You quite often see successful and experienced marketers commenting or complaining about how negative a lot of people are on forums when talking about making money online. They have a point and there is a lot of negativity out there. Oftentimes the negativity is unfair in relation to the specific product or technique being discussed but while in any situation there will be both positive and negative people I think there is a particular reason why there is so much negative opinion around.
How many times have you bought a product that gave you the impression that it would help you make your fortune? How many fortunes have you made? Not too many I bet. Some will always achieve success but for many it seems to elude them whatever they buy and whatever they do.
Almost every internet marketing product claims to be the solution to your financial worries and when you hand over you money you sort of have the feeling that you will make your money back time and time again. If that doesn't happen and you buy product after product and it never seems to do anything other than empty your wallet it can make you very cynical and very negative.
It has become common practice that after you agree to buy one product you are offered yet another as an 'upsell' at a special price. It makes good sense for the seller to try to encourage you to buy more while you are in the buying mood. Sometimes the upsell really will help to automate or assist with the main product being sold but if you have been sold on the idea that the main product is the solution to making a success of your online enterprise and making lots of money you would be right to question whether you should need anything else.
So often, it seems, the marketers who are claiming to make so much money are doing so by selling you stuff about how to make money online. Nothing new here as selling the idea of how to get rich has always been a lucrative business in the offline world for decades, perhaps hundreds of years.
The classic tale of this type of business is the advert in the newspaper or magazine that offers to sell you the secret to how to make a few hundred or thousand dollars so you send off your $10 or whatever and back comes a single sheet of paper with the secret information. It tells you to put an advertisement in the paper offering to sell the secret to making money for ten dollars.
Maybe the crazy thing is that it can work, you proved it by sending the ten dollars off but the point is that by appealing to eager and even desperate people you can sell them on a dream and deliver very little.
If you read some of the guides sold on how to make money on the internet you will be told to produce your own product in as little as three days. They say it doesn't matter if you don't know the subject you are writing about just knock something out and start selling it. I don't know about you but when I buy a book in an offline bookstore I expect that author to have slaved over that book for rather more than a couple of days and I expect them to know something about their subject matter.
There is so much trash being published online now that people will be turned off by the idea of ebooks. If you bought an ebook written in pigeon English by someone who doesn't understand the subject matter you would be extra cautious the next time you were tempted to spend money.
There is a lot of good stuff out there that can help you make money online but there is also a lot of poor quality information that may only explain a small part of an overall business plan yet it is sold as being the solution to your money worries for life. Other guides are sold that may have passed the time when they were effective at doing what they claim to do. What worked well two years ago may not be so effective now, not least because there are so many people who have been persuaded they can make money online and are proceeding to produce blogs and websites. The competition is intense.
The reality is that it gets harder to make money online and you have to be smarter than the next guy. you need to understand how to market products and you need to promote your websites and blogs. You need to learn but you need to be cautious of claims of rapid success. It can happen and probably happens every day for someone but it is also probably true that someone wins a lottery everyday somewhere but the odds are against any particular individual being the winner.
There is a lot of free information online that will help you build a business online. Focus on one plan and stick with it for a while to see if it achieves some results for you. Most systems work if you persevere. Article marketing, blog commenting and taking part in forums will all help build visitor numbers on your website but if you just do a bit and then sit back it may not work out so good.
You need to be focused on what you plan to do and get on and do it. Thinking about doing it won't make you wealthy.
There are lots of people out there who say they would like to run their own business. They are usually, though not always, referring to running an online business.
It is no surprise that so many people see this as a real possibility. They are constantly being sold on the idea that you can buy a make money online product and be swept into a world of Ferrari sports cars, glamorous yachts and be surrounded by beautiful women, or men, whichever takes your fancy.
Many of these prospective entrepreneurs are to be found on various online marketing forums asking for advice and giving their 'knowledge' gained from reading far too many sales pages. Nothing beats experience and unless you walk the walk you should be cautious about talking the talk. Inexperienced people frequently seem to mislead other beginner online marketers and prospective online business owners but that is the downside of everybody having a voice on the internet. With so much general babble it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the genuine, experience based knowledge from the chatter of the enthusiastic but inexperienced.
We are all entitled to an opinion but when we are saying emphatically that something is the case we should be talking with knowledge and experience of putting those ideas into practice and making them work for us. Too many seem eager to relay what they have read elsewhere that may or may not be correct and they wouldn't know because they never tried it.
They say we now live in the information age and that knowledge is power but when there is so much chatter it is difficult to hear clearly. Most of everything you need to know about online marketing is available for free online, somewhere.
Marketing is hardly a new business and the old established ideas of marketers of old generally still work today, albeit that the system has been updated to work online. It is still about having a product or service to sell and finding a customer who might need that product and then convincing them that they would be happier with your product than without it.
So, if you want to run an online business for free you can. Get yourself a hubpage and write about a product. Get a blogger blog and tell the world about your service. Just be careful what you read and don't assume that because someone has a gazillion posts on a forum they must know what they are talking about. It is interesting to see many people with a lot of posts to their name writing about how they plan to set up a blog soon and start making money online. To those people I say, Stop wasting your time writing forum posts and start writing some content on your own blog.
The cost of setting up your own website with your own domain on your own rented hosting space is minimal. We are talking around $20 to get started and $75 tops, for a year. It is not a huge amount of money yet we see people grumbling about the cost of it. OK, I know times are hard and some people dream of having twenty dollars left at the end of the month. I understand that. If that is you go the free route. Set up Hubpages, Squidoo lenses and write articles for EzineArticles, Goarticles and Article Dashboard. You can make money using free resources and if you are really short of cash start that way.
Most people can afford $20 dollars to spend on various different things and it is only a question of priorities that prevents them. If you can afford to go to a movie you can probably afford to own your own website, run your own online business and potentially make a bit of money. It will cost you around $9 to $10 dollars to register a domain name, from $5 per month for server space. (My server recommendation Is Hostgator. Click here for more info) You might possibly make a lot more than your twenty dollars and you might multiply that number by ten, hundreds or even thousands of times. It is possible but that is not to say it is easy and it requires work, knowledge and dedication together with a slice of good luck.
If you decided to run a real brick and mortar business, how much do you suppose that would cost you? You probably need finance of around $50,000 to $100,000 to run just about any serious realworld business these days so what is twenty dollars? $20 is what it would cost you to get your shop window cleaned before opening. It is a tiny and insignificant amount of money to run a business with.
I know what it is like to struggle to pay the bills. I know how hard it can seem to get an online business generating decent returns that enable you to live a comfortable life but if you want to run your own online business and build something worthwhile that can earn you real money you have to be prepared to invest something into your business.
Now I am not saying you should spend the rent money on internet marketing products. I say exactly the opposite. Do not spend money you cannot afford to lose buying ebooks, guides and courses. Spend time researching for free instead but don't avoid ever getting started. Use the free route. It works and it can earn you some money to invest in your own domains and server space.
Note I said invest. You are not in this to spend money for the sake of it. When you buy a product or a service for your internet marketing business you should be buying with a purpose. Figure out how this new purchase will fit in with your business and how it will improve your efficiency, your returns or your visitor numbers.
What is an online business? IT'S A BUSINESS. Businesses are there to make money, not to keep spending money on the latest hyped up idea that everyone is telling you is essential to your business. It may be essential and it may be effective but it also could just be that these guys and gals promoting it will make some money from convincing you to buy it and they may never have even seen the product before.
I must declare an interest here. I have my automated offers blog attached to this site and while I do like a reccommend the wordpress plugin that runs the publishing of these offers which only costs about $5 if you are interested, I have no idea what is being published on there. It has new products and offers appearing most days. I look at them now and again but they appear as if by magic and I have no experience or knowledge about them. Most seem pretty good and they are usually priced very reasonably but you have to make the choice and decide if they are suitable or not. Don't listen to me or trust the salespages to tell you if you should purchase or not. Use your own judgment and make up your own mind.
There is a lot of good information out there for free and lots of good reports and guides available for just a few dollars. If you want to run your own online business then you should approach the whole thing as a business person and be prepared to invest, what you can afford, in yourself and the business. Avoid the temptation to buy everything out there. Be selective, think about your reasons and benefits for buying anything and how it can help you make money online.
If you had a real bricks and mortar store you wouldn't buy everything from every salesman who walked in and offered you their goods and nor should you do that online. Spend more time working on your websites and less time reading sales pages and participating on forums and you might actually find you are beginning to build an online business.
Have you been tempted by the latest super-duper whizz bang marketing offer? Have you been spending money buying the latest internet marketing make money online course? Are you about to click a button that makes you a millionaire next week? Many buy but few succeed. You might though most don't but if you are looking for that magic make money online button to make you rich overnight, well, if it existed it wouldn't be for sale at $97.99 would it?
When you have a desire to achieve online success and make a lot of money online but you know very little about online internet marketing, you search the internet for answers. Slowly, you begin to have some understanding of how it all works. You buy a course that someone is promoting as being the solution to massive, make money online success. We have all done this and the experienced internet marketers know we do it so they constantly feed us with internet marketing courses, software programs, sales processes and website building courses with the promis that, Yes! You can make money online.
You could probably buy an internet marketing product every day for a year and never run out of yet more offers you haven't purchased. Do they work? Probably. Are they worth the cost? Maybe. Should you buy them? Hmmm. That depends.
Most internet marketing ebooks and courses are a structured way of developing your online business. They give them cool sounding names but they are usually tried and tested ways of going about developing your business. Most of the systems to make money online will have worked for their authors to some extent, perhaps very well, and most of them could work for you if you follow them diligently.
They say that around 80% of internet marketing and make money online products bought online are never put into practice. Many are never even opened or looked at, at all. We have all done it. You get tempted by a great offer and end up clicking the order button almost on auto pilot because your dreams have been encouraged by what the salespage says. You then go to the download page and set the downloads running. That can take quite some time in itself, with all the video courses now offered, but eventually you have everything downloaded and you may even open it to have a look but you are just as likely to think that maybe you are too tired to study right now so you will look at it tomorrow. Tomorrow arrives and so do a whole new load of offers and you may simply forget about the product you bought yesterday. We have probably all done it.
Even if you do open it up and look at the materials included, even if you print it all out and read it, the chances are high that you will think that it could work for you but somehow you never get around to putting it into practice. It may sound a bit complicated or hard to put into practice or you may feel there are other things you need to know before you can start doing what it says. It could even sound like a heck of a lot of work and that probably wasn't what you wanted.
Whatever the reason, most of us put it off and later when we still haven't achieved online success and we do not make money online we remember all the money we spent and wonder what it was all for. There will always be another offer that will sound like it is the answer but on their own they rarely seem to work out that way. Whatever it is that you bought. Whatever process or procedure it was suggesting you do. If you do it, if you get off your butt and actually put it in to practice you will almost certainly be more successful than if you do nothing.
I am not suggesting that you never buy any product or service to help your online business. You can do a lot of things for free and you can learn through experience but if you believe this is going to be a proper business then do what businesses do and invest in your business. If you are going to invest in your online business do as other businesses do and evaluate what you are going to spend and what it is expected to achieve. If you are serious about your make money online business you must treat it as a real business and make real business decisions. If you decide to buy a particular product you should have a purpose in mind and put it into practice. Take the time to do the job properly and don't allow yourself to be distracted.
There is no point in buying yet another guide or course that does not match your plans for your online business or give you a new plan you will follow. If you take no action on it you are almost certainly wasting your money.
There is no point in buying a course on using Adwords if you never plan to use Adwords to promote anything.
There is every point in buying a course that you know will match your business model and you will use it to build a business online. Investing in your online business means exactly that. INVEST with the expectation of generating a profit from the investment.
Don't throw your money away on an ebook you will never read or put into action. A cheap ebook you never read is a bigger waste of money than a $3,000 course you WILL use to develop your business. Whatever you buy to help you develop your online business and teach you how to make money online, be sure to make full use of the advice it offers to build your business online.
At the end of the day, it's your money to do with as you please. If you insist on throwing money away that is your right but if you are going to do that just let me know and I'll find a way for you to throw some money in my direction.
