. Indeed, you have already encountered proof of this if you have been selling digital infoproducts from a site like Clickbank.com.

You may already have noticed that more and more product vendors are paying 75% of the sales commission to affiliates, and perhaps wondered why? The reason is straightforward and simple enough.

They realize that it is well worth it to give away 75% of the initial sales proceeds in order to attract the maximum number of affiliates to their product, because doing so will also maximize the number of customers that they can add to their mailing lists.

Once a customer is added to a list in this way, the product vendor is then able to send product promotions and recommendations a couple of times every week, and, as long as those recommendations are sufficiently well targeted, doing this will generate sales.

In fact, many top-level marketers estimate that every customer on a mailing list is worth $1.00 per month on average to the list owner. And, because you sent the customer directly to the product vendor’s sales page, you are never going to get a share of any subsequent sales proceeds that the product vendor generates primarily because of your initial efforts.

You are, in effect, building the product vendor’s business, rather than your own.

It is for this reason that using landing pages to collect customer details for your own mailing list represents such a huge step forward for you. In doing this, you begin to build your own business for the first time, and that is one of the most significant steps you can ever take towards moving your money making efforts up a notch or two.

In effect, you cease to be a salesperson for someone else, and become an online business owner in your own right for the very first time. Of course, you have to accept that there is a downside to sending people to your landing pages before you send them to the product vendor’s sales letter. You will undoubtedly see a slight downturn in achieved affiliate product sales as some of those visitors choose not to proceed when they see that, in order to do so, they have to give you their name and e-mail address.

One way of combating this is to improve the perceived value of the free gifts that you are giving away in return for that name and e-mail address information. For instance, if you were previously giving away one unique niche related report, increase that number to two or three reports. This is, in fact, considerably easier to do than it may at first appear.

Returning to the earlier example where you were promoting products in the weight loss market place, open up the homepage of the leading article directory site, EzineArticles. Scroll halfway down the homepage and you will see the search box in the column on the left-hand side of the page. Type in your primary search term:

Click on the ‘Search’ button: And you’ll see that there are over thousands of articles listed on the site that deal with some aspect or other of weight loss.

Have a read through some of the articles on the site, and download 20 or 30 of the best ones that you find. Doing this is perfectly within the terms of using a directory site like EzineArticles, and you can republish these articles in almost any format, as long as you leave the original authors biography and information attached.

Compile these articles into two reports, and you have far more information available to give away on your landing pages than you had previously. The associated increase in perceived value of the gifts that you’re giving away should increase the number of mailing list signups that you generate from your landing pages.