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Success in Internet Marketing

Can you recall the first time you were in a car or on a motorcycle that was moving so fast that it made you anxious? How did you feel getting on a steep, twisting roller coaster or other thrill ride? Was it fear you felt before your first bungee or parachute jump? You hoped it would all go all right but you weren’t certain it would … remember? But when it was over, you couldn’t wait to do it all over again, right?

Failure to Jump
It’s estimated that 97% of people who get into Internet marketing fail to make any money at it. That’s astounding to me but I understand why it is.

There are plenty of things a person who has started a business could do and, in my experience, they will naturally gravitate toward the tasks that they understand and feel they have the best chance of obtaining a result with. I am talking about things like setting up a blog or designing a logo or a business card.

All those things are fine and will be needed at some point but, especially in the beginning, they won’t move a new business ahead in any meaningful way.

I compare this approach to people who are too frightened to jump or the ones who are hanging around the amusement park doing everything but getting onto a ride.

The actions that will move your Internet marketing business forward are usually completely strange and new for most people. They don’t understand them. They don’t know if they will get it right. So, they procrastinate and find other things to keep them busy. They never jump.

It’s Not a Business Until …
Just like you can’t have a college without teachers or a party without guests, you can’t have a business without customers.

I may be wrong about peoples’ fear of the unknown. Perhaps they’re not afraid but rather not aware of which actions are the most important ones to take. They don’t realize that not all actions are of equal value.

The primary concern of any person starting up in Internet Marketing should be to obtain their first customers, make sales and get the money coming in.

So, the blogs and business cards can wait. The various apps or plug-ins that seem so urgent to get, install, and use—it can all wait. All energies should be directed into activities that will drive traffic to your offers and provide leads that you can turn into customers.

A High-Converting Offer
For someone who chooses to be an affiliate marketer, selling someone else’s products, the simplicity is that you need to find a high-converting offer and drive traffic to it.

What is a high-converting offer? It’s not the product itself. It’s information about the product that’s both informative and persuasive enough to cause someone to take an action, such as to give you their email address or even buy the product straight off. It’s effective at increasing interest in the product. It converts readers into sales leads and customers.

When I say “information,” I mean the written or video content on a landing page that tells you about the offer. Five (or even five hundred) people could market the same product, using their own offer, and each will convert differently. A great, valuable, and desirable product marketed with a poorly conceived sales pitch will not be high converting.

Once you identify a high-converting offer, all you’ve got to do is place ads to promote the product and drive traffic to the offer (product landing page). This is not news; you’ve likely heard me talk about this numerous times before. The more people you can get in front of the offer via your promotion, the more leads and sales you will make.

The Right People
There are some advertising people who will tell you that if the offer is good, you just need to get in front of people. But I have not found that to be true. If you’ve got a great offer on yarn and knitting needles, it doesn’t matter how many teenage boys or truck drivers see it—it’s not going to convert them.

So, it’s a matter of getting your offer in front of an audience that’s interested—mildly, moderately, or extremely—in your type of offer.

If you’re promoting a home business opportunity, you would want to get your offer in front of people who are looking for extra income opportunities or their own business. With a little Googling, you can figure out what websites, blogs, and forums those kinds of people spend time on. You can figure out who the home business gurus are. You can identify which print publications this crowd might subscribe to. Those are the sorts of places you’d want to place ads for your offer.

Then it’s just a matter of choosing one traffic method (type of ad) and working with it until you get a result.

Will everyone who sees the ad click on it or contact you? Probably not, but within the community of people who frequent such sites and publications, you will have a larger percentage of response than you would just reaching out to a general audience.

Final Thoughts
People who are new to online marketing definitely need to spend some time learning things. But don’t get caught up in the cycle of endless learning at the expense of doing things that will actually move your business into business.

Try using a 1-to-4 ratio: one hour learning, four hours doing. For instance, spend one hour learning about a particular traffic method and then apply what you learned for four hours. Create the ad and place it.

What you will find is those four hours of doing are where the real learning occurs. You will also make real progress that way. That progress will lead to success.

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