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.