Basics - Step 1
OK – the first step of ALL is just some advice, and you’ll find this repeated many times in many books and programs…
So the very first thing you should do, once you decide what area you want to operate in (Your Strategy: eBooks, Pay Pre Click, Affiliate marketing etc.), is pick ONE plan to follow. Then put that plan into effect and stick to it until you’ve got it fully set up and run it for long enough to properly assess its success or failure.
You don’t see this advice in many of the follow-on emails from the “just join my mailing list” sequences… because many of those will simply be a chain of auto responder emails, automatically sent out every few days along the following lines:
The 1st one will be a “thank you note” for joining their mailing list and/or buying the product, and possibly congratulating you on being so discerning as to pick the best plan or eBook ever invented… then every day or every few days a new email:
2nd email:
Subject: (some catchy phrase e.g.) New! (Online money making package) – Only a few available!
<your name>
Hey, you need to read this! This is the ‘real deal’, you can’t afford to miss it…
There have been (whatever type of plan it is) packages before, and some of them have been good too – but this new package includes (some fancy name) that will supercharge your <responses, traffic, income> – on Autopilot!
Think of that, once you’ve set it up you’ll be able to just sit back and reap the rewards!
There are only a few places left, so don’t delay - Click the link to claim your place before it sells out!
Your friend,
Joe Bloggs
….etc. etc.
3rd, 4th, etc. Emails: every few days, maybe alternating different types of plan… but basically they are recommending you to buy another plan, then not allowing time for you to actually read the manual, let alone put the plan into effect! Not to mention the cost if you kept joining them! So what did they think you were going to do with the first one, the one where you signed up to their mailing list? Just put it to one side without even reading it? Read it but not do anything? Answer: Yes! Because that’s what most people do (I’ve done it myself many times before!) So what you absolutely must do is pick one and stick to it.
Only a few of these limited time offers disappear after the short time indicated – most of them will still be there in a few months, so don’t panic buy! Even if that plan gets closed off, the same guru will be bringing out an even better one a few months from now… A lot of them make their money just selling a new plan every few months… usually it’s basically the same plan, renamed and rehashed, but with some new wrinkle that makes it better than ever! Even a good, honest guru – one who really wants to help people, who caps the number of students… but in a few months those people will have gone through the process and then the next intake comes, and you can try for that one – so all you lose is a few months – during which time you’ve increased your experience and therefore your chance of eventual success.
So you must accept that you’ll have to close some doors in order to actually make some progress – otherwise you’ll just be spending money and wasting time until you give up on the whole idea and settle for being a wage slave for the rest of your life. You only have so much time and money to spend on this, so you can’t possibly do all these plans.
You might decide which plan to follow based on the details of the sales letter, or perhaps by picking the guru or mentor who seems most trustworthy, or by finding the top performing plan – but based on how it works, not how fast the plan itself sells! i.e. just because a plan is ‘the most popular’ doesn’t mean it works, just that the most people bought it – maybe it had the best marketing, that doesn’t make it the best plan!
Then put that plan into effect and stick to it – it won’t give instant results whatever the sales pitch says – you’ll have to keep at it, improving and refining until it works or you reach a pre-determined cut-off point you decide on. The results will be dependent on getting people to your page, site and/or mailing list, then converting browsers to buyers… it takes time to build up traffic, and it will probably take several attempts and fine tuning before your sales page converts satisfactorily. You will want to tune your sales page(s) for good conversion before ramping up your traffic acquisition, so that when you do get high traffic, you also get good conversion – otherwise you could waste costly prospects! But you need some traffic in order to test the conversion rate in the first place!
And remember that when you’ve succeeded once, it will be a lot easier the second and future times – more like cloning and multiplying your first successful income… though you should also keep fine tuning, experimenting and improving too!
Though many plans will give a 30, 60 or 90 day money back guarantee - that will probably not be long enough to produce a good, regular income, but it should be long enough to work see whether it its workable, IF you get started quickly and keep your momentum going. Generally any refund will come through OK – give it a day or two, before chasing it. Clickbank (who specialise in information product sales’ payment processing) have a strict policy ensuring a 56 money back guarantee. Other payment processors should have a similar policy but with different timescales – but check their policy before you buy. If there’s trouble getting a refund from the supplier, then after giving them a proper chance you can try going through the payment processor. Even if you miscalculate and overrun the deadline, if you are truly dissatisfied with the plan after trying it properly, ask for a refund – you may well get back the initial fee. This only applies to the cost of the ‘plan’ itself, domain name, web hosting and autoresponder costs are generally non-refundable, so do things in the right sequence (see below)
When putting a plan into effect, especially on a limited budget, remember to do things in the right sequence, but allowing time for each item – write out a flow chart of the items that make up the finished process and make sure you understand the interdependence and the sequence they need to be done in, before you start doing them!
e.g. if you are sourcing products, building a website, a mailing list and an autoresponder sequence: Source the products, and decide which one(s) to start selling first – you can’t write the wording before knowing what products you are selling! Then build the web pages as this may take quite a while if you aren’t used to it… writing and arranging the wording and images, linking the pages etc. might take days to weeks. These two stages might take several weeks. So if you’d set up your hosting and autoresponder first they’d be sat there costing you money – you might pay for a month without using them, or waste a free months service! But remember that it may take a few days for confirmation and set up details to come through, so don’t expect to open your hosting or autoresponder account the day before you want it to be fully working!
Also – remember to factor in the time to read and understand the terms and conditions for all these accounts you are signing up for! Most of them are long winded and difficult to understand, but obviously you should always read them before signing up, possibly translating to plain English notes for yourself, for checking later – for example an Amazon affiliates’ sign up prohibits using domain names that include anything like ‘amazon’ in them… so if you hadn’t read that, you could end up not only losing your commission, but having to set up a new website as well – and possibly you might be barred from rejoining! Google has some very stringent rules and may blacklist you if you break them even by accident… which could mean you can’t ever use Google AdWords or AdSense again – and Google is the number one source of traffic on the internet!
If you are running an AdWord campaign, remember to put strict limits on it, otherwise you might blow your budget before you’ve got anywhere at all. Also, allow for a day or two for Google accounts to be activated, or refused and re-applied for! (you don’t apply for a Google account until you are ready: website working AND you have links to it already in place – e.g. from blog or article pages)
If you need to set up a web site, think carefully about what domain name you use, you might be able to re-use the same one, if the first project you try doesn’t work – but in any case, domain names are cheap, so you can always get a new one and hopefully add it to your existing webhosting account – check the number of domains etc. allowed for your hosting package before deciding which one to buy, though you might be able to just upgrade to include extra domains in the same hosting account. It’s a good idea to check for this before signing up for your first hosting package – but don’t take so long making your mind up that you lose interest – keep your momentum!
If your first project works, great! You can repeat the success using the same method, or try a different plan, while still earning money from the first project. If not, you might have decided to give it six months, and stop if there’s no profit by then, or the profits are too small compared to the ongoing time commitments. You may have put a cap on how much you are going to invest in web hosting, auto-responder service etc. Or you might just decide after a few months that the particular process or product you are selling isn’t what you thought it was at the outset and you hate selling it.
So then, if you decide to try again – make sure you do a post-mortem on the first project before looking at alternatives: make sure you learn everything you can from any mistakes you (or the author of the plan itself) made, so you can better avoid them in the future. Then look for another project, pick one and follow it through… keep doing it one at a time until you find the one that works best for you.