Importance of Attitude in Internet Marketing

The Importance of Attitude in Internet Marketing

If you want to become a serious and profitable internet marketer, there are certain things that you must do in order to have a real chance of succeeding in achieving your ambition.

The first thing that you have to acquire is the correct attitude.

Whether you market online on a full-time or part-time basis, you must have the correct mental attitude when doing so, because not having that attitude will almost certainly doom your efforts to failure. And, the key to the correct attitude is to treat what you’re doing as a serious business.

It cannot be something that you treat or think of as a hobby. A hobby is something that you indulge in from time to time when the whim takes you, and you cannot afford to approach your internet marketing business in the same manner.

For example, if you recommend a product to a potential customer, and they come back with questions about that product, you must answer them both promptly and accurately. To eventually get around to doing so a week or two later is simply not satisfactory, and it also guarantees that the customer concerned will make their purchase from anyone else but you.

Even if you do not have direct customers at the present moment, at some point in the future, you will do. Those customers will only do business with you if they can trust and rely on you. At the same time, they will probably never meet you in person or come to your office. Their only point of contact between you is going to be via the internet, which is, in essence, a very impersonal medium of communication.

Also, never lose sight of the fact that the customer is always King. If they want or need you to do a job for them in the middle of the night, then that is what you have to do, because that is how a serious business person deals with such demands.

And, if the notion of getting out of bed at 3 a.m. to answer a telephone call from a customer on the other side of the world terrifies you, then you should question whether you are cut out for working in a business environment which is, by definition, open and operational 24/7.

This does not necessarily mean that your internet marketing activities cannot be fun. After all, if something is an enjoyable experience, then it is far easier to do it, and as a general rule you will do the job far more efficiently and effectively if you are enjoying it too.

Having fun is, therefore, an important part of the internet marketing experience, but at the same time, at its central core, you must understand and appreciate that making money online is a serious business, and that it brings responsibilities with it.

If you’re currently treating your internet marketing efforts as a hobby or interest, then you need to change that attitude immediately if you seriously have a desire to become anything other than an online marketing newbie. Another extremely important aspect of your attitude is that you have to be a motivated, self-starting ‘doer’. All of the great ideas in the world will never make any money whatsoever if you never put any of them into action.

The fear of failure is one of the biggest hurdles that massive numbers of internet marketers have to overcome. It is easier to ‘hide behind’ spending all day doing mundane administrative tasks than it is to get out there to try to make money for your business The difference between success and failure is often represented by a very thin line. It is this fear of failure that causes many marketers to spend most
of their days engaged in pointless, menial administrative tasks which will never make any money for their business, rather than taking a risk by pushing out there into the marketplace.

The fact is, no matter how long you work in the internet marketing industry, you will have failures. That is an unavoidable fact which you just have to live with. However, every time you do so, you will undoubtedly learn something from it, and what you learn should make it far more likely that you will push on to success in the future as long as you apply that knowledge and get off your backside to do something!

There is absolutely no reason to be scared of failing. It has happened before, and it will happen again. At the same time, it is critically important that you become someone who acts rather than being a procrastinator who hides behind wasting the whole day with pointless non-moneymaking tasks.

Attitude is, without a doubt, the first thing that you must get right if you want to enjoy long-term success as an internet marketer. After that comes the second question which is, do you have a plan?

Perhaps you are familiar with the age-old ‘real world’ business mantra which suggests that ‘failing to plan is planning to fai. This applies every bit as much in online business as it does in the offline business world.

Whilst it may not necessarily be possible at this stage of your online marketing career to put in place a detailed step-by-step plan of everything that you want to do over the next five years or so, you should nevertheless try to do some planning, even at the very beginning.

Without any kind of plan, you have no structure to your business activities, and therefore your focus is likely to be very poor as well. Lack of focus is perhaps the number one reason why so many newbies who come into internet marketing never get past the first stage.

As an example, a very typical newbie scenario would have the marketer involved reading a report or e-book that tells them that product ABC is the best thing since sliced bread, and that they will become a millionaire by promoting it.

Unfortunately, the book gives them very little guidance about exactly how they are supposed to promote or sell the product, and therefore, they manage to land only one or two sales. Then they read another book or special report that they found was available for free download that says pretty much the same thing about product XYZ.
So, they immediately jump on that product and find themselves in exactly the same situation once again.

Having got no joy from product XYZ, they move on to product 123, then ZYX and so on and so forth. Every couple of weeks, they change the product that they are promoting without ever really giving themselves enough time to see whether what they are doing is going to be successful.

This is such a typical newbie situation, and a classic demonstration of a complete and utter lack of planning or focus. Many newbie marketers would perhaps suggest that it is not possible to put together a plan early in their career, because their knowledge of what is realistically achievable is perhaps not so highly developed at that point.

Whilst this is to a certain extent fair, it is nevertheless not a complete picture, and, given the importance of having a plan, it should not be allowed to get in the way of you creating a plan of some description.

For example, you can start with a framework built around where you are now in terms of your internet marketing career, and where you would like to be in three or six months time.

The type of questions that you should ask yourself in order to put together this framework would be along the lines of:

· How much money are you currently earning, and how much would you like to be earning in six months? It is important when answering this question that you try to stay realistic. If you’re currently earning $2 or $3 a week, then, of course, you would like to be earning $3000 a week in six months, but it is not going to happen. Aiming for $50-$100 a week would be a far more realistic and achievable plan.

· How do you currently make your online money? If, for example, you are promoting products as an affiliate, is that something that you would still be content with doing six months down the line? If you use AdSense advertising as you main cash generation resource, do you plan to continue doing so?

· Whichever method of making money online you are working, are you optimizing your efforts? For example, if you are an affiliate, are you certain that you know how to pick the products that are most likely to be top sellers? If you are using AdSense, are you doing so in the most effective and profitable manner?

· How are you currently marketing? Is what you’re currently doing successfully bringing enough visitors to your web pages, and, if not, do you know how to change that fact for the better?

· Are you currently utilizing the time that you spend on your online marketing activities most effectively? If not, what changes can you make that will increase your effectiveness and efficiency?

Note that all of these questions relate to what you are doing now, and how you can improve in the future. They do not, therefore, assume that you are going to undertake a huge change of direction in the next six month period, because, once again, to do so might be indicative of a lack of focus.

What is important at this stage is to sit down and try to honestly assess your own strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, try to analyze your own knowledge with a view to establishing where you are most knowledgeable and where your knowledge needs the biggest improvement.

Also, understand that, whilst the internet marketing community as a whole probably likes to imagine itself to be representative of a whole brave new world of business, it is, in fact, no such thing. Business offline is all about buying and selling, and it is exactly the same within the online business community.

The only significant difference between the two is that the marketplace where people come together to buy, sell and trade is different, which is significantly different to the notion that the online business model itself is something revolutionary and new.

Running your own business in any guise or format is essentially the same. You start off making $.50 a day, and progress from there to a daily $1.00. After that, you progress to two dollars a day, then three dollars and so on. In other words, building a business online or in the real world is a step by step process, and you cannot realistically expect to be able to run (in business terms) before you can walk.

Of course, you will see stories of online marketers who release products that make them $1 million in less than 24 hours, but it is important to appreciate that they did not do that from a standing start. They had spent years building their business and their reputation within the business community to finally get into a position where that could happen. Of course, you should create your first three or six month plan on the assumption that you will be more successful after a few months than you are now.

At the same time, however do be realistic about what you can hope to achieve in what is, in business terms, a relatively short time period. For example, any marketer who launches a brand-new products onto the market knows that achieving Google Page Rank for their sales page is likely to boost their sales significantly. At the same time, they also know that achieving Google Page Rank can take many months, and that expecting to do so in a matter of a couple of weeks is just not going to happen.
Having a business plan of some type is one crucial aspect of becoming a long-term successful online marketer. Making sure that your plan is realistic is absolutely of equal importance.

Blog post summary:

· In order to be successful and to progress from being a newbie, you must have the right attitude.

· That attitude must be businesslike and professional.

· These qualities must be allied with determination to succeed and a dedication to providing all of your customers with the best products and services that you can avail yourself of.

· Do not be scared of failure, and do not waste your time engaged in tasks that cannot make you any money. Failure happens to everyone on the internet to some degree or other, and you will be no exception.

· It is a big advantage to have a plan that covers at least the first three or six months of your internet marketing career. If you do not have one, you are making it far more likely that a lack of direction and focus will cause you to fail.

· Your plan should lay out in as much detail as possible exactly where you want to be at the end of your chosen period, although it will contain little specific detail of what you’re going to do in order to achieve that objective.