I Think I will Become a Brain Surgeon – Tomorrow!
Are you the kind of person that can see something in front of you once… and immediately have the skills to do it yourself perfectly every time? If so, you should not be reading this blog, you need to become a brain surgeon! On the other hand, if you are like the other 99.999~ percent of the living and breathing population, it will take you many hours and possibly years of practice, to gain the needed skills to do something right, more than 50% of the time!
Making Money Online is Not Brain Surgery, But it Takes Alot of Practice!
How many of you reading this went to College for 2 years, 4 years, or even 8 years? How about a Trade or Technical School? The point is… you were willing to spend several years of your life and many thousands of dollars to learn the very basics of a skill that would carry you for (hopefully) the rest of your life.
Why then, do most people who decide to enter the make money online market, think they will find long term success within the first few months, AND with little to no investment of money? With very few exceptions, the common mantra in the MMO world is to gain vulnerable readers, present them with a rosy green promise of gaggles of cash, then get them to buy something from you or sign onto a mailing list, so you can sell them more promises of wealth via email! (**cough~bullshit~cough**)
Set Your Goals and Expectations Low when You Start Out
Just like the brain surgeon would not expect to perform successful surgery within the first few days of College, we need to set our own expectations according to our skill levels. If you are just entering the affiliate marketing circus, the process of learning is only going to be as easy as you make it on yourself!
Choose a Site Topic you Already Know About!
Whether you decide to build a niche store, build a product review site, or just start a wordpress blog, start with something you ALREADY know about! If you trade regularly in the stock market, start a site about your experiences and techniques! If you enjoy cooking, start a site about cooking! Do you like to take pictures? If so… post them on your own site and talk about how you took them! ALL of us have something we do well or know a good bit more than others do, use that as the topic of your first site, it will be much easy to understand the process.
A friend of mine recently asked me how they could get started in affiliate marketing. Since they run their own in-home daycare center, I suggested a site that helps other learn how to the same thing! The result was a Do it Yourself Daycare website, started 45-60 days ago. They spend one hour every day, just blogging about their own experiences… versus 4 hours a day, learning about different topics!
Commit to At Least 90-120 Days of Learning on your FIRST Site!
From the day you register your first domain and setup your hosting, make yourself a Commitment to Learn! Stop reading every new ebook that comes to your inbox and focus 100% of your attention on taking your first website from nothing… to, Hey – I Can do This! 99% of everything you would ever need to know is freely available on the web!
The way you market your website and earn money will always be a moving target, the basics of delivering great content to an interested reader base, will never change!
- Learn how to use WordPress!
- Forget that WordPress is delivered as a blog platform, and view it as a Content Manager.
- When you find a website that provides great information like this one, subscribe to the rss feed so you don’t miss future posts! (My link is in the upper right of the sidebar :-) )
- Learn the basics of writing great content! Search Optimization will occur naturally, when the foundation is in place!
- Learn the basics of keyword research people in your market may be interested in.
- Ask questions and participate in discussions in the same social community. We ALL started somewhere and most people are happy to help, in return for a simple thank you!
The biggest hurdle we all have to deal with in the affiliate marketing arena, is making sure we don’t let our goals exceed our own skill level. Take your time, learn as much as you can and apply it in a market you are already knowledgeable!
Forget about Making Money – The Money will Find You!
The biggest mistake most people just entering this market seem to make, is that they want to go from “What is Affiliate Marketing” to “Make 5 Figures a Month” in less than 30 days! It may take years for you or anyone else to make 5-6 figures per month on a steady basis! Most give up trying after less than 6 months… when they realize it is not going to happen overnight!
To Summarize:
- Affiliate Website Marketing Takes Practice!
- Start Slow by Choosing a Topic or Passion you Already Know!
- Learn as much as you can about the Tools and Resources and Apply them as Needed!
- Write Great Content that will get Attention in the very Wide Web!
- Don’t Chase the Promise of Money – Let it Find You!
Once you discover what it takes to realize success in a topic where you have knowledge, you will quickly understand the challenges of making money in a market you know nothing about!
Share your own Experiences Below…
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Progressing on the New Site – Niche Store of Tomorrow
- What you Learn Today will Last a Lifetime!
- What is Most Important when Buying or Trying New Software
- Getting back to the Basics of Website Development
- Build an Authority Website Based on a Knowledgable Topic!
- Hello From Cindy
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Great post Mark, I’m already subscribed to your RSS! Keep up the good work.
Thanks Mark for continuing to help others learn what you know about how this all works. My best to you and yours.
@ Pedro –
Thanks man – FYI – I have left 3-4 comments on your blog and I think my email may be getting trapped in your spam plugin. None have ever made it to the public side of life! :-)
@ Terry –
Great to see you posting again Terry!! Lets all cross our fingers for a great year – the job market is sure looking bleak!!
Thanks again, Mark. More sound advice (and a reminder for the not-so-newbies) that’s a refreshing change from the ‘get rich quick’ ripoffs you see everywhere.
KUTGW! (Keep Up The Good Work!) :)
I found one of them Mark and I do appreciate them! Not sure why Akismet would think it was spam, you didnt have any links in it…
I have a family friend who wants to start doing affiliate marketing. I will refer her to your site. Your friend’s Daycare site looks great. It looks very professional and you would never know it was her first site and only started just a couple of months ago.
My biggest obstacle is that I get so overwhelmed with all the technical parts…doing stuff with robots.txt, htaccess, url canonicalization (say that 3x fast!), 303s,302s,411s, do this and don’t do that or google will hate your forever kind of stuff. I get so scared when I start a new site, making sure everything is perfect, it takes me forever.
Hey Mark: This post was a great way to answer the questions I’ve had for you lately!! Thanks and I’ll be waiting on the check for providing you with the material for this post!! Just kidding…looking forward to your next post and thanks for all of your help. You da’ man!!
Mark,
Way to hammer home the practice makes perfect mantra!
As online entrepreneurs, we are constantly bombarded with get rich quick crap that we think it’s not a stretch to get rich not that quick. Still, we sometimes don’t accept that we have to learn fundamentals and commit them to our daily practice before we start seeing results.
Seems like you and I had this conversation just recently-LOL!
Jeff
Mark , this is a very interesting post. It took me about 4 months to see a dime from commisions from knowing absolutely nothing. and thanks to your guidance I am well above a dime now. The thing with aff marketing is that it is an ever changing arena, with the search engines and the different things that you need to know without messing things up. I am glad we have you for keeping us on track and headed in the right direction.
Haha, love the way you were able to sneak in and get people to subscribe like that :P
I spent probably my first year learning and not monetizing, so now is when I start that
Not quite there on the $1000 per month yet (Dec $896) but will get there soon.
Mark is exactly right! Pick something you know and like to do and write about that. I have wasted too many hours developing, writing, and trying to keep interested in blog topics that I am not interested in just because they are the “latest topic”
Since I’ve focused on three things that I know and am interested in those three sites have basically doubled in readership and income each month.
Follow Mark’s six steps and STOP looking for the quick and easy way to get rich.
Unless you are P.T. Barnum making money on the internet takes time, patience, lots of reading and practice.
Oohhh, i’m looking forward to the 1K club : )
Having a site that deals with something you love or something you are very interested in, makes a HUGE difference!
great info!
I have been doing this internet marketing thing for a while but until I stepped into the BANS world is when it actually started working for me. So it had been over a year before I found BANS and then it took prob 6 months for me to actually figure out a lot of money can be made with BANS.
Mark
Just wanted to say that I enjoy your info and you have been a great help. Your advice for writing what you know about has helped me focus to develop a site (not the one my name links to) that put me over the $1500 a month mark last month!!
It did take some time (8 months) but now I only update once a week or so with well thought out info and the traffic continues to grow.
Thanks again
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