When you get started online you really want to get that first thousand dollars earned as soon as possible. In this article, I’m going to give the beginner internet marketer 7 of my best tips for achieving this in the shortest time possible.
These tips have mainly come about from mistakes that I made when I started out online. It took me a couple of months to make my first $1,000, but in retrospect, I now realise that I could have made that money a lot faster.
Don’t make the mistakes that I did, follow these tips:-
1. Find a Hungry Crowd Before Picking a Product
I remember vividly my first money making campaign. I went straight over to Clickbank.com (the world’s largest digital product vendor) to find products to promote. I promoted the products that I would be interested in buying. Unfortunately this is completely the wrong way of going about things (not least because I am not representative of the consumer marketplace!).
Instead of making my stupid mistake, you need to make sure that you do your research and try to find a hungry market of people first and find out what makes them tick. What problems do they have? Are they willing to spend money to pay for a solution? How old are they? What sex are they? And so forth.
With all this information at your disposal you can then take the time to match a product to their precise needs and make nice, high conversions.
2. Learn a Few Traffic Techniques and Learn them Well!
Earlier today I was speaking to a friend of mine about driving traffic. She told me that she had a page full of ways to drive traffic and that she had “analysis paralysis” simply because she didn’t know where to start.
This is all too common amongst beginners. Traffic generation isn’t that hard – you just need a traffic strategy. And a traffic strategy needn’t include 100 different traffic sources – just a couple is fine.
I am current building a list in the Make Money Online niche (one of the most competitive niches online) yet I’ve managed to get this list up to just shy of 500 people in a matter of a few weeks by following a simple traffic strategy.
Here’s what you need to consider. If you’re operating in a new, up and coming niche, then it makes sense to try and build a web site and get traffic from Google. A blog is the perfect site to achieve this. Each page within the blog should be optimised for keywords (preferable long tail). Article submissions, video marketing and web 2.0 sites are also very effective in niches where competition is minimal.
However, in niches of high competition you need to take your focus away from Google (because it’s just too competitive to get decent listings) and start looking at alternative forms of traffic generation. Most people view competition as a hindrance, but if you flip it around, it can actually be an advantage.
To get traffic in a competitive niche you need to look for strategic alliances and leverage. You should be submitting your articles and content to high profile, high traffic web sites and ezines, signing up for joint venture giveaways, finding others in your niche to piggyback off and to do adswaps with. In many ways, it’s easier to drive traffic in a competitive niche – but only if you focus on the right sources of traffic!
3. Build Your List!
I know, I know – you’ve been told this before. However, you need to do more than just build your list – you need to build the relationship with your list. If your subscribers start to know, like and trust you then you’ll be able to make easy sales in the future when you come to promote genuinely useful products to them.
If you spent the next month simply building your list then it would be a month well spent! And of course, once they’re on your list send them some useful stuff before you make your sales pitches.
4. Stop Buying Get Rich Quick Products!
Trust me when I say that I know how tempting all these “get rich quick” schemes are but at the end of the day the only people getting rich are those that are selling the deal.
You don’t need to waste your time buying every product on the sun on a false promise. You’ll only become distracted and ultimately dejected when you realise you’ve been sold a “duff” one.
Anything that mentions getting rich in the next few days or weeks – don’t even consider purchasing it. Trust me when I say that making money online doesn’t work like that – there’s a bit of hard work and elbow grease to put in before you reap the rewards.
5. Focus your Attention on just 1 Project
I see it all the time when I log into internet marketing forums on the web. In fact, I’ll be honest with you – within the first couple of weeks of starting out in internet marketing I made this mistake…
I entered far too many niches at the same time. I had articles in about 15 different niches after the first month – I was spreading myself far too thinly.
The problem with this approach is that you’ll never have the time (or the inclination) to build a truly valuable follow-up series. And this is where the money is at. Instead of creating site after site that’s full of less than useful content and is really only there in the hope that somebody may click on your ads, I recommend that you create one site with a powerful profit funnel that converts and spend all your time generating traffic.
Once you have a list of a couple of thousand people you should be making four figures per month fairly comfortably. They say that the average return is around $1 per subscriber that you get on your list (although this obviously varies between niches). Once you’re in this position you’ll be able to make a fairly passive income.
The other obviously advantage to spending your time in just one niche (as opposed to 20 different ones) is that you’ll be able to make yourself an authority figure in that niche. Once you’re the “go to” guy, then you have it made!
6. Buy Your Own Domain and Hosting Account
I see many newcomers to this industry create blogs or web 2.0 sites at places like squidoo.com and blogspot.com. I don’t think they truly understand the risk of creating a business model on a platform that reserve the right to strip your assets at any time.
You’re probably thinking that I’m just scaremongering you. But, let me reassure you, right now I can think of many people who have lost thousands of dollars in income simply because they didn’t host their web sites on their own domain and hosting account (under their own control).
In fact, just this week, a friend of mine had his Blogspot blog de-indexed by Google because he was promoting “Make Money Online” products. Most of you will know that Google owns Blogspot – and for some reason they decided the content was “inappropriate” for their blogging platform and penalised the listing in the search engines.
This time last week the site was listed third for the term “make money online” in Google and he was making thousands of dollars each month from advertisements alone. Now, the site is pretty much worthless as it no longer gets any traffic.
I’ve heard similar stories with hubpages.com and squidoo.com. A domain and hosting account will set you back around $30/year – don’t overlook it.
7. Find a Mentor
I’ve mentioned this before but I believe it is so important to your success. A mentor who’s been there and done it can literally save you hours and hours of hard work, frustration and heart ache from just one 30 minute conversation over Skype.
If you can pay for one then do so, if not then head over to an internet marketing forum. Before long you’ll see who the experts are; approach them with a positive attitude – one where you demonstrate a willingness to work, achieve and help them on their own business for free and someone will most certainly take you under their wing. Pro tip: A message on Facebook is going to have more chance of being recognised that a private message in a forum.
Taking this slightly further, I recommend that you attend internet marketing events and network with people. In this business it’s all about who you know as well as what you know (well, this is true in most businesses in fact). Try and put together a mastermind group where you get together on a call with other similar minded, driven internet marketers and really feed off each other’s enthusiasm. You will find this game hard on your own – so get networking!
You Really Can Do This…
Making money online is a very real opportunity and, by very virtue of that fact that you’re reading this article, you clearly know that already. Focus on visualising what it is you want to achieve, eradicate self doubt and every day take consistent, intelligent action on your journey to reach your goals.
This article is written by guest author Paul McCarthy at paulmccarthy.co.uk. If you’d like to learn how to make a full time living working from home, then sign up at his site and he’ll teach you personally for free. He is a star guest blogger at QOT and you can read more articles by Paul. Get your own tag on our site by guestblogging here.