Why Failure Sometimes Happens

Getting into Internet marketing is like going into business for yourself.
What most people fail to realize is running a business is running a business.
The same obstacles and challenges that people have offline are the same
obstacles and challenges you face online. Except in a different format.

If you have difficulty selling items in a regular brick-and-mortar store.
You are going to have difficulty selling online. Don’t think that slapping a
website up is going to transform you into an instant super salesperson.

It won’t.

Instead, seek to become a better businessperson. By taking your cue from
basic business practices and transferring those skills online.

Take the following perspective.

Taking the position of an offline business owner. You first set out to get a
location. A website in the offline world. Inside this location, you will have a
range of products for sale varying in price and needs. These will become your
affiliate offers if you plan on doing internet marketing.

Second, after setting up the location, you would go to work each day to
attract people to your store. You are not going to attract people to your store
sitting on the sofa. For this to happen you need to focus on 4 revenue
producing activities:

• • Generate traffic. Through organic strategies or paid strategies.

• • Have a process to capture this traffic. You want a process where you can keep in touch with your potential clients/customers.

• • Ability to follow up. Very few people, 3%, will purchase from you on the first interaction with you or your business.

• • Presenting offers to your audience. As I said above, operate your offline business like an online business. If you do, it is only a matter of time before you see success.

YOUR ATTITUDE IS HALF THE BATTLE

Business is a competition, just like sports. Like anything worth doing, be prepared for setbacks. Setbacks are part of the game, and you can’t let a few setbacks sour your entire game. So, give it you’re all until the umpire blows the whistle and the game is over. At this point, you can evaluate what you did well and determine what needs improvement. Until then, the game can always be turned around at the last minute.

Having a positive attitude when you go into Internet marketing is essential. Like when you are competing in sports. If you think you will fail, you will. There is no better self-fulfilling prophecy than someone who half-heartedly goes into business. Followed by making excuses that it didn’t work out for me. That it’s all a scam for why the business failed.

It didn’t fail after they started doing it. It failed the minute that they didn’t believe in themselves. To make this work you will need stamina and persistence if you want to be successful.

There will be setbacks.

You must be able to use everything as a learning experience to finally cross that finish line as a winner. Look at it as failing forward.

UNDERSTAND YOUR STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

Every business reflects the owner who creates it, and Internet marketing is no different. If your strength is, for example, structuring a product lineup and not in sales. Then you must find or hire people on your team who possess those skills. Or you need to learn the skills to cover those weaknesses. Sit down right now and carefully assess any businesses you’ve created in the past.

What were you good at?

What did you fail at?

Learning from failure is the key to success. Those people who fail to learn from their mistakes, as it is said, are doomed to repeat them. Therefore, take account of your previous experiences.

What types of obstacles have you encountered in the past?

And how can these experiences apply in this new venture? What can you do to prepare an alternate plan to avoid these obstacles before they occur?

False Expectations Can Trip You

If you’ve heard that you can make BIG money on the Internet, it’s true.

You can.

Will you make it immediately?

While some people appear to have done so overnight, the truth is that they have gathered those skills over time.

They worked at it until, one day, it all came together. If you think that all you must do is to put up a website. Wait for people to show up. You have a set of false expectations that are completely unrealistic. And you will fail.

This is no fault of your own. It is how you are being marketed too. Most people coming into this industry are coming in with the prospect of improving their current circumstances. This circumstance often centers on making money. With internet marketing being a possible solution.

For these people, the focus is on making money and not building a business. These same people are looking for the path of least resistance. They are buying into the dream of the dream. To prove my point, scan your social media feed. You won’t have to search long. You will see a lot of content mentioning “10k” somewhere in the post. You’ll see it is quite common. And better yet all this can be achieved rather easily if you have the right done for you system.

Before continuing, here are the three misconceptions about Internet marketing. Following them will only lead to disappointment if they’re not tempered with some common sense.

YOU CAN QUIT YOUR JOB WHEN YOU FIRST START

If you have a job, keep it. Internet marketing is best learned as a side business. The thought of leaving your job should remain a thought. This is until your business shows signs of profitability. Unless you are independently wealthy, you are going to need a steady source of income. During this time you will gain experience with the Internet and with making money online.

Set some monetary goals, but don’t make them so outlandish that they demoralize you. The point of having goals is they should inspire you. Make them achievable, like making an extra $500/month.

Do you have a strategy planned to make that income?

Once you reach a goal, increase it.

At this point when you’re making an income equivalent to what your job pays. Then quit! With this additional time, you should be able to surpass what you are currently doing at your job.

DOESN’T TAKE MUCH TIME TO LEARN

Internet marketing is an exciting field to learn. If you hitch it to your passion, it will seem like fun. It won’t be burdensome. The concept of marketing is not difficult. However, if you think that all you must do is to put up a blog. Send out a few emails. Or post a few links on social media. You are in for a rude awakening. This is just the bare minimum.

You will have to learn how to get traffic to your offers.

You will need to design the right type of offers if you want to create an income.

It’s not just the technical aspects of setting up a website that take time to learn.

It’s the art of marketing online.

Expect that there is some work and time involved.

Don’t be discouraged if at first, you don’t make a single penny.

Be willing to learn the ropes. As before, it comes down to how you are being marketed. Again, look at your social media feeds. What do you see, how you can achieve x without doing x?

Nothing worth doing comes without struggles.

Another consideration is, that there is no formal education. There is no 4-year program on how to run an Internet marketing business. Therefore, it is left up to the individual to figure out a lot of this on their own.

Leaving people vulnerable to the unscrupulous marketers out there pedaling the “10k” without doing anything message.

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME

This might have been true five years ago, but today, the Internet is flooded with competing sites. Don’t expect that you can just put up a blog or website and think people will flock to it.

This business is not a printing press for money. It takes time to get traction. More than likely, you’ll start with one or two visitors a day, but it will grow over time. At this point, you’ll have to take action to attract traffic. This is where the art of marketing starts.

Trying To Be Too Perfect

The first thing to remember is that you don’t have to be perfect to start making progress. You need to have a solid niche and an online presence to expose that niche. And if you have targeted traffic towards your chosen demographic. You have a good start.

As much as a fancy, colorful, and perfect website is nice to have. It means nothing without a marketing strategy. Instead of spending thousands of dollars putting up a complex site. Build a site that is simple, fast, and has a marketing message explaining the problem you solve.

Does the person visiting your site come away with the message that you or your business can solve their problem? If not, they will bounce.

The Basic Mistakes Beginners Make

following elements are the basic mistakes beginners make when setting up an online presence.

YOUR NOT-SO-HOT NICHE

Hitch your passion to a profitable niche, and your chances of success increase dramatically. Do a little research before picking a domain name. Also, decide what niche you want to target. This way, even before one piece of HTML code is installed onto your website, you have a good idea of what to expect. If there’s no market for what you are selling. No marketing strategy can make up for that.

Once you pick a topic or niche of interest to you, you can check out the competition. This is accomplished by entering search terms related to your niche on Google. Use marketing tools like Hubspot, SemRush, or Ubersuggest and do additional research. Look at some of those competitive sites. This will give you an idea of what they are doing but at the same time, you can see the demographics of their audience. It can provide you with a source of attracting sufficient eyeballs to yours.

Pay attention to the types of products and services that appeal to the demographic in question. Think about how you can market to the same niche while putting your unique twist on it. Once you have a few possibilities, it is time to see what domain names are available to the market.

YOUR MANGLED DOMAIN NAME

Pick a descriptive top-level domain name that is easy to remember, flies off the tongue, and isn’t easy to misspell. Avoid hyphens and other odd characters if you can. Make it all one word.

Go to a site like Namecheap and see if the domain name is available.

You may have trouble with getting one- and two-word domains, as these have mostly been sold out.

However, a three-word domain is still a good choice and is relatively inexpensive through online domain name registrars. Pick a few good domain names that are and get a package to host your website if you don’t already have a hosting service.

EXPENSIVE AND FEATURE-LESS HOSTING

There are multiple Web hosts out there that offer packages for a basic website. At this point don’t go overboard, you can always upgrade. While you’re learning how to do this whole website thing, you should grab a package that puts up a website quickly without too much of a learning curve. You can do that by setting up a blog using WordPress or a hosting site like Builderall. Each gives you instant installations without having to learn a single line of code.

COMPLICATED WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

If you’re still stumped about what to do to get a website up and need a little HTML training, why not get someone to show you? There’s no reason you have to go it alone. With a majority of the paid plans, they offer great support and provide awesome tutorials.

Don’t worry if they don’t look perfect; just get them up quickly.

If you’re worried about looks, check out Twitter. It has one of the most basic and ugliest interfaces around, yet there are millions of users on this site.

You do want your site to look professional, but not so perfect that you spend a fortune getting it there. Keep it simple, put it up quickly, and get it done fast.

NOT UPDATING FREQUENTLY ENOUGH

Once it is up, you need to update the content on a consistent schedule where people know what to expect. You want balance. Create a schedule that you can maintain. Your goal is to keep people coming back to your site. If you only update once a month, people will quickly forget about you. Causing you to lose traffic instead of gaining it. Whatever schedule you decide to run with, stick with it. Nothing kills momentum better than inconsistency.

If you get writer’s block, which is normal, don’t stress. The worst thing to do is to post content for the sake of posting content. This will turn off your readers and they will leave you. As an option, you can hire ghostwriters or freelancers to add content to your blogs and websites for a small fee.

NOT USING SEO

Learn what you can about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Having a plan is crucial. Without a plan, it will be difficult for you to attract the right visitors to your site. By right visitors, I mean people who are prospects for your products or services. 

You don’t need to go overboard, but doing keyword research will help optimize your website. 

Additionally, when the time comes and you want to hire, for example, a freelancer you have a template to work from. someone to write content for you have a plan. This way you can include SEO techniques that are consistent and search engine friendly.

Not Having A Clue How To Make Money

In a brick-and-mortar store, the business owner has the advantage of setting out his/her merchandise on the shelves, doing a little advertising, and if the shop is in a good enough location, the buyers will come.

Taking this approach is deadly online.

Not having a solid plan to make money with your website is a big mistake for beginners.

How do you start making a plan? Next, I’ll share with you a few topics to bring to your attention. This is not an exhaustive list, but it is a start.

PICKING GOOD PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

The first idea that comes to mind is to offer a product or service that will pay you for your efforts. In many cases, you will receive a commission for the front-end sale. Unfortunately, these front-end sales don’t pay much because they are introductory offers.

If you understand sales funnels, the top of the funnel is where the lower resistance offers are made. Once the company pays you on the initial offer they have your customer’s email address and are free to start marketing to the customer you brought in. This is where the higher-priced products are promoted. Later down in the funnel. So the company makes the big commissions on your hard work.

That’s great!

Word of caution, don’t pick a product because of a commission if you are acting as an affiliate. Do your research and investigate the commission schedule. 

In either situation, the types of products and services that you offer on your site should match the demographics of the people visiting your site. You can’t market high-end products to low-income people. Always keep your demographics in mind when picking the products and services that you will offer.

NOT PUTTING UP SUFFICIENT OFFERS

If you only offer one or two products, once your audience buys these, what happens next?

Make sure you have many products and services in your lineup so that no matter how much your audience buys, there’s always something new to consider purchasing.

Having too few offers is one of the many ways you can fail to achieve significant income with your site.

OFFERING THINGS YOU HAVE NO EXPERIENCE WITH

This is a big one. As I said earlier, don’t pick or promote a product based on the payout or something you have no experience with. Be careful when you start listing affiliate offers in your lineup. Your reputation is on the line.

The best offers are those that you have experience with because you have first-hand knowledge of how the product or service works.

The last thing you want is to promote offers that result in fraudulent claims or make your customers unhappy. You will be the one who ends up with the blame, not the unknown product creator or provider.

Your site is representative of your good name.

Take the necessary steps to keep your reputation clean. Listen closely to customer feedback and remove any offers that fail to live up to their rhetoric.

Not Expanding Money Options

Selling products and services is just one way to make money online. As your business continues to grow you want to expand your moneymaking capabilities.

So that you aren’t limiting yourself to a brick-and-mortar model of selling only a product or a service. You can make money online in many different ways. Let’s look at a couple of examples: It’s important to understand these models and to implement them to expand the ways to increase your income potential.

TWO TYPES OF AFFILIATE MARKETING

When first getting into affiliate marketing, you will see many pay-per-click or pay-per-sale models available to choose from within your affiliate network. The most popular is the Google AdSense PPC program.

These offers depend on people coming to your site and clicking on the links you set up.

A pay-per-click (PPC) offer will pay you at most a few dollars for the click, and usually a few cents for each time a person clicks a link.

A pay-per-sale will pay a percentage commission that depends on the affiliate offer but is much harder to generate due to the action requested, completing a sale.

Along with PPC offers, there are cost-per-action (CPA) affiliate offerings that can generate income from your site.

These offers pay out much better than PPC and only ask that a specific action be taken by the visitor. The type of offers could be to fill out a survey, add their email to a registration form, or opt into a newsletter. 

The action can also lead to a sale. There are many CPA offers that are looking for sales leads. Not for actual sales. These are far easier to market on your site and lead to more income because a visitor isn’t being asked to purchase anything.

NOT EXPLORING OTHER WAYS TO MAKE MONEY

You can make money via advertising space on your website. If your site becomes popular, advertisers will line up to put their ad or banner on your page. Resulting in you receiving a monthly stipend for that exposure. This can happen with traditional websites and blogs too.

Another option you may want to consider is setting up a membership site. With a membership site you can add special content inside a protected area for a monthly fee.

You can make money by putting up search engines that pay for every time that someone searches your site.

You can offer discount coupons on your site to your offline businesses and reduce the cost of printing offline, thus creating more money in your retail budget.

There are many ways to make money online that are different than what you currently know.

Having No Sales Pipeline Outlined

Even with all of these offers lined up, if you don’t have a plan for what to present first, it can get rather confusing, for both you and the prospective customer.

Online, you need to plan out a sales pipeline and always keep some offers in front of your prospective client.

You should know what they’ve seen before and what they’re going to see next.

You should plan out and understand how demographics will affect your pipeline too.

Hopefully, you have a capture process in place. With a method of acquiring email addresses, you can start building an email list. With this email list, it’s up to you to make sure that they hear about you and your business regularly.

It’s not like a regular retail store where they might take the chance to go to your site to buy some particular item. Instead, you are dealing with people who will be hopping all over the Web. Unless you repeatedly pull them back to your site, they will soon forget all about you. The sales pipeline thus serves two purposes: it’s informational and it’s for sales.

SEGMENTING YOUR CONTACT LISTS

For all of your sites, you might have one master email list that you can use to send reputational-type emails that focus on you and where your business is headed. These types of emails have nothing to do with sales. They can be entertaining but are generally used to relay vital information that everyone on all of your lists needs to know.

Outside of reputational-type emails, your lists should be segmented. Segmenting the list means that you put customers into categories. They could be categorized based on demographics, interest in certain products/services, or income brackets. Then you should separate people’s email addresses based on that information. From here you can market different products and topics based on where they are in the sales cycle.

If you don’t know what demographic they belong to, just stick them in the low-income bracket until they buy a product. Then offer them a product from the next grouping to see if they bite. If they do, move them to the new list and market those products to them regularly.

PLAN THE SALES PIPELINE ALL YEAR

Here is where planning comes in. I would suggest using an Excel spreadsheet or something similar. You want to have a good idea of when you are sending out emails, to whom you are sending out emails, and what products and services are being offered.

You should know when a holiday promotion is coming. With a plan, you can figure out how you want to promote the product and whatever discounts you feel are necessary to generate additional income. It seems like a lot of work, but it will make the operation of your website smoother and more profitable in the end.

Not Promoting Your Site

We talked about false expectations earlier. Too often entrepreneurs think what they have created is so unique that they don’t need to market it. The reality is you are going to do some heavy promoting if you want visitors to show up.

If you are working on your own, you don’t have the same resources to advertise as a massive company can using television, radio, and newsprint. Instead, your choices should be limited to what you can do online. Prime the pump by having a marketing campaign set up to distribute content so that when the site goes live, you can start the promotion.

Avoid starting to toot your own horn as quickly as the sites go up. Nurture the process and here are some simple methods that you can use to promote your site online.

SET UP EMAIL SIGNATURES

If you are in the position of using multiple websites, it’s beneficial to set up separate email addresses. Another suggestion is to set up additional email signatures. These signatures are inserted in your email and automatically promotes something of value to your customer. Be careful that you don’t come across as a jack of all trades. This will hurt your reputation. So, promote your site or a recently featured product or service. Or anything else that can make money for you. 

SEND OUT PRESS RELEASES

Write up press releases for all new products and services that you are offering and make sure to go online and add them to press release sites. You can buy a service that will take one press release and post it to multiple sites. As long as you have your Web address and what you are offering, it’s a great way to promote across the Web and to gain more traffic to your site.

WRITE INFORMATIVE ARTICLES

You can also submit informative articles to article directories for free. If you write up a great article and it gets lots of attention, it can bring loads of traffic to your site. In the resource box included with these articles, you are allowed to post two links. Choose what you advertise there carefully and be sure to stay within the terms of agreement of the site for those links.

UPDATE YOUR SOCIAL NETWORKS

Use an automatic service that can send out status updates on new offerings to all of your social networks. This way, you centralize those functions but still get the word out to everyone.

Not Tracking Results

After all this work, you probably will have some idea of whether your strategies are working or not by tracking the bottom line. This the obvious way of tracking your Internet marketing success.

Three other things you want to track for better results are traffic, conversions, and marketing effectiveness.

TRAFFIC

Your website will track traffic by way of the unique visitors and hits to the site, along with other statistics. While that’s a good way to know how popular your site is, it tells you very little about where your main streams of traffic are coming from. Taking a further look, you see what countries give you the most hits and which sites as well. If you’re testing a specific promotion, however, it doesn’t show up unless you take the time to use a URL shortener that will track how many specific hits to that link showed up on different days. Include techniques to view traffic and analyze it in as many ways as possible.

CONVERSIONS

Conversions typically refer to converting a visitor into a customer. However, if you are using CPA offers, you may just be converting them into someone who completes an action that delivers money to your pocket. You may want a free area where people subscribe and convert from an anonymous visitor to someone with an email account. Numerous conversions can show you how well your site is doing and where it needs more work.

MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS

When you do email campaigns, wouldn’t it be nice to know how many people opened your emails and clicked your offers?

Using a system like Aweber.com, you can automate your sales pipeline and also track the effectiveness of your email campaigns, down to the emails and links that got the most attention. This helps you to start to recognize what works with your audience and what doesn’t.

Split testing is another way to test the marketing effectiveness of different sales pages. This can be done with email marketing too, but it’s often used with Web pages. The idea is to set up two different versions of a sales offer and send half of the traffic to one Web page and the other to the other. The one that has a better conversion rate is the better advertisement, even if all that was changed was a title or the position of a “Buy Now!” button. “Why Website Analytics are Important.”

Going It Alone

The worst thing a budding Internet marketer can do is to go it alone. Whether it’s trying to do everything manually and not using tools to make the process more efficient. For me, personally, hiring a coach was the best thing I have done. If not, I would still be out there trying to figure it out on my own and probably would have thrown in the towel. There is a steep learning curve to internet marketing. But there are so many tools, forums, and experts to help lend a helping hand. And I think it’s really sad when someone tries to do things the hard way.

Don’t be afraid to network. Like anything, there is good and bad. Use common sense. If it sounds too good to be true or claims extraordinary results with little or no work. You need to go in the opposite direction. For a little more insight, read, “Surfing the Online World Without Drowning.” A lack of networking, or a failure to listen to the experts who went before him/her, going it alone is a sure recipe for distress and high disappointment. 

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ONLINE TOOLS

We’ve discussed several tools as we went through this short report. There are many others just waiting to help you out with the job of automating important everyday tasks. I know everyone loves Free. But remember you get what you pay for and often you don’t get access to all the services you need. These software companies aren’t stupid. Once set in place, they free up time that you can spend elsewhere, raising your productivity.

It may take a bit of time to learn how to implement the tools, but the sooner you learn and implement them, the less time you will waste doing things manually from then on.

NETWORK ALL THE TIME

The Internet has facilitated the ease of meeting new people online. A great place to start your networking journey is forums, like Quora, and Warrior Forum, and contribute to the group. You can read some of the same issues that you are having and how people are resolving them. You can post your questions and get answers from experts online.

The same is true with social networks. You can attract people in your niche and see how they build their internet business.

Follow as many Internet marketers as you can. Watch how they promote themselves online and copy them. By viewing what they’re doing, you’ll get some great ideas to implement on your sites.

LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS

Go where the experts are and listen carefully. Don’t just listen, but also do. Go out and implement some of what they’re promoting and see if it works or not. Some things will work for you and others won’t, but don’t blame it on the tools or the experts. It could just be your audience or niche is far different than what those methods were used on before. Always customize everything you hear to your sites and niches. Consider that everything you hear has value, but you will be the one to decide exactly how it can work with your Internet marketing practices and sites.

By carefully discriminating between what works and what doesn’t. You can keep tight control over the information you are taking in. You will learn to sift the gold out of the sand very quickly. If you can find someone who truly excites you and understands your niche, see if they offer a mentoring or<br />coaching program. These types of programs can be expensive, but they can
catapult you into action and help you achieve in one year what it
might take a few years otherwise. Just be careful to choose reputable coaches
and always keep your eye on the results.

Then it becomes a question of who to believe. As I have said before, most
people coming into this industry are looking to change their current
circumstances and hear about internet marketing as a solution. Generally, these
people gravitate to the done-for-you systems. They don’t exist. It is not the
program it is what you are doing with the program.

My rationale is If it were that easy everyone would be doing it, and I<br />couldn’t imagine anyone living in poverty if this were the case. But that is
for you to decide.

What are your solutions?

Double down on your niche.

First, regardless of who, what, or where you are in your journey. The first goal is to develop influence. Which is difficult to do in today’s world. This is where you want to double niche down. Meaning, though affiliate marketing is your niche. It is difficult to develop a high level of influence here. Now, if you add to the keyword affiliate marketing, known as longtail keyword and you find a certain subniche. You can make this happen. So, look at what knowledge you have to share with the community and build influence in that area.

Develop a business owner’s mindset.