How NOT to make money online!
I got an email from someone asking for help. He’s not making many sales via Clickbank and his Adsense earnings are falling. In his email he said…
“Then and only then, when the clickbank sales start slowly increasing is one able to take a breather and study the theory, but not until.”
So, distilling the essence of that quote it means… “I want to make money BEFORE I know how to do what it takes to make money”.
I’m sorry, I know I’m being harsh, and when money concerns are of paramount importance, it DOES seem to be more important to make some money than to understand how the money is made… but it can’t be done that way.
If you start an offline business with the attitude of making a few bucks and then learning the “theory” you’re going to go bankrupt with massive debts. The online world is no different, except that the “cost of entry” is much less, so you could fail with smaller debts… but you’ll still fail.
Here’s the way to do it… use your current debts to concentrate your mind… focus on how money is made online… where money is made online… after you’ve learned the “theory” go and do what’s necessary to make your own money online. If you know how to sail a ship before you set sail you’ll have a much, much better chance of not sinking!
If you want to succeed online, please, learn about the topic… even if it’s from free newsletters, reports and articles. Read the runes. See how other people are making money and model your business on them. Start out small, feed on your own little successes. Build momentum.
I didn’t get my $12,400+ affiliate check the day after I started my online business. It took a long time to build to a check that size. I do remember my first ever check. It’s dated July 1997 and is for $45.40. I carry a copy of it in my wallet.
To go back to my nautical references… you know the saying, “learning the ropes”? I believe that comes from studying models of boats, especially the rigging and how the sails worked before stepping foot on a real boat. Fast forward a few hundred years and the same applies to making money online… you have to “learn the ropes” first.
June 12th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
I have yet to understand why people think they can earn $$$$$ overnight with internet marketing
Most other businesses take *at least* 12 months of 16 hour days to make into a real profitable concern
I too started on the internet back in 1996 (ah, that’s 10 years now - more on that later
) - and my first cheques were, well $0
It takes time, hard work, lots of research and lots of hours….
June 12th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Hi Neil,
Thats a great piece of advice, and it helps me, I think what 99.95% of people including myself don’t understand is “learning the ropes”, there are so many ropes out there and more being added everyday.
I speak to a couple of net maketers and they seem to buy the latest software to do whatever and before they use it something else comes out and they never bother using what they just bought.
I think most people need to learn te basics and move forward I get sidetracked evey day now on something that does not earn me anything, again I think eveyone is looking for the next big thing or a way to pay the ever increasing bills.
I am one of them people are lacking any direction at all. I think the hardest part is trying to motivate yourself personallay i can work 5 hours a day on the net and earn nothing all week, trying to remotivate myself is very difficult, then you get the odd 2 cent adsense click and you think “is it worth it”. I think we all just need a bit of luck. I think the main thing that motivates me is like the lottery I just hope what i doing today is going to make me something in the future, but untill that time comes its a bit of a uphill struggle.
Cheers
Kevin
Uk
June 13th, 2006 at 2:20 am
Thanks for blogging Neil. I’m still trying to just get started. Still have zero on my list and zero in sales. Still trying to learn the ropes. I enjoy reading your blog. Thank you very much. Atlanta, Georgia USA.
June 13th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
I’ve recently started the adsense game, since Michael Cheney’s videos. I used to have adsense one of my websites, which made me about an extra $200 a month… but had to take it off for business reasons.
I just started my own personal blog, which I’m not rushing to make thousands of post on for ads. It’s a long term project.
I plan to add adsense to another one of my websites that does pretty well with traffic, I hope to get some decent money and more motivation to update that well.
And I’m planning to create a new article website, with nothing but 100% original articles and html pages only. I find html is the only way to go for the search engines.
Question: Neil, what do you recommend to create a 100% html article website? Do you have any specific software you use? Or hand made templates? I’ve tried a few already with no luck with the search engines and the websites that I use .html pages, almost all those pages get index. So I’m all HMTL now.
Wordpress seems promissing search engine wise.
Cheers.