How Do I start Internet Marketing With Ease?
Newcomers to Internet Marketing are often awed by one question –What is the easiest way to start?
That question is not made any easier when you start seeing the tons of materials available online promising different results and giving different advice and directions on what or what not to do.
Worst still many times you don’t have a way of validating these claims.
Related to this question of where to start is also that of knowing who to trust. That would be covered later on in some other post. Both questions almost sort of tell you from the onset that this could be a very long journey…
So you are left with the two dilemmas of figuring out how much to learn and also how to identify which materials are useful to spend your precious time on.
You have to make sense of all of these seeming confusing questions.
Sounds familiar? I have been there!
And it is not pretty as it could be very frustrating, to say the least.
Below you will find my account of my Internet marketing journey when I started as a newbie and how frustrating it was for me until I found that Affiliate Marketing was undoubtedly the best place to start Internet Marketing as a newbie. Ever since then things have been different and I have started focusing on that one aspect.
I bet you can learn one or two things from my own experience.
If you do, then you could save valuable time and effort in the process and avoid some of the frustrations I had to deal with.
If you are a newcomer like me to the Internet Marketing / Make Money Online niche you will agree with me that one of the biggest challenges people like us face is where to start.
Wow! I have spent months just studying tons and tons of materials, hours on end watching videos upon videos and reading reports upon reports.
And don’t get me wrong these are not videos made by some armatures (no offence guys, your time will surely come if you just keep at it). These videos are proceedings from Affiliate Marketing conferences such as the Affiliate Word Asia Conferences (AWASIA 2018) and listening to seasoned veterans like Neil Patel (@neilPatel) talk about affiliate marketing.
They speak with so much passion and in-depth knowledge that it almost becomes intoxicating.
Boy! some people’s passion for what they do can be the kick on your butt to challenge your level of motivation. And thanks to Youtube, these videos are queued one after the other that before you spend three or four hours you hardly notice.
As for the reports I have read, many of them are books really as they are sometimes sold as such. So they do contain real meat by way of substance. So you go through these materials you are so excited at hearing how people are literally making money by the bucket loads and you rub your hands and say to yourself indeed I made the right choice in seeking to be part of all this. Congrats! But as you would find out later that is only just the beginning!
For those not too familiar with the term, Affiliate Marketing is the term used to describe the process of promoting goods or services produced by others (vendors). See the infographics below for a diagramatic representationof affiliate marketing.
The person thus doing the promotion is called an Affiliate for short. And so if you were to create an account on CLICKBANK®, for example, you would have two screens allowing you to transact business both as an affiliate and a vendor.
Internet Marketing Challenges -Conflicting Voices
No doubt you have heard all sorts of slogans “The money is in the List”, “Content is King” or “Just develop a product and become an expert”.
Added to these are many more that I can’t list here. Please don’t get me wrong, from even the little I know these are are all very true in their own right, as I am getting to find out as I go on this exciting journey.
But this is where we begin to get lost as newbies. These all sound like discordant voices in our ears with the net effect of deepening our level of confusion at best and at other times increasing our frustration.
The preceding then leads us to the real issue –Where does one start? I had been at that point for months! I was literally stuck! Yes, I had gotten some of the tools to start building my list and had even attempted drafting those autoresponder sequence messages.
Has anyone been there? Anyway, that is how far I could go. Even my many years of experience managing e-mail services for a large multinational corporation could not get any further.
Oh, by the way, I was sort of amazed when I found out the amount of efforts that go into creating the right Subject for each message!
Again Wow! So how was a newcomer to know all that if he was to start his or her Internet Marketing career with List Building?
Content Creation Struggles
Now let us consider the process of trying to create a piece of content to be traded for those precious commodities, I mean those commodities that you crave so much of; that your customers guard as if their lives depended on it?
If you are still wondering what this is then you are really a Newbie!
I am talking of the email addresses!
If you are like me, I wouldn’t put my name on anything that I was not proud of. And so it isn’t just finding anything.
Yes the PLR sites are replete with those but honestly many of them just don’t make it for me. I want to give and promote something of value and have the feeling that I am giving something of real value.
Anyway, I am sure I will get to share some of my experiences with PLRs sometime. But suffice it to say that as a newbie, starting your journey with trying to create your product from scratch is a daunting experience except of course if in your previous life (by that I mean you already have publishing experience) you already gathered the skills to do that then well and good, you could start with that. However, for the rest of us, we have to find something less arduous to start with.
So how would you like to avoid many mistakes that a lot of us newbies make at the start of this journey?
I am sure all of us would. I could write a book about all the textbook mistakes I have made. And watch out I just might do that someday.
And the painful part is that many of these mistakes are what I will call honest mistakes. But as I have learned over time, honest mistakes are not cheaper than real mistakes! They are equally as costly. For one, I made these honest mistakes out of my great enthusiasm to start making money at the earliest possible opportunity. Yes, the word is “opportunity”. But as you many get to realize –hope not too expensive, what the newbie sees as opportunity may not always be that.
If you don’t take anything else from this blog let it be that. Like they say, to be forewarned is to be forearmed. And so I spend time watching a video or reading a book about online marketing in general and more specifically about affiliate marketing, I start having ideas. I take notes upon notes and just like that, I jump into making it work. As you may already see for those who are at least wiser, you need to ensure it is the next thing to do not just whether it is the right thing to do.
It could be the right thing to do but the wrong time! So this is where Affiliate marketing comes in. From my experience so far, finding the right affiliate marketing program could save you loads of “birth pains”. I call them birth pains as these are usually commencement pains that you go through only once. Once you have mastered it then you gain the experience and you don’t go through that again.
Choosing An Affiliate Marketing Program –Hook UP Issues
Although I have said finding the right program could be advantageous, please note that many of these affiliate networks or groups come by recommendation and others by reputation.
Vendors generally are looking for people to sell their products and would favour people who ALREADY have experience doing that. And of course that usually excludes newbies like you and me –We rarely have anyone to recommend us nor do we have any reputation that precedes us.
Just a short while ago, I watched a video while trying to put in an application for one of those affiliate programs. One of the scenes in the video was the picture of a big bouncer standing at the gate preventing access to these big dudes.
Indeed for many affiliate networks that is the reality –it is almost cult-like by the nature of their exclusivity.
This is why we need to network and dig deep to find the networks or vendors that understand our unique challenges and that can accommodate us. I just recently stumbled on one of these rare ones and have signed up and started on that journey. To find out specifically about the one I joined click HERE. You could complete a Sign-up form HERE if you would love to receive my Affiliate Marketing Newsletter.
Affiliate Marketing -Potential Benefits
In conclusion, I believe finding the right affiliate programs that not only can provide the products and all the marketing materials but also the relevant know-how to get you started promoting these products and making money while you build your skills in your chosen niche area becomes your ultimate goal as a newbie.