A journey from Internet marketing stasis to business mastery and financial freedom (I hope)

I was recently asked to write more about what it is I’m actually doing to make money on the Internet (as I promised I would). It made me realise that I hadn’t done a lot of that so here we go…

One caveat though… while I am earning a living essentially off the Net, I don’t want you to confuse me with someone who is very successful at it and really knows what they’re doing. I know a lot of theory but putting it into practice is another matter altogether. I’m learning as I go along and that’s what this blog is really about.

How I’ve Made Money

1. My Main Business

Okay, this is my primary earner. Without getting too specific, I have a product that I created and have been selling online for the last couple of years. It’s a software product so it’s delivered digitally over the Internet just like an e-book would be. For various reasons, there is an overhead associated with each sale and also commissions to pay but the overall profit margin is very high. If I could just sell more of it then I’d be earning a comfortable living rather than just scraping by.

Most of my time is spent working on this business. It’s tempting (oh, so very tempting) to kick off one or two other projects to bring in multiple streams of income and I do waste a lot of energy trying to resist this temptation. This business is only scratching the surface of its full potential and if I drop the ball now then it could be catastrophic.

Most of the marketing for this business is Internet based though an increasing amount is going offline (and yes, that is more expensive). I’m making good use of a lot of the Internet Marketing things I’ve learned but because of the target market, some of it just won’t work so I have to play around to discover what I can use and what I can’t.

As and when I get the chance, I’ll try to write about some of my marketing experiences with this business.

2. Underachieving

I was one of the successes of the first 30-Day Challenge back in July 2005 (though Ed never did add me to the Hall of Fame for some reason). It took a while to find a suitable niche so the whole thing – product, web site, sales letter, ad campaign, everything – was put together in about 15 days and my first 2 sales rolled in on the last day of the challenge.

As soon as it was over, I got straight back to my Main Business and left everything untouched. In the 2 months that followed, it pulled in about $680 (not profit). Not a huge amount but enough to convince me that the system worked. Getting my first cheque from ClickBank was also quite a thrill although they’re a bugger to cash over here in the UK.

I could have continued with this but my Main Business was demanding all of my time and I also had a bit of a problem. The niche was (and I believe still is) quite a good one but my product, that was knocked up in about 7 days, was not, to put it bluntly, of sufficient quality. While returns are to be expected, I was wasting lots of time processing them and responding to emails so in the end I shut the whole thing down with a view to doing it properly when I get the chance. That was over a year ago but I may still do that.

How I’ve Lost Money

1. AdSense sites

You may be asking yourself how someone can actually lose money with AdSense sites? Sure, it’s easy enough to put up a site that doesn’t make any money, but how to you actually lose money?

Well, first there’s domain name registration and renewal fees. They may be cheap but if your site doesn’t earn anything then that’s money straight down the toilet. Then there’s hosting fees though, in my case, I’ve got an unlimited hosting account so I don’t consider that.

But the biggest incurred cost is all those crappy software tools that the gurus told me I must buy to automate site generation and send all that spam to my blog, etc. It’s true that some of them were so bad I managed to get a refund but I still wasted hundreds of dollars on that stuff for a total return to date of about $3.72 (ah, the sound of flushing is still ringing in my ears).

Now clearly I didn’t do it right but if you’ve read my earlier posts on the subject you’ll know that I’m not a big fan of making money from AdSense in this way so I don’t need to go on about why I haven’t tried to fix the sites.

2. Other stuff

I’ve lost money buying into BizOps and various other dubious endeavours that, quite frankly, I don’t really want to waste time talking about. They’re outside the realms of Internet Marketing anyway.

How I’m Planning To Make Money

First off, I’m not about to give up my Main Business. This is my bread and butter and it has good growth potential. I just need to improve everything about how it’s set up and being marketed, and that’s what I’m learning how to do, especially with the help of Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System.

In parallel with that, Mercury is about as close to a “normal” type of niche Internet Marketing project as I’m going to get for a while, so that will be a good opportunity to put everything I’ve learned (and am learning) about IM into practice. As I’ve said though, this is a long-term project in a subject I’m truly passionate about so I’m not about to try and make a quick buck out of it.

Beyond that, we’ll see what happens. I’m not the kind of serial entrepreneur that can juggle 15 different niche sites and projects all at the same time. I think those 2 projects will keep me busy enough.

What Next?

There’s not much point in me talking about my Underachiever project, especially as I’m not actively working on any more now. But what I’ll try to do over the next few months or so is detail some of the things that have been working (or not working) for me in trying to market my Main Business online.

That’s all for now.

Let me start by saying that I don’t go in for New Year resolutions. They tend to be fairly artificial and short lived. To my mind, you shouldn’t have to wait until New Year to make important changes. Having said that, if any time of year is a good time to make resolutions then New Year is as good a time as any!

And this year, I got strangely inspired. This had something to do with watching “Adaptation” on New Year’s Eve, a quirky film about a screenwriter trying to adapt a difficult book. That led to talking with a friend about writing a novel, at which point I dug out my copy of “No Plot? No Problem!” by Chris Baty. This is a hugely inspiring book and not just if you’re thinking of writing a novel. It was a key influence on Ed Dale to create the Underachiever 30-Day Challenge in 2005.

So here’s what I’ve decided for 2007:

1. I want to do something amazing in 2007. Something I can look back on as a great personal achievement. It won’t be a novel but I do have a project in mind; a project I’ve been thinking about for over 20 years and never yet been able to get going on. Well, now I’m determined to make 2007 the year I seriously get started on it. I don’t want to give any details at this point but I’ll codename it project “Mercury”.

2. I will focus on my current business and not let any further opportunities pull me away, no matter how tempting they seem. If I can stick to this principle, it should save me a lot of stress and anguish!

3. I will leave no more than 2 weeks between posts to this blog. I’d really like to post every week but I’m also realistic and past performance shows that this one will be tough. This is about me committing to finding regular time to write about all the things I need to get out of my head.

So there we have it. A new year with all the Xmas hassle out of the way and a chance to do something amazing.

I wish you an incredible year and something amazing for yourself!

I’ve been hearing and reading a lot lately from guru after guru about setting short to long term goals and making sure that everything is aligned with achieving those goals. To work on only 1 project at a time and avoid jumping on every bandwagon that comes along.

3 years ago I quit working for someone else and started my own business. Sometimes though, I feel like I’ve traded one job for another that pays me less money and makes me do more work. But hey, at least I’m my own boss right?

So why do I continue with it? Because I know that if I could just focus on my business goals for 5 minutes and stop chasing opportunities, I could turn it into the business I know it has the potential to be. A business providing me with a steady income and more time to do other things.

So if I know what I need to do, why then do I suddenly find myself being sucked back into the Underachievers 30-Day Challenge this month? Have I forgotten how last year, despite my best intentions, I got practically nothing done on my business for a whole month? Or that I got very little sleep? At least I had the full support of my wife last year!

The trouble is, my opportunistic impulses are too strong to resist. I’m too weak and I haven’t mastered control of my feelings. I really need some Jedi training.

The thing about the 30-Day Challenge is that I know from last year how amazing it will be. The chance to get involved in an interactive learning experience within a great community and with a very good chance of having a profitable business drop out at the end. Not only that, but I can apply a lot of the new techniques I’ll be learning to my existing business.

And it’s not an opportunity I can postpone for 6 months. It’s an event and it’s happening right now.

I had thought that I could just see what was going on, learn a few things and get back to business. But it’s compelling stuff and I’ve got sucked right back into it!

It’s only day 4 of the challenge (well, nearly 5 actually) and I’m already 3 days behind. But I know I can catch up. I really want to succeed at this and meet the challenge.

I guess motivation is one of the key factors here and the trick is to try and get so fired up about achieving a goal that you’d do almost anything to make it happen.

I feel a Success Tip coming on but I’ve got about 8 more videos of Ed and Frank to watch and follow through on, plus more WIS notes to write up, a few customer support emails to respond to and some urgent consultancy to attend to (that just this minute came in)… Now where did I put those caffeine tablets…

And I’m so glad we booked that family holiday to the seaside for the middle of July. How’s that for timing? Maybe I can work an Undies project out of that…

I have to confess to being an Underachiever. Yeah, I know – you’ve already gathered that from my first post. But that’s not the kind of underachieving I’m talking about. And I don’t want you to think that I’m a total waster!

Now I’m always surprised when I meet people at seminars who haven’t heard of Frank Kern and Ed Dale’s Underachiever system. It’s a well defined process for finding a market, figuring out what that market wants, developing a product and selling it – all with minimum cost and risk.

A couple of years ago, I got sucked into the whole launch process for their Underachiever Mastery course which I duly bought (naturally). Well, it seemed great. I watched all the DVDs and as soon as I had the time I was really going to put it into practice…

So I sat on it for 6 months and did nothing with it.

That was until Ed Dale did the most remarkable thing I’ve ever witnessed in Internet Marketing. He decided to issue a 30-day challenge and teach as many people as possible how to make their first $1 in sales from scratch within 30 days using the Underachiever system. But the most amazing part was that he’d decided to do it for free using podcasts, online training videos and a members forum.

It all happened in July 2005. I think more than 900 people registered for the challenge. There were probably a large proportion of passive observers and many that dropped out. But a huge number stayed with it and continue to do so.

32 people made their dollar in the 30-day challenge. And I was one of them!

That challenge changed my way of thinking in so many ways and I started to believe that it was actually possible for ordinary people like me to make money online. Being a part of it was an emotional roller-coaster ride. Partly because of the amount of time and energy I put into it (and the resulting lack of sleep) but also because of the incredible community of Underachievers (”Undies”) that I became a part of.

I’d always thought of Internet Marketing as being a highly competitive, back-stabbing arena. But the generocity of everyone on the forum has been unbelievable. And I don’t think it would have happened if it hadn’t been for Ed’s huge generocity in the first place. It set the scene.

I’ve certainly done my best to contribute as much as possible. How could I not? I maintain a resource page as a one-stop portal into all the tools needed and places to research markets, etc. It’s really a labour of love. My chance to give something back.

I’d post a link to my resource page here but I really want to reserve it for Undies at the moment. If you register for free (from the Underachiever’s Blog) and visit the forum, you’ll find it soon enough.

And now is a great time to join because it’s all happening again. The 30-Day Challenge II starts in just a couple of weeks (July 2006). Be prepared for one hell of a ride and I’ll see you on the forum!