Residual Or Full Time Income?
Posted by Mitch on Jan 26, 2010
I was checking out a post by our Buddy Mike CJ talking about blogging and job security, and it sparked a memory in my mind. In his post, he’s talking about a friend of his who’s now sick and worried about his business. Mike talks about how, by making a living blogging and being online, he’s actually in a very good position because his business will not only make residual income, but he could still do blog posting from a hospital bed if he were ever in the position to have to do so.
It reminded me that the reason I actually bought my second domain many years ago was because I wanted to try to set up another source where I might be generating some online income as a just in case measure. As a consultant, there are times when I’m making mad dollars, and other times when my income is drastically deficient. There is more down time than alive time, but it’s certainly not vacation time by any stretch.
Enter internet marketing. The basic idea is to find a way to either create your own or market someone else’s products, create and market the webpage to hopefully get visitors to stop by and buy the product, then repeat the process over and over until you’re making serious bank. I mean, it sounds so easy when you hear about other people who’ve done it, right?
I’m here to tell you something you already know; it’s not so easy at that. It seems there are ideas that either work or don’t work, and products that either sell or don’t sell. There are tactics that may work such as mailing lists, or might not work such as popup ads; I’m not sure either one of these works or doesn’t work, but my friend Kelvin is wont to say (that is a legitimate phrase, Sire lol) that if people keep doing it then it’s working for someone.
Here’s the two biggest questions most of us ask about some of these things. One, if we copy what someone else has done step by step, will it necessarily make us the kind of money they’ve made? Two, if they’re making so much money doing that, why are they telling me how to make money? I’m not at that money making level, but I can answer both of those questions.
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Let’s look at the first one. Do you know the origin of modern day chocolate? Though there’s an interesting history about the stuff, modern day chocolate was pretty much started by Cadbury, whom many of you have heard of. Is there anyone who would say that Cadbury is the number one chocolate maker in the world today? Nope. I could probably pop off 5 other chocolate makers who are more popular and sell better. And most of them at least initially copied the same formula as Cadbury. But there are probably at least 10’s of thousands who have come afterwards that haven’t quite made it to Cadbury’s level, who might have started, floundered, and gone away already. But many of them are making some kind of money, and are surviving by doing it their own way. They’re not the norm, but at least they’re hanging in there. Those other people are us. We could follow the model exactly as the big time marketers do, and we will either win or fail; there are no guarantees. There are lots of dolls out there, but only one Barbie; that’s just how it goes.
Let’s look at the second one. Not on the money front, but on a different front, at one time, when I was still an employee, I was one of the top ranked managers where I worked. I was tied with another guy as the top dogs based on a survey of employees; not bad, eh? This was for a corporation that had around 1,600 employees overall. When I decided it was time to go, I wanted to get into leadership and management because I felt I was pretty good at it, and I wanted to see if I could help others get there as well. That’s what led me to write the book you see there to the left side, Embrace The Lead. Sometimes it’s not enough that others have named you as something good, and it’s not enough that you’ve shown that you can do something well, even mastered it, if you will. You want to see if you can then show others how to do it for themselves, to help spread your legacy, to prove that your theories and practices are correct.
And if you can make a little bit of jack off it. so much the better. However, the second one only works if you’ve actually accomplished something, while the first one is open for everyone. On the first one, though, we all learn that there might be aspects of how someone did something that we don’t like. For instance, Sire and I don’t like mailing lists; if that keeps us from ever truly being successful, so be it. But I remember a presentation I got to see a few years ago from a Rich Jerk representative that troubled me. I don’t want to give out all the details, but in essence the entire sales pitch was based on a lie to consumers. The person who created the video even gloated and laughed, saying his only interest was making money, and at least the people would be getting something out of it, even if it was based on his lie, since he knew absolutely nothing about the product. Man, I just couldn’t live with myself if I did that.
And therein lies the issue. There really are things that hold some of us back from being successful, even though we say we’re trying as hard as we can. I commented on a post earlier this evening where the writer (another buddy of mine) said in one of his financial recommendations that people should work harder to make more money; he wasn’t talking about internet marketing, just to get that out of the way. I wrote back that I didn’t believe it had anything to do with working harder as much as all of us trying to learn how to work smarter. I truly do believe we can all be as successful as we want to be, but our thinking patterns might not be quite in line with where we want to be.
Where does this leave us? Well, it leaves me still scratching and making my little small residual income, and it leaves Mike making his living online. It leaves me with most of y’all, trying to decide when or if I’m going to lay caution to the wind and actually go for it full blast, or keep working on growing incrementally until maybe, one day, I get where I want to be. What about you? How do you see yourself online, if you’re hoping to make money? If you’re not hoping to make money, I guess this question isn’t for you, so just move on to the product. lol
The Fine Line Between Blog Visitors Success And Failure
Posted by Mitch on Dec 22, 2009
For the past two years, I’ve wondered one big question over all others; what is it that makes one person get thousands of subscribers versus someone getting a hundred.
It’s an interesting question to look at because, though we know that traffic that’s meaningless isn’t supposed to mean all that much, the truth is that traffic really is the key to everything.
If you want to make money you want traffic. If you want readers to see you as an authority on something so that you’re asked to go and speak to others in person and make money off it, you want traffic. If you’re looking for some kind of validation that you’re words are communicating with anyone, you want traffic.
Something I do that I’m sure others do from time to time is check out what some of the top bloggers are saying or doing that seems to be working for them, then compare what they’re doing with what you’re doing. Hey, you know it’s true.
In my mind, I don’t see lots out there better than what I do. I do see some things much different. I see some people write some fairly technical stuff, but not as many of them. I see some folks who write a lot of nothing and rank better than I do, and I’m not sure how that happens. I see some of the big time bloggers who may write only half the time, allowing others to guest post on their blogs. Heck, I allow that myself, but I don’t have a lot of people who take me up on it.
So, what really makes the difference? I think it has more to do with having some bonafides when it comes to whatever it is you do. For instance, John Chow is a guy who’s made a lot of money online. Truthfully, he’s made a lot of money offline as well. People know that, and it gives him a built in audience before he says word one.
Darren Rowse is the same. When you look at her early stuff you see that he had few commenters. But somewhere along the way he broke through, got advertising, was able to show that blogging could make someone a millionaire, and that was that.
Y’all see this book I’m helping to promote, Beyond Blogging, there to the side. Well, every person in that book is a 6-figure a year blogger. Some of those six figures are more than $500,000 a year. Even if those guys didn’t try to make money by blogging, they’d be making some money from blogging.
I’m not mad at anyone who makes a lot of money blogging. Heck, I’m not mad at anyone who makes a lot of money at anything. What I am, though, is wanting the knowledge to figure out how these folks do what they do. It’s not that they all help each other out. It might have been at one time, but no one would have helped anyone if they hadn’t shown something beforehand.
Also, there’s something about participating in the entire blogging community. The way I believe I’ve helped my subscriber number grow is by commenting on other blogs. There are a lot of new people visiting that I might never have met if I hadn’t visited their blogs. Okay, a big ups has also come from both Sire and Kristi in the last month, so I have to give them some big things as well. But I really believe subscribing to lots of blogs so I have something to comment on has helped greatly.
Commenting on other blogs might provide that big difference between success and failure. Things like running a contest might get you a blip, but most of those people won’t stay beyond the first entry. Truthfully, other than finding not only a niche that will bring a lot of visitors but also finding a way to stand out, I can’t think of anything other than commenting on other blogs that will help generate visitors to come to your blog. Well, maybe writing 10 posts a day; I don’t see that happening any time soon.
What do you think about all of this? Share your thoughts on the topic, and let’s see if we can come up with solutions.
Internet Millions – Don’t Do This
Posted by Mitch on Oct 14, 2009
If you like late night TV infomercials and girls wearing low cut tight shirts with lots of cleavage, then you’ve probably seen at least one of the commercials for Jeff Paul’s Internet Millions program. It promises to teach you how to make literally thousands of dollars a month with almost no effort so that you can live the life you dream about.
The first thing a buyer will realize is that there are a lot of DVDs to watch, which takes away the ease that’s promised in the commercials. The second thing, once you start checking out the videos, is that the “easy way” of making a lot of money is to spend a lot of money building a lot of websites. This means that most of the people who buy the program are already going to be at a disadvantage because they may not know anything about HTML or coding. They may not have thousands of websites of knowledge to create a bunch of websites. And folks, buying domain names, even if they’re relatively inexpensive, can get pricey if you continue buying a lot of them, and it’s not easy for one person to keep their eye on a lot of websites.
Having said that, one could argue that what Paul teaches in his program does offer people the opportunity to make money online. I don’t disagree with that. What I disagree with are a couple of things. One, the promise of easy millions that get people to pay exorbitant amounts of money on his programs. What, you say it’s only around $50 for his program? That’s just to get you in the door. Once you buy, you’re going to continue getting lots of phone calls with promises of making even more money as long as you’re willing to pony up more money for the right of better education. And it won’t stop until you get tough and get yourself off the list. There’s even one guy who set up a blog just to talk about the things he was getting from them without buying anything except the very first thing, and how often they were calling him to pitch their products; what an idea for a niche blog, eh?
Two, the commercials are so enticing that I’m surprised they’re not happy just raking in the money that those commercials have to be making and leaving people alone later on. And I know something about late night commercials; I used to be kind of a junkie for these things, no matter how good or bad they were. However, these commercials are lying. If you sat down one night and wrote down, then calculated, all the money that these people say they’re making, you’d realize that there wouldn’t be any money problems anywhere around the world because all you’d have to do is tax the few people in the commercial and every country would make a mint.
For instance, one guy said he made $125,000 in 10 days. Others were more “modest,” making that much in a month, or at least $50,000 a month. And, if you’ve paid any attention to the disclaimer, those results aren’t indicative of the kind of money that most people will make.
I’m sorry to say this, but I have to put this one in the category of a scam. There is no easy way to make money on the internet unless someone else is building your website, doing all the work, and it costs you almost nothing to pay for. This one will end up costing you way more money than you’ll ever make back; stay away.
How Online Affiliate Marketing Works
Posted by Mitch on Mar 5, 2008
I’m glad to get comments on my blog any time I can get them. This then gives me a chance to see what’s on the minds of people and address them either by commenting back or, in this case, writing a post specific to the issues.
In this case, I’ve received a few messages regarding one of the companies that I market as an affiliate. Truth be told, I don’t know all that much about the company except that the things they make look very nice when you look at the pictures. The other truth to be told is that, quite often, many affiliate marketers don’t know a lot about the things they market. That’s because we can market so many things that it’s impossible to know about all of them. The one thing I’ve yet to do is accept paid advertising, though that’s not beyond the realm of possibility if this blog ever grows its readership to a level where I might actually make some real money off it. For instance, there’s a blog at a site called johnchow.com where he accept paid advertising, and makes a heck of a lot of money, and even showed his income report for the month of February; wow! But I can guarantee that I will never write any paid reviews; just not my style.
Anyway, I market close to 75 different companies and product lines, and I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about most of them. There are some I do know about, who I’d stand behind no matter what anyone said, but others might make me want to check into them more, which I’m going to do on the one company that was mentioned, because it won’t do me much good if overall reviews are trash on someone, right? Now, every company makes someone mad, and that’s to be expected, but when a lot of people jump on the bandwagon, like they did with Comp USA, well, you know it’s time to stand up and take notice.
So, there you go. Internet affiliate marketing is different than regular marketing because in regular marketing you only work for one company, you take time to build relationships with a few long term clients, and you hit the phones and cold call to try to gain new clients. Online, you try to set something up where, hopefully, you entice people to at least take a moment to look at something you’re marketing, and then hope they’ll go to the site, through your link, and check out other products that company may offer. But I make money only when people buy things; I don’t know the company president, I don’t know any of the management working at the companies, I don’t know any of the sales clerks, and I don’t know where a lot of them are located. But, if asked, if you can’t get satisfaction after a sale, I will name the company who I contract with to be allowed to market these items, and, since I know this particular company is definitely high quality, and wouldn’t want to be associated with someone whose products were substandard, a complaint to them might help you get your issues resolved. No promises, but I’m sure if enough people contacted them they’d be on alert.
So there you go. Now, from a company I do know something about, take a look at this:
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