Last night I was looking at a new membership site from someone who is trying to make his first money online and discovered that the information available there was spectacularly useless for anyone wanting to make money online. Now, this is a guy who has been around the block a few times and had some very good things going on under his belt – so you’d expect him to know better.
But no – he got it wrong. He made three basic mistakes that have probably cost him many thousands of dollars already…
Mistake #1: The Information Gap In every “how to do X” program of whatever kind out there, there will be a gap between where you are now and where you need to be to start profiting from the information. Unfortunately, there are far too many programs out there that leave this gap huge – maybe even insurmountable! And because people don’t want to admit they’re struggling with the basics, they’ll buy anything. This means no matter how wonderful your product is, it will fall on ears full of wax if you haven’t filled in this magic piece of the puzzle for them.
Mistake #2: Tracking The Wrong Things People who offer ad space as an income stream always seem to focus on click-through rates (which tells you almost nothing about profitability), or set up “traffic exchanges” that send one visitor after another into your site (usually at random) in the hope that one of them will buy something, or click an ad… All of which misses the point. This is like trying to catch a fish by tossing it in another fish tank!
What you need to do instead is track your “money pages” (i.e. the web pages where you make money). You should then focus all your effort on improving these pages because that’s where the real income is generated. Once again, this isn’t rocket science – but if you’re new to online marketing, it can be hard to see past a few over-hyped products and seminars promising overnight riches from Google AdSense ads or publishing links on traffic exchanges – things that don’t work for anyone beyond a very small circle of people says Paul Haarman.
Mistake #3: Ignoring The Biggest Source Of Profits This is the mother of all income streams, and it’s hidden in plain sight. I discovered it many years ago, but back then there were no good ways to make money from it. Today, however, this opportunity has opened up massively because AdSense is king. And guess what? Exactly the same principles apply when using other people’s ad space as when using AdSense… Take a look at 99% of “make money with adverts” programs out there and you’ll see that they are based on either selling your own advertising or driving traffic to affiliate products. If you’re into that sort of thing OK – whatever makes you happy. But if you want something that works, why not make it work for you?
We all like shortcuts. And when internet marketers come up with a shortcut, everyone tries to get in on the act by making money from selling this shortcut instead of taking it themselves. But shortcuts are no good if they don’t actually work! What’s worse is that people will still pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for them even though there are simpler ways that do work…
I’m not saying the above mistakes are easy to avoid altogether – but I do know that once you understand what needs to be done, most of these mistakes become very obvious. This means if you’re making any one of these three mistakes your business may well be dead before it starts, damaging your online reputation and leaving you in the financial lurch.
I’ll explain exactly how to avoid all these pitfalls and more in my next article… Until then, good luck!
Conclusion by Paul Haarman:
Nice to see some people can still think. I am very surprised that it appears the majority of marketers just cannot help themselves and pull out the credit card and give away yet more money for devious products and services. There is a lot of money to be made in this industry, but most simply do not deserve it.
Marketers fall for hyped products because they are not thinking rationally and most likely they never do any research on the product/service prior purchasing. It has been proven many times that a company’s marketing strategy can make or break a company, even if its product or service is top-notch. Of course you will find success stories where people have made money from the first method I mentioned but those are and far between which also makes the success stories not believable. You can find many many more failure stories than success and that’s what is important to remember.
