Planning for Your Internet Marketing Success

Having a plan in place is a big advantage, but it is also a fact that not everyone is good at planning. If you find yourself in this situation, it does not necessarily mean that you have no future as an internet marketer. What it does mean, however, is that you have to adopt a slightly different approach, one that is best suited to your own character and personality.

Find a mentor

If you’re the kind of person who finds it very difficult to create a plan, or to stick to a plan once it has been created, then you might best be served by finding an experienced mentor who can ensure that you stick to the right path.

Unfortunately, whilst finding a mentor is a very sensible tactic that will definitely help you to be successful, it is not always that easy to find someone of suitable experience who would be willing to mentor you. You will occasionally see a new program launched wherein a top level professional marketer offers to take on a small handful of newbies who they are willing to mentor to success. The two major problems with most of these mentoring program offers is that, firstly, they are usually massively oversubscribed and, secondly, there are generally very expensive as well.

Alternatively, there are various sites that specialize in introducing potential mentors to students who are looking for such people within their market sector or niche. A list of such sites can be found here, whilst an example of a mentoring site can be seen here and this is an extremely useful article about mentoring.

As you are reading this, it is assumed that you want to progress from being a green newbie in the internet marketing business to being someone who might be described as an intermediate level marketer. This being the case, whether you are using your own plan or want to engage the services of a mentor, you must be focusing all of your attention on working on one project or with one product only...

Whilst how you go about deciding what this project or product should be is something you will read more of in the next section, the point to understand is that the best person to mentor you will be dictated by the nature of that project or product.

For example, if you wanted to become a professional classic car restorer, then the ideal mentor for you would be an expert in classic car restoration. Employing a leading brain surgeon as your mentor would be both pointless and ridiculous!

Whilst this is a plainly absurd extreme example, it highlights the point that the best person to mentor you will be someone who is an expert in the topic or subject matter in which you want mentoring. Perhaps up to now, you have not really decided what money making method you want to utilize in order to make progress in the internet marketing industry, and also what niche you intend to operate in.

However, you should not underestimate the importance of this choice. As an example of the importance of the niche you choose, imagined that you are already an affiliate marketer who has so far promoted digital infoproducts to other internet marketers. The question now is, is this a suitable path to follow in order to make further progress.

Sadly, the chances are that it is not. By focusing on promoting to the internet marketing niche, you are picking a fight in an ultra-competitive marketplace where it is going to be extremely difficult to increase your earnings in the way that you would like.

If, however, you focus on promoting infoproducts outside the internet marketing industry, then your chances of success are significantly improved. For instance, the weight loss infoproduct market is an extremely lucrative one, but the competition is an awful lot less cutthroat than it is trying to sell internet marketing products to other internet marketers. In this case, therefore, a slight change of focus could make a huge amount of difference to the future success of your internet marketing ventures.

Once you have come to a decision about what you want to do, then there are various ways that you can look for someone who might be interested in working with you as a mentor.

The first option is to find the most widely recognized experts and gurus in that particular market niche. This is, however, not always going to be particularly easy or productive. If, for example, you decided to continue promoting e-books as an affiliate marketer, you might try to find a top level e-book seller to mentor you, but why would they do so when you represent direct competition?

In other market niches, however, the experts might not be in direct competition with you. In this case, there is no conflict of interests and it should therefore be considerably easier to convince them to help you.

Find their websites and, if the site features a contact e-mail address, use it to try to get in touch with the expert behind the site in order to make your request. If, however, you cannot find a contact e-mail address on their site, try running a ‘WhoIs’ search of the domain name, because if it is not privately registered, such a search should turn up a contact e-mail address.

The problem of this approach to finding a mentor is that you’re doing nothing out of the ordinary. This is exactly the approach that most of the people in your niche will adopt when they try to find someone to mentor them, and therefore,the chances are that the expert in question gets dozens of such requests a week.

The chances of him (or her) agreeing are accordingly very slim. A far better approach is to become a free-member of the forum sites highlighted in the next section of this report, and use those forums to get involved with other online marketers.

As long as you make an active and useful contribution to the forums in question, over time, other members will become aware of you. In fact, you may even be able to befriend other more advanced marketers in your market sector or niche through these forum sites.

Because of this burgeoning personal relationship, it will be considerably easier to approach them with a request for mentoring a little further down the line.

At least create a daily ‘mini-plan’

Before you close down your computer at the end of every working day, write down a list of everything that needs to be done the next day. Then, put those tasks into the order in which you’re going to do them and make certain that you list either the most difficult or least pleasant job first, or simply the one that is the most important.

From there, prioritize everything else that needs to be done the next day, and make certain that everything that is of importance is featured early or high on that list. In that way, if you have been over-optimistic about what you can achieve in the day, the tasks that will remain undone at days end will be the relatively unimportant ones.

Keep every one of the daily plans that you create for a period of a week or two. After that time has elapsed, you should be to able to see some kind of pattern emerging of what you’re doing every day, and, more importantly, where what you do every day is taking you.

Is that the direction that you really want to go in?

If so, then that is excellent news, because what you have in front of you is a plan ‘blueprint’ created over the previous week or two based on actions as opposed to ideas, notions or words. If not, then you now have a detailed breakdown of where the most precious commodity that you possess (your time) is being frittered away whilst taking you no closer to the objective that you want to achieve. In effect, what you’re looking at is an ‘anti-plan’ and if nothing else, that will show you all of the things that you do every day that you must stop doing. This too represents a very effective planning tool!

Blog post summary:

· If you lack planning skills, then you might want to look for a mentor who can guide you to internet marketing success.

· Make sure that any mentor you choose to work with is an expert in the field wherein you are must interested in making money

· You can try approaching niche experts with your mentoring request, but you are likely to have far more success through niche focused forum sites.

· If you have no plan and no mentor, write down a detailed job plan for the next day at the end of the preceding one. Prioritize these jobs so that the most difficult or most important jobs are the first ones to be completed everyday.