Part 29: Can I Really Make Money from Internet Marketing?

Stock exchanges across the globe appear to have stepped back from
the brink after the disastrous falls at the end of last week.
News of governments agreeing to coordinated support plans for
their countries banks seems to have instilled a little much
needed confidence from investors as markets opened again this
week. One can only hope that the glimmer of hope is sustained.

However, what is certain is that regardless of what the money
markets do in the short term, or how quickly the banking system
stabilizes, world economies are heading into recession for the
rest of 2008 and probably most of 2009.

That means that we all face a year or more of financial
uncertainty.

It means that many jobs are suddenly a lot less secure.

It means that belts will have to be tightened and that for some
people, the future could involve some real hardships.

Why am I writing such doom and gloom words?

The reason is that with so many of us staring a bleak future in
the face, it has never been more important to look for ways to
augment and bolster the household budgets.

With tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people facing the
very real prospect of being laid off at work, there has never
been a more critical time to look for alternative ways to make an
income.

I’m not going to try to sell anything in today’s Kickstart -
let’s get that straight from the beginning. Today I want to talk
objectively about a subject that is of real subjective interest
to all of us, and clouding the issue by attempting to make money
from it won’t help matters.

The subject is clearly on many people’s minds, but it has come to
the forefront of mine this weekend because of an email I received
on Saturday.

It was from a Kickstart reader, who shall remain nameless. In it,
he wrote:

“Martin, I’m turning to you for advice because I don’t know who
else to trust and I get the feeling that you won’t blow smoke at
me like so many of the gurus would. My situation is pretty bad
right now and I have some hard decisions to make which I hope you
can help me with.

I’ve been told that I should expect to be laid off at work soon,
and I know that the prospect of finding something else is slim. I
might be able to get minimum wage work if I’m lucky, but there
isn’t much going on where I live. I have a wife and two kids and
very little in the way of savings. I don’t think we will starve,
but I’m really frightened about the future and feel powerless to
do much of anything about it.

My question to you is this…do you really, honestly, think that
I can make enough money to feed my kids and pay my mortgage
through Internet marketing? You write about this program and that
all the time, but do you really think that any one of them could
be the lifeline I need?”

The email was a lot longer than that, but I’ve trimmed and
paraphrased it to make the core question clear.

And what a question it is!

It boils down to this: does Internet marketing really work, or is
it yet another bunch of hooey from people trying to extract money
from people who can least afford it.

My answer might surprise you.

First of all, there are many people for whom Internet marketing
will never work. It is true. Some people, no matter how much they
spend on this program or that, this latest greatest course, or
that over-hyped ebook, will never in a million years be able to
make more than coffee money online. They are just not suited to
it, and it isn’t suited to them.

Why? Well, for starters, there are always some people who won’t
take advice. They read all the books, listen to all the experts
and decide to go about things in their own sweet way. And usually
that way is wrong.

Then there are the people who, no matter how simple you make it
for them, still resent the idea that they have to do some of the
work for themselves. they constantly fight against the idea of
putting any personal effort in – even to the extent of expending
more effort in their resistance of working than they would in
just getting on with it.

And there are people, surprisingly quite a lot, who seem
constantly intent on clutching failure from the jaws of victory.
These are the people who start out well, follow all the right
advice, but somewhere between making a brilliant start and
reaping the rewards of their success, manage to derail their own
efforts. I feel particularly sorry for these people because they
work so darned hard and then just throw it all away.

Sadly many of those people who have a go and fail are then left
with the view that all Internet marketing is a scam and anyone
peddling ways to make money online are con men and scammers.

The truth is that Internet marketing isn’t the magic wand or the
panacea of all goodness that many who sell its virtues might
promise. It is very possible to fail, and usually because of
faults in your own nature. There ARE bad programs out there and
it is very much a case of caveat emptor (buyer beware) but more
often than not the people selling ways to make money have good
intentions.

Failure in Internet marketing is rarely a costly business. You
might be out of pocket a couple of hundred dollars and a few days
of your time, but nothing like the risks involved in failure at a
bricks and mortar business.

Okay, so we’ve established that it might not work – but look at
the reasons for failure again – they are rarely down to the
marketing principle being at fault. The failures are most often
due to the characters of the people who are half-heartedly having
a go.

Let’s flip the subject on its head now and look at what it takes
to succeed.

But first, let me assure you that with the right attitude, and
the correct success-oriented mindset, success is very possible.

I know a lot of people from all walks of life who are very
successful as online marketers. People who have gone from barely
being able to turn a computer on, to making a full time living
online (and yes, giving up their day job) in a remarkably short
space of time.

It IS possible. I should know – I do it myself. Just yesterday
(which was a Sunday) I made more money in one day than many
families make in a month. It was an exceptional day – I don’t
claim to do that every day (I wish!) but it shows that if a
particularly unexceptional person like me can do it, anyone can.

Success in Internet marketing takes a few basic character traits:

* The ability to listen
* The ability to learn
* The ability to adapt
* The ability to experiment
* The ability to keep going
* Persistence

Then you need some other fundamental traits:

* A willingness to seek advice
* An excitement to turn your computer on each day
* An understanding that you are dealing with a vast global market
* The honest acceptance that just because one thing you try
doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean that all Internet marketing is a
scam.
* A healthy degree of realism – overnight riches are about as
likely to fall your way as winning the lottery.

Also, you need to understand that ‘Internet marketing’ takes many
different forms. I like to write, so I’ve adapted my online
activities to take advantage of that. Other people are good at
graphics, or are excellent with detail, or are good dealing with
people and build their online businesses around their particular
skills. There isn’t just one way to be successful online – there
are as many different ways as there are successful marketers!

The trick is to find what works for you.

If you already have those traits, or can learn them, and
understand that despite some of the wilder claims made by people
selling money-making plans, Internet marketing takes hard and
sustained work, then you might just be one of the people who it
will work wonders for.

Because for the right people, with the right attitude and the
right mindset to succeed, making money via the Internet is a very
practical proposition.

So, to answer the question: “My question to you is this…do you
really, honestly, think that I can make enough money to feed my
kids and pay my mortgage through Internet marketing?”

I really, honestly believe it can be done. If you start now,
before you are absolutely against the wall, you will have time,
hopefully, to build a real business that can sustain you – if you
have the character traits you will need.

The good news is that you don’t need to spend any real money to
find out. Buy a domain for under ten dollars and some hosting and
create a WordPress blog. You don’t need to buy any high priced
courses or ebooks just yet. You don’t really need to buy
anything. Learn the ropes, consult the Warrior Forum for ideas
and support – heck, even read up on the details of what you need
to do on my free online course at http://imkickstart.com

If the economy is really about to go to hell in a handbasket, it
seems a good idea to me to build some insurance into your life by
starting an online business that might very well see you through
the recession with a big smile on your face.

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Part 27: An On-Page SEO Brainwave

When designing web pages, we try to incorporate as many things that the search engines like as possible. This is called On-Page SEO. But the problem is that nobody knows for sure exactly what factors the search engines actually do like.

And they are not saying!

We can ‘reverse engineer’ the search engines to some extent – my own Keyword LSI Spy  tool does a pretty good job of analyzing the top ranking pages for any given keyword or phrase, but there is only so far you can go because every page is different, and so many factors can come in to play.

What we need is a means of looking at pages where only a small amount of what is on page changes from one page to the next – effectively allowing us to reduce the variables and find out what the SEs really do with a small set of data. But how do you go about finding a whole lot of pages that you can compare against each other in Google (for example) where we know that only a limited number of things change between them?

It is something I’ve puzzled over for a long time, but this morning I had a brainwave.

Forgive me if this is blindingly obvious to you. It is to me NOW, but you, like me, may not have made this connection yet, so the technique I’m about to share may be very useful.

EzineArticles is an online article directory that has many hundreds of thousands (millions probably) of articles. And the great thing from our point of view is that each one is displayed in a standard template. So, effectively, the only things that change on the page from one article to the next are a couple of meta tags and the article body itself. All the other stuff on the page, particularly for articles aimed at the same keyword, remains virtually identical.

In Google we can search for pages within a website. So by using the search string: “acne treatment” site:ezinearticles.com (using whatever keyword phrase we like between the quotes) we are given a ranked list by Google of articles that they consider to match our keyword from the EzineArticles site. Because of the sheer size of EzineArticles, you’ll be hard pressed to find a niche that doesn’t return a good selection. My acne treatment example pulls up 16,500!

Now we can look at the articles that Google has selected for us and see what, if anything, makes the ones nearer the top of the pile stand out.

 Here are a few suggestions for factors that you could check out:

* Meta Title tag
* Meta Description tag
* Meta Keyword tag
* Article word count
* Article keyword density
* Use of LSI words in the article
* Use of synonyms in the article
* Keyword density in the article title
* Keyword density in the first paragraph
* Keyword density in the last paragraph
* Keyword density in the middle paragraphs
* Average sentence length
* Average paragraph length
* Links and link anchor text
* Recency of article
* Style of article
* Use of subheadings

Unfortunately, EzineArticles have software in place to prevent automated scraping of their content, so it isn’t possible (by me anyway) to write a script to do this analysis in a php program, but with some patience you can easily get some good indications manually.

Try it out – and let me know if you find any surprising new insights!

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Part 26: Sightseeing on the Road to Success

Why is it that human nature so often makes us take the most difficult route to where we want to get to?

I’m thinking about business in general and Internet marketing specifically, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to apply across the board.

For example, in Internet marketing, although there are literally hundreds of different ways to make money, most people struggle. But every once in a while someone comes along who succeeds effortlessly and makes a killing. How come?

Then that successful person writes an ebook on how they ‘Twittered for Gold’, or ‘Craigslisted their way to success’, or ‘Made Five Figures With Video’ or whatever the latest thing is – and everyone with half a brain reads the book and realizes that nine times out of ten there are no big secrets being revealed – just plain common sense.

[Sorry about the extreme length of that sentence - I could seem to find a way out of it!]

You see, I think that there are people – most of us, most of the time – who get confused because we think that ‘it’ should be complicated. So we look for complex solutions, convoluted processes and contrarian systems. Something inside of our brains won’t accept that success really is simple – we have to introduce layers of complexity. And in so doing, we focus so hard on the process that we lose sight of the destination.

Its like driving – as long as we have a map and know where we are heading for, navigating the route is easy: each new road we take is a step towards our target. But as soon as we stop to think ‘oh, this is a pretty road, let’s see where it leads to’ our focus shifts away from where we want to go and on to where we are now.

The result is we get lost.

Psychologists and animal behaviourists tell us that one of the main difference between humans and animals is that our brains have evolved to be able to imagine a future. We have areas in our brain that can extrapolate from our past experiences and our present condition and create an image of the future. Animals, it seems, either lack that facility, or have it to a much lesser degree.

Somehow, though, when faced with business decisions, many of us suppress our ‘thinking forward’ skill and rely on the far more basic magpie mind (ooh, look at that nice new shiny thing…).

That constant jumping from one good looking idea to another draws our focus away from the destination and firmly on to the process.

Destination oriented thinking is absolutely crucial to your success – and mine. I don’t claim any superiority here – I’m just as likely to be sidetracked and diverted as anyone else. Maybe more so.

But recognizing the problem is a big step towards dealing with it.

So, how do those people who write the books find the ‘secret systems’ that they sell – the ones that, as I said, when you read the book you think are actually blindingly obvious (except that you didn’t think so before you read the book)?

The answer is simple to explain but quite difficult to put into action.

What these people have that most of the rest of us don’t is the ability to focus on what it is they want to achieve, and then to look at whatever process they have decided to study (be that Craigslist, Squidoo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Article marketing, or any of a hundred other methods of online marketing) with an eye to finding out what people who are already successful are doing.

There are very few original thinkers – and most of those who can and do come up with truly original concepts are too busy profiting from them to want to teach them to other people (even if they have the communication skills to do so).

No, the ones we end up learning from are the people who make it their business to understand what works. The people who have an innate ability to see below the process and to understand the route. In other words, they don’t focus on the shiny diversions, they focus on the entire map.

There is good news and bad news.

The bad news is that if you want to be a teacher, you will have to learn the difficult skill of seeing an entire journey and understand how each part inter-relates to each other part. It is a skill that we can all learn, but one that is difficult because it requires enormous focus.

The good news is that if ‘all’ we want is to be a success, then our job is really much easier. We have to learn to follow a map and to ignore the pretty roads we’ll see along the way.

Sightseeing has its place, but not on the road to success.

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