50 Lessons Learned From My Internet Marketing Journey (Part 2).

Discover “50 Powerful Lessons & Breakthroughs” that have put me on the path to Internet Business success.  And they just may do the same for you.

If you are a new or struggling online marketer I highly recommend that you read this two part post titled “50 Lessons Learned From My Internet Marketing Journey.”  These two posts each contain 25 of the most valuable insights and pieces of advice I have received during my internet marketing journey.  They also contain several discoveries and breakthroughs I have personally made during this time.

Lesson #1 through Lesson #25 (Part 1) can be found here.  This post you are now reading contains Lesson #26 through Lesson #50 (Part 2).

As I develop this blog and as you continue to read it, you will quickly realize that I am a prolific note taker.  I carry my business journal with me at all times — and whenever I learn something of value, I write it down.

Important note:  I highly recommend you do the same.  If you do not have a business journal, you need to get one.  Then, whenever you discover something new, write it in your journal!  (You can also use an online tool like Evernote.)   If you do not document what you are learning there is a very good chance you will forget it.  In addition, by documenting the important things you are learning you are developing a reservoir of content that you can use to build an authority blog along with your own information products.

During the past couple of months I have started to review my many business journals in an effort to provide valuable and educational content for these two posts.  It has been a great learning experience for me to re-read my business journals and “re-discover” some valuable lessons that I have learned over the past few years.

As I was putting together Part 1 and Part 2 of “50 Lessons Learned From My Internet Marketing Journey,” it struck me that I have so much more content from my business journals that I want to share with you and the other readers of WebBusinessResearch.com.  During the next few months I plan to release this valuable content on a number of different platforms;  including posts on this blog, a weekly podcast, video updates and via the Web Business Research (WBR) Newsletter that I will be releasing in the very near future.

Be sure to subscribe to the Web Business Research Newsletter because there is going to be some great stuff in this “Special Report.”  As a subscriber you get access to research, strategies and case studies that I will not share anywhere else.   To subscribe simply fill in the form to the right of this post.

Also, subscribers to the Web Business Research Newsletter will receive all the free content that I release, including posts on this blog, the video updates and the weekly podcast.

Enough of that.  Let’s get to the primary reason why I put this post together.

Below you will find 25 more valuable business building lessons I have learned during my internet marketing journey.  Here are Lessons #26 – #50 that make up the second half of “50 Lessons Learned From My Internet Marketing Journey.”

26. Be very skeptical of income claims — especially when they come from marketers who are trying to sell you a “money making system.”  While on the subject, a “money making system” is not going to take you where you want to go.  It’s a “business” that will take you to where you want to go.
27. Clarity comes from “Action” — not from contemplation.  Clarity comes from “doing” — not from thinking.  If you have a business or campaign that you want to launch, get moving on it.  The sooner you introduce it to the marketplace, the sooner you will know if the marketplace likes it and the sooner you will know if “YOU” like the business.  There is nothing worse that spending 12 months planning a business only to find that you do not enjoy the business once you launch it.  The sooner you try stuff the sooner you will find stuff that resonates with you.  And the sooner you try stuff the sooner you will have clarity on what business is right for you.
28. “Speed of implementation” is one of the keys to web business success.  The faster you implement new strategies and tactics the faster you will get results.  Speed of implementation is the one thing that separates the very successful marketers from those who struggle.  Those who are successful implement new tactics and strategies in their business “AS” they learn them.  While those who struggle will usually learn a new marketing tactic or strategy, and then they will continue searching for new tactics and strategies in an effort to find an easier way to make money.  The sad reality is that they rarely implement what they learn — they never act because they are always looking for an easier and quicker path to success.  The critical point to remember is this:  Your growth as an entrepreneur and the growth of your business will accelerate significantly when you start to implement as you learn.
29. You need to be a “developer” of content, not a “consumer” of content.  Most struggling online marketers spend the majority of their time consuming content.  You have limit the amount of content you consume and you have to transform yourself into a developer of content.  Adding value to the marketplace is what allows you to create wealth and build a successful business, and it is very difficult to add value if you are not creating content that helps and serves the people in your target market.
30. You must limit your consumption of information.  I talked about limiting your consumption of information in point #4.  Because this issue is so important, I want to expand on it.  Information overload is probably the biggest problem that both new marketers and those who are struggling have to deal with.  It’s inherit in the online business world.  There is so much opportunity and information that it is almost impossible to not suffer from information overload at one time or another.  Your ability to manage your time and manage your “consumption” of information will be a major key to your success.  In my opinion most aspiring internet marketers should immediately remove themselves from at least 80% of the email lists they are currently on.  Most email marketers offer little value in their email correspondence and most of their emails are nothing but promotions — which causes even more confusion and information overload.
    

    Here is the critical point:  You have to stop being the person who is always reading emails and you have to become the person who is sending the emails.  This is a valuable lesson I learned from James Schramko, a very successful online marketer from Australia and the creator of an excellent internet business training site called Fast Web Formula.

31. Do you want to build a successful online business?  The first thing you need to do is select a market that you want to serve.  The second thing you need to do is start helping people in that market.  Help the people in your market solve their problems.  If you start there are you already ahead of at least 95% of the other people in this business.
32. Remember, the market comes first and the product comes second.  Find a starving crowd and then give this crowd what they want.  Do not build a product and then look for people who may be interested in your product.  Target people who have a need or desire first, and then find or develop a product that gives these people what they want.  Travis Sago has an excellent free report on market research titled “Niche Factors That Never Fail.”  This report gets into some powerful marketing psychology strategies and covers topics link “Mind Share” and “Taking the Emotional Temperature of Your Target Market.”  It’s really good stuff.  Here is the link to this free report from Travis.
    
33. Get The Lead!!  Internet marketing legend Mark Joyner believes that a list is what breathes oxygen into an online business.  In other words, it will be extremely difficult to build a successful web business until you start generating leads and building a list.  Web business success is all about generating traffic and leads, and then monetizing the leads.  Lead generation (i.e. list building) is, without question, one” of the pillars of internet marketing and online business success.  I firmly believe the moment you focus on lead generation is the moment you become a serious web marketer.  List building will get you into the game and allow you to accelerate the growth of your business faster than almost anything else.  The development of a list will give you an asset that you can market to over and over again.  Without a list, you don’t have much of a business.  With a list, you have a “real” online business.
34. Don’t just build a list, build a list of “Buyers.”  According to paid traffic expert Chad Hamzeh, a list of buyers is worth 8x to 10x more than a list that is built on the back of a free offer.  The product used to build the list does not have to be a high ticket purchase.  A list built with just a $10 to $20 product is significantly more valuable than a list of the same size built with a free offer.
35. Collect data and know your numbers.  After you start generating leads you have to study the data and determine how much each lead is worth to your business.  Once you know the value of each lead you now know how much money you can invest in lead generation without losing money.
36. The majority of affiliate marketers who are making six & seven figure yearly incomes are paid traffic affiliates.  Yes, you can make money by focusing on SEO, but most of the big money affiliate marketers are paid traffic affiliates.   Paid traffic is easier to measure, it allows you to generate traffic much, much faster than SEO and you can scale paid traffic.  I still believe in building authority sites.  However, paid traffic is going to be a bigger and bigger focus of mine in 2013.  And the guy I am going to learn from is Chad Hamzeh.  Chad is a very successful paid traffic marketer and he has created an excellent course that will teach you many of the strategies he uses to build successful paid traffic campaigns.  This course comes with detailed, step-by-step instructions and it also includes multiple case studies.  The course is called Traffic Blackbook.  I highly recommend it.  (Please note, I will be doing a complete review of Traffic Blackbook on this blog in the very near future.)
37. Incremental progress is critical.  You have to show up every day.  Imagine what kind of web property you could build if you posted content to your website or blog every day for one year.  Your blog traffic and readership in the first month or two may be limited, but one year from now you could possess a web property that is an absolute powerhouse.  Seth Godin recently released a book titled “Whatch Gonna Do With That Duck?”  This book is a compilation of blog posts Seth Godin has made over the past six years.  Seth had this to say about the creation of this book:  “I could never, ever have signed up to write this book, never sat down to create it. But since I had six years to write it, it created itself.”   Seth goes on to say that “You don’t launch a popular blog, you build one.”   Ain’t that the truth.  Most people think about launching a blog, but few realize that it must be built.  And you build it by showing up every day. (Yes, I must admit that posting content every day is something that I must get better at.)
38. Keep your promises.  This is one way to separate yourself from most of the competitors in your market, especially the internet marketing space.  Internet marketers and web entrepreneurs love to tell their customers and blog readers what they are going to do in the upcoming months.  But only a small percentage follow-through with their promises.  I love what Seth Godin has to say about keeping promises:  “If you want to build a bigger brand, make and keep bigger promises.”
39. Never be dependent on one traffic source.  One of the most valuable lessons I have learned the past couple of years is that you have to build your own platform and you have to diversify your traffic sources.  There is nothing wrong with platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Squidoo and others.  Just don’t build your business on them.  Use these platforms to drive traffic to “YOUR PLATFORM!”  The same goes with Google search traffic.  If your entire business is reliant on Google, you are one Google update away from being out of business.  Build your website into an authority so it generates traffic from a variety of traffic sources.  This will position you and your business for long-term success.
    
40. Don’t worry about competition.  In most markets competition is wide, but it is not deep.  Read this post at Web Business Research for more thoughts on why I believe that “Too Much Competition Is One of the Biggest Myths of Internet Marketing.”
41. Become a serious student of your business.  If you want to be successful you have to stop treating your business like a hobby and start treating it like it’s your profession.  Learn from the leaders in your market and read books from successful entrepreneurs who operate both inside and outside of your market.  The bottom line is that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to become a serious student of your business.  The education of the successful entrepreneur is never-ending.  You must always be learning.
42. Who else is doing business with the people you want as customers?  Find them and then develop strategic partnerships with them.   The following is excellent advice on this subject that I received from Accelerate High Growth Business Training creator Eben Pagan.  Eben received this advice from Jay Abraham.  Eben stated that when it comes to acquiring customers and generating leads, you need to answer these questions:  “Who else has gone through the effort to attract customers that I want as a customer?  Who has already done the work?  Where do my potential customers hang out?  — If you want to be a successful marketer you have to figure out the answers to those questions.”
43. If a business does not feel right, don’t do it.  I’ve been involved with projects that I was doing purely for the money.  And it sucked.  If you are doing work that does not resonate with you, find something else.  If you can’t get excited about the business you are building because you are doing it solely for the money, you may want to find another business.  Yes, the money is nice.  But if you are doing work purely for the money there is a very good chance you will end up in a miserable place.  I love what B-School creator Marie Forleo has to say about this subject.  Whenever Marie is presented with an opportunity, she either says “HELL YEAY!”  or “HELL NO!”  If she can’t give a new opportunity or project a “HELL YEAH” response, the response has be “HELL NO!”  In other words, Marie will only work on projects that she is excited and passionate about.  This is great advice to follow.
44. What do you want to become?  Who do you want to serve?  Most people in internet marketing are looking for “ways to make money.”  Think more strategically.  Give serious thought to what you want to become and what kind of business that you want to build.  And think about your legacy.  What business can you build that will make you admired by those you and your business serve?  What kind of legacy do you want to leave?
45. Focus on “Marketing.”  If you want to accelerate your growth as an entrepreneur, learn marketing.  Find a technology guy (or gal) to handle the web design and technical matters and focus your time on the one skill that can bring massive growth to your business.   And in my opinion that skill is “Marketing.”  One of my biggest regrets of the past few years is that I did not focus more of my time on the subject of marketing.  In 2013 I will be investing a significant amount of my time studying the marketing masters from the past;  legends like Claude Hopkins, John Caples, Robert Collier, Gary Halbert and others.
46. Listen to the “I Love Marketing” podcast with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson.  Don’t just read the direct marketing legends of the past, also study marketing from two guys who are in the marketing trenches every day.  Joe Polish and Dean Jackson have an outstanding free weekly podcast where they discuss marketing and entrepreneurship for an hour.  As of this writing there are more than 100 episodes of their podcast at ILoveMarketing.com.  Go to iTunes and the download their podcast to your smart phone so you can listen to it while you are in your car or on the bus or train.  And if you don’t have a smart phone the I Love Marketing podcast is a very good reason to get one.  Start by listening to the first five podcasts.  In their first few podcasts Dean Jackson and Joe Polish will teach you the basics of “Education Based Marketing.”  This type of marketing is what allowed Joe Polish to take his struggling carpet cleaning business from $2200 a month to more than $12,000 a month in just five months.  It’s really powerful stuff.  Also, make sure you to listen to podcast #24, “The One With More Cheese and Less Whiskers.”  Every university business school should make their marketing students listen to the “Cheese and Whiskers” podcast.  It’s pure gold.  You will instantly become a smarter marketer the moment you listen to it.
47. Customers buy on emotion.  But soon thereafter, they start thinking logically.  Because of this your job as a marketer is to make sure your customer has a world-class experience “AFTER” the purchase.  This is terrific advice I learned from a brilliant marketer by the name of Dean Graziosi.
48. Sell what is already selling like crazy!  Hot markets and hot products are everywhere.  Don’t try to look for the obscure niche where there is no competition.  For the most part they no longer exist.  If you are having a difficult time finding products to sell, go to Amazon and do a search for “Best Sellers.”  This will allow you to research Amazon’s best selling products in more than 30 product categories.  Even if you do not want to sell their products as an affiliate, Amazon’s “Best Sellers” will give you some great insight into what people want and what they are buying today.  Also, research the magazine section of your local bookstore and look at the products being advertised in popular magazines.  It’s a great way to discover products that are selling like crazy.  If you are doing CPA marketing (cost per action) talk to your affiliate manager and ask him or her what offers are converting the best, and start there.
    
49. Don’t envy the rich and successful, learn from them.  I find amazing that there are so many people in our world who envy and in some case “hate” those who are successful.  This is limited thinking personified.  How in the world can a person expect to grow and become more successful if he or she is not willing to learn from those who are have accomplished great things?  Whenever I meet someone who is successful, my first thought is to find out what they did to become a success.  Successful people, for the most part, are more than willing to share the secrets to their success.  The majority of people in this world really do want to help others and they love to give advice.  If your request is sincere you’ll be amazed at how successful and wealthy people will open up to you.  But you have to ask, and be sure you ask with sincerity.
    
50. Leverage your work by repurposing your content.   When you develop a piece of content, always be thinking of additional ways that you can repurpose your content.  This two-part blog post, “50 Lessons Learned From My Internet Marketing Journey,” is an excellent example.  In addition to creating a two-part blog post with this content, I can also turn this content into an audio file and distribute it via a podcast.  I can use this content as the foundation for a free report that I can then use to list build.  I can create a PowerPoint presentation from this content and turn that PowerPoint into a video.  Or, I can take each of the “50 Lessons Learned” and then create individual videos (or blog posts) where I expand on each point.  I can then upload these videos to YouTube and use them to drive traffic to my blog.  Or, I can use the videos as an offer to list build.   The possibilities are almost endless.
51. Bonus Lesson #1:  Learn Video Marketing.  One of the biggest mistakes that I have made during the past couple of years is not making video marketing a priority in my business.  There are so many benefits to using video to promote an online business that it is absolutely insane NOT to be promoting your content with video.  Video allows you to connect with your audience on a much deeper level than written text.  As a result, your conversions with video will be significantly higher.  Also, your content is much more likely to be consumed if you also have it available in video format.  And finally, Google loves videos — especially videos that are hosted on YouTube (which Google owns).  A properly SEO’d video hosted on YouTube can generate a ton of free traffic from both Google and YouTube.  If you want to learn how to leverage the power of video marketing, I recommend Jeff Johnson’s Tube Traffic Secrets.  Tube Traffic Secrets is a Video Marketing Training Program that will teach you how to tap into YouTube’s 800 million monthly visitors so you can start driving more and more traffic to your websites with video.  Jeff Johnson is a YouTube and Video Marketing expert — and he is the guy I am learning this valuable skill from.
52. Bonus Lesson #2:  Put serious thought into building own blog.  There are several reasons why you should launch and build your own blog, including the following:

• Blogging allows you to develop influence and authority in your market.
• Blogging allows you to build a web property and a web asset that you “OWN.”
• Google loves blogs and they rank content rich blogs high in the search rankings.  And that means FREE search traffic from Google!!
• Blogging allows you to “connect” with people in your market as well as other leaders in your market.
• Blogging  allows you to stay current on the subject you are blogging about.  In fact, the research you do for your blog can transform you into an “Industry Expert.”
• If you are seriously thinking about building your own blog, I highly recommend that you study Blogging With John Chow.  John Chow is a professional blogger with one of the most popular internet marketing blogs in the marketplace (JohnChow.com).  Blogging With John Chow will take you by the hand and teach you “step-by-step” how to build an authority blog.  It’s a terrific product every aspiring blogger should get and study.

As I look at my notes in front of me I see that I excluded some excellent content that could have added significantly more value to this post.  But as I mentioned above, I will release this content during the upcoming days, weeks and months ahead with more posts to this blog and via the Web Business Research Newsletter.  In addition, I will also be starting a Web Business Research Podcast in the near future.

As I mentioned in Part 1, I am a full-time entrepreneur — but at this time I am not a full-time “web entrepreneur.”  I own an offline business (a private car service) in addition to the web projects that I am currently building.  However, with each passing day I am getting closer and closer to “Going Pro” with my web projects — and that is good news for you.

Here’s why.

As I slowly remove myself from my car service business, I will have more and more time to invest in my online business projects.  That means I will have more time to do market research, product reviews, test new profit generating strategies and then share this valuable information with you and the other readers of Web Business Research.  It is my hope that this valuable information will accelerate your growth as an entrepreneur and move you further down the track toward web business success.

I want to thank you for taking the time to read this post.  I hope you found value in it and I would love to hear your feedback.

Also, please be sure to share this post with your friends on Facebook and your followers on Twitter.  If you know people who are new to internet marketing or who are struggling to get their web business up and running, I sincerely hope the lessons I have learned while on my journey can help them get their business on the right track.

All The Best,

Jon Poland