Making Internet Marketing a Sideline & Getting a Job

After much booze and contemplation I’ve reached the conclusion that there’s a point when you must jack it in (albeit not completely), if only to progress and get on with some sort of life!

After 5 years of some success (but not enough to live off) it’s time to get a ‘real’ job.

I’m demoting Internet Marketing to a sideline and I’ll be working less and less on it as I work a normal day job to support myself.

(This replaces a blog I wrote saying I’m jacking it in completely which I decided wasn’t true after sobering up a little)

How Many Turds Have You Thrown at the Money Wall?

Exploring why old online business projects failed is crucial to fine-tuning our knowledge as marketers, and in them lies the secrets to future success.

I’d like to tell you about my most prominent failures and in return invite you to have your say at the bottom of the entry telling me and anyone else who reads this yours - I’m positive we can all learn from each others mistakes.

Personally I can think of 3 failures, or turds as I call them, that I have thrown at the wall of internet marketing success, not making the actual stick.

The fact I can only think of 3 inspires me as 3 isn’t that many at all - giving much hope to my current projects in development that I have applied the skills learned from the 3 failures I’m now going to mention:

1. Content Websites using Google Adsense

I believe I got in to this game way to late - I was under the impression that with quality content that wasn’t duplicate, which I had freelancers write for many, many websites that it would be possible to rank for hundreds of search phrases that weren’t searched for much.

Unfortunately while I had brief success with MSN Search due to it’s lax algorithm and favor of websites hosted in the UK, Google wasn’t having any of it.Even with plenty of back links built using free directories and paid directories and frequently updated content, the new sandbox (at the time) kept all of the content websites from ranking for anything at all.

I perhaps made a few hundred dollars with content sites and Adsense, and a few thousand dollars when I sold them as they weren’t making enough for my liking - never more than $8 per day.

2. Ecommerce Online Store using Google Adwords

As previously mentioned in my blog this was a venture that led to my bankruptcy. I imported select collectible items from the USA in to the UK and sold them using Google Adwords, which worked briefly until the errors I made in buying a lot of useless stock caught up with me and I headed right in to debt.

I’m re-starting this venture with more smarts this time 5 years on - time will tell if it becomes another turd welded on my wall of failed projects.

3. Pregnancy Fitness Guide on Clickbank

This wasn’t too well thought out - I ended up trying to market a product created for women who had just had their baby (it was on losing weight after pregnancy) to women who were still pregnant.I modified the guide to include information on having a healthy pregnancy but hit a stumbling block.

It was quite some time ago and I lacked some serious knowledge on marketing and sales copy etc. I sold the website and guide eventually for a few thousand dollars and moved on.

Have a think about your most prominent failures and share your thoughts on what went wrong using the ‘Have Your Say’ link to the bottom right of this post.

Creative Thinking & Why Shoemoney is a C.U.N.T.

Shoemoney, aka Jeremy Shoemaker, is a huge online financial success, from being debt ridden to earning over a million dollars per year, and it’s time for me to call him out as a C.U.N.T.

That’s right - he’s a Creative, Undeniable, Naked* Talent.

* The naked refers to the admission he works butt-naked in his basement developing uber-code. I suspect he may be telling porkie’s there, but experience tells me these developer types can be very, very strange.

To get to the point, I’d like to explore creativity and its helping hand in success, and the reason I’ve chosen Jeremy to head this entry is that I have heard him on numerous occasions emphasizing creativity as a primary tool of success plus I’m going to use one of his success stories as an example.

Let’s get started - what is creativity?

This seems like a dumb question to ask, but it’s not. I believe it’s important to understand what creativity actually is and break it down in to specific examples.

Creativity isn’t just thinking of a new idea or cooking up some weird hair-brained scheme, and you don’t need to wear a funny hat or roll a doobie to get the creative juices flowing.

The Dictionary definition of creativity is: “The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations”

For our purpose as cash-hungry online entrepreneurs, let’s add “..and turn them in to products or services that have the potential to generate revenue”.

In the simplest form, taking old websites, services or product functionality and using modern tools and technology to create meaningful new forms of interactions and delivering content or services to website visitors or prospects.

In the example below with the recently launched Auction Ads (by Shoemoney), the now-standard contextual method of advertising by Google Adsense (which was very creative in itself) is combined with the idea of serving up ads from eBay’s affiliate program to form a “meaningful, new method” of delivering advertising and generating revenue for our websites.

It’s smart, it’s creative and yet so very, very simple. I don’t know much about the business end of Auction Ads, but I suspect this technology could be sold to eBay for an extremely large and disgusting amount of money if that’s the route Auction Ads wish to take, though I don’t get the impression that’s what is going on here.

Example number 2: The Rich Jerk E-Book, a get rich online package.

There are hundreds if not thousands of get rich quick packages on the Internet. Most are marketed the same, have similar names and don’t jump out and grab you at all - The Rich Jerk by Kelly Felix not only jumped out and grabbed you - it insulted you, smacked you around the head and called you a loser while boasting what a wonderful life The Rich Jerk had.

It provoked a response that shocked but also made you laugh which had this great charm about it and made you curious about what it contained inside. It was a concept, idea and above all else a product to fall in love with before you even purchased.

The Rich Jerk quick became the best-selling product on Clickbank and continues to be amongst the top few get rich products out. Can you say C-R-E-A-T-I-V-E? There was only one, again, very simple ‘tweak’ to the old get rich quick mantra, and that was in the branding and marketing used.

The same information contained in the Rich Jerk can be found in most packages, yet they will never attain the success or status of the Rich Jerk.

Applying creativity to your own products or websites

It’s clear if we get our creativity on there is potential for making some really nice money online. If you own your own websites of products (or are stuck for new ideas), here’s what you can do to get the ideas flowing:

Check out successful and innovative products in closely related or other industries completely - you can venture as far away as possible from your niche and explore. Look around, what services, features or technologies are other companies using on their websites or products that you could apply to your own?

Do you run a website with a discussion forum? Think about features on Myspace that you could apply to your own forums that will improve interaction with your members. Don’t go all out and buy a script that emulates Myspace, but pick a few features and implement them.

Do you run a membership website that sends out tips on property investment? Why not take the standard property search and develop a service that searches property for sale in their local area with specific attributes for investment buyers, which e-mails them between your tips, creating more value and ensuring better retention levels from subscribers. This could be a whole new website idea in itself.

Once you get in to the right mind-state, being creative becomes easy. Write ideas down, research them, check the market if one exists, don’t be afraid to try something new - that’s what it’s all about. Out with the old, in with the new.

You can even dive in on a limited budget, so there’s no excuse. If you need coding done, bring in a programmer from college or university who could do with a few extra bucks or who would be interested in becoming a partner or a share-holder and would do the work for free. Creativity doesn’t just stop at thinking of new-fangled website and product ideas.

Step outside that box and get your creativity on - I know I am.

P.S. Jeremy didn’t pose in a C.U.N.T. t-shirt, I modified this photo from his gallery.

Revisiting a Venture with Experience after Bankruptcy

When I was 18 years old (I’m now 24) in 2002 I ran an e-commerce store importing specific collectible items from the USA and selling them to customers in the United Kingdom.

I made many mistakes during this first online venture, which were:

Buying as many varied items as I could without thinking whether or not customers would actually want them - I was under the illusion of the more variations I bought, however silly, that I would be able to sell more. This led to thousands of pounds worth of stock sitting in a storage unit that I couldn’t get rid of and had to sell in bulk for way under the price I actually paid for them.

…There was my first lesson in to market research.

There were only a few items that sold well but I ran out of these after a few weeks and business grinded to a halt - the first few weeks things flew - I had $200-700 per day in pure profit, but it didn’t last when I run out of the good stock.

Another problem was I was using Worldpay to take payments and they didn’t send me the funds from payments for 6 weeks so I hit a massive cash-flow problem that I hadn’t planned or made provisions for, as I wasn’t able to re-stock with the items that customers actually wanted.

…There was my lesson in planning finances and the importance of cash-flow.

Due to this error of buying items that simply wouldn’t sell and not being able to afford to re-stock with the hot sellers, it meant I ended up going in to a lot of debt as I was also having to pay $900/month in rent for the office and storage (12 month contract) for all the many swords - also because I carried on living as normal and neglected the problem, which ultimately led to my bankruptcy, which I was dis-charged from last year in 2006.

…There were too many lessons to mention! *groan*

Now that I’m debt free, I’m going to start-up a similar business selling the same items but approaching the whole venture from an angle of experience.

This time around:

• Since I’m debt-free now, I will not borrow or lend any money for the venture from any source whatsoever.
• I will not purchase expensive $1,000 e-commerce software or sign-up to an expensive $900 payment processor that only pays 6 weeks after the transaction, instead I will use PayPal. Money saved and great for cash-flow.
• Instead of buying hundreds of items worth $16,000 in wholesale price including ridiculous items I now know will not sell, I will buy a handful of the items for $100 that I know sell well (because I sold them well in the first few weeks before) through PPC marketing with a high conversion.
• There is also the fact I am now far more experienced in online marketing. Back then, I had no idea about sales copy, building trust, creating value, call to actions and utilizing the back-end and previous customers to generate more business.

You may think I’m insane re-starting up a business that led me to bankruptcy, but the difference is, it’s only costing me $150 at most to test the waters 4 years later in the same industry.. and I won’t be making any of the same mistakes again.

I don’t believe failed business ventures are like ex-girlfriends, and I believe by going about it the right way, by re-visiting this particular one there’s a chance for success that I can’t let slip simply because of some very silly mistakes I made previously.

Here’s a quote I plucked off Google on mistakes which made me laugh…

“Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from” - Al Franken