Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I was blown away by the responses to my article on How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up.

So far we have over 100 comments to the post, and these are real heartfelt comments too.

It seems a lot of you are sitting at home in silence, struggling with all kinds of internal turmoil, trying to make this whole Internet business and blogging thing work.

I realize it’s a challenge for everyone to keep on carrying on in the face of slow growth and little financial reward. We’ve all been there.

As human beings, most things in life worth achieving are difficult and slow to attain, but of course, that’s part of why we do it. If it was easy, then it wouldn’t have as much value. The same goes for building a great blog or a great business.

The Day I Knew I Would Make It

There’s one moment - one ingredient - I believe that is the only indication you need to know if your blog can be a success.

It’s not traffic or links. It’s not making your first affiliate sale, or signing up your first sponsor. It’s not about making your first dollar in any way.

See if you can guess the ingredient from my story…

What Is The Magic Ingredient?

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There’s something I’ve come to realize about most of my fellow bloggers - you guys and girls are not great at marketing.

Don’t take offense, marketing is not something that comes naturally and most people enter the blogging world as writers or hobbyists, not business people.

Some look at marketing as advertising and their current perception of advertising is akin to lying. With that attitude in place, no self respecting blogger wants to learn how to lie in order to promote their blog. This may be an inaccurate assumption about marketing, but let’s face facts, most people don’t know what marketing is and their world view of the advertising industry is framed on their experience with television commercials, magazine advertisements and billboards.

Some might say I’m a good marketer, but I want to be honest with you - if I had a choice, I’d rather sit down and just write to my blog and not worry about how I’m going to “get my message out there”. I’m lucky because I have some momentum here at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, so in a lot of ways I can just publish content and my traffic will grow, but chances are for you, if you build it, readers won’t just show up and read your blog because it’s there.

…or will they?

The Long Road To Blog Traffic

You’ve possibly read the varying arguments about targeting the Long Tail for traffic as a blogger. Some argue that you can’t leverage the long tail for traffic in the same way that a business like Amazon does for profit selling goods.

This is true, in some respects. Amazon, iTunes and companies and services like them, have massive scale and can reach the entire long tail of a product catalog and thus truly leverage the full breadth of the tail.

Bloggers cannot realistically do this since it would mean writing content to hit every single topic and keyword phrase in a niche - effectively millions of articles.

Any blogger who has managed to stick to writing regular content for at least three months - and it really kicks in after about six to eight months - knows about the gift you receive from Google. If you check your traffic statistics regularly, the traffic coming from Google and in lessor respects from the other search engines, will increase if you stick to regular content production long enough.

Thanks to search engines, bloggers who specialize in writing voluminous amounts of content but with poor marketing skills or a lack of motivation to do much more than put creative thought out on their blog, can still succeed - it’s just a bit slower this way.

One Visitor At A Time

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I just finished watching (actually listening to the MP3 version) of the video conversation between Jeff Walker, Eben Pagan and Frank Kern. The video is one of the resources Jeff released free from his “road trip” around the USA interviewing marketers who have done big online launches.

If you haven’t seen any of the videos, head to the product launch formula website and enter your name and email to gain access to the video and MP3 interview with Jeff, Eben and Frank. It’s free and Jeff’s stays on topic when he sends mail, so you won’t get hit with pitch after pitch once you are on his list.

Jeff Walker, Frank Kern and Eben Pagan talk product launch

If you haven’t watched the first video from Jeff where he interviews John who makes $9,000 a month from a business selling a board game about medicinal herbs (!) - you can find that video and the full story in my previous post here -

$9,000 a month from a board game

I won’t recount the entire video with Jeff, Frank and Eben but there was one point they brought up I wanted to discuss further because it’s something that is often overlooked by people doing a launch. These techniques are part of what Jeff claims are new to the 2.0 version of the Product Launch Formula and it’s safe to say no one else is looking at this to the depth Jeff is.

What are we talking about? Your affiliates - in particular, how to motivate them to promote your product.

The Greatest Source of Traffic Is…

Most of us poor bloggers have a mentality akin to the working class when it comes to building traffic. We toil day-in and day-out, pumping out content, building little channels of traffic and slowly creating an asset. We hope to retire one day leveraging our years of previous effort and follow the slow-and-steady path to success.

That’s a fine way to go about building an Internet business - that’s exactly how I did it and in time, it can be very rewarding - BUT, there are others who don’t have the patience to go through the slow process of content production and marketing, and instead look for quicker ways to reach an audience.

Marketers who have released products online understand that their affiliates, in most cases, drive traffic and sales. Affiliates are definitely an integral part of a launch process because they help bring in traffic, usually much more traffic and better quality traffic than any other source available online today.

As an avid student of how to build traffic online and also a teacher attempting to offer my students the quickest methods to deliver traffic results (since you are all so impatient!), I’ve studied information products about traffic generation and watched with interest how people market things on the world wide web.

Whenever I purchase an Information product related to making money online, the first page I turn to is the one about how the person built an audience. I have to know how exactly they attracted the traffic necessary to generate sales. In most cases, this is where the real nuggets of value come from and where the real gains can be made if you apply the advice to your business.

After years of research, study and practice, it’s pretty clear that almost every marketing expert agrees that your affiliates are the greatest source of traffic you have. You can look deeper into this and qualify the difference between joint ventures, host beneficiaries and plain old affiliate traffic (each source of traffic is of different quality), but that’s not something we will look at in this article. What’s important is if you want to succeed online today, you need to understand how to leverage affiliates.

It’s Not As Easy As You Think

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Over the last two days I attended a workshop run by Andrew and Daryl Grant on the topic of joint ventures (JVs).

The workshop was valuable and covered a topic that is rarely given an entire two days worth of focus. JVs are the best way to drive quality traffic today and while they are not always easy to negotiate, they can make or break a business.

The people in attendance at the event were Andrew and Daryl’s membership site partners - people who are launching membership sites online in all kinds of niches in partnership with the Grants. The Grants provide the training and the technology, the partners provide the content and marketing.

Compare Blogging To Internet Business

As I’ve mentioned before I sit in a unique position in that my preeminence comes from being a well known blogger, but I do so in the Internet marketing industry. Internet marketers often view blogs as marketing tools, but nothing more. They use blogs to drive traffic and augment their information selling business. For bloggers, the blog is the business.

Listening to some of the membership site concepts floating around at the workshop it was clear that the focus for these people is to get a product out the door as quickly as possible and then market it using intelligent, high leverage methods, like joint ventures.

The mindset really is powerful and focused on the business of doing business. Create product, then find ways to sell it.

This is very different to bloggers. Bloggers pour their energy into content and resource creation, giving all of it away for free. The strategy is to create a blog of value, build traffic and then monetize with advertising and maybe, for those few bloggers who are business minded, to produce products and sell them.

You can’t really say one method is better than another, but it did raise the questions in my head about whether bloggers give away too much for free and wait too long to sell their information.

Product Leads To Profit

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You have to love the Internet marketing world. There’s a certain amount of jaded bitterness that surfaces when you sell something that presents a make money online opportunity. Every time I promote a product related to marketing or online income generation, there are those people out there who have adopted the belief that all marketers are liars and their products are more sales than substance.

Some might argue that it’s the hype - the language used to sell Internet marketing, in particular the long sales page format, that elicits the snarky comments or the sighs of “not again” from a handful of viewers. The disdain is palpable from some people and as much as I understand where they are coming from, it would be nice to only deal with satisfied customers.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time and everyone has a different experience and mindset, which isn’t always positive. No matter what you sell, there are people who will take issue with what you do and how you do it to the point where they feel the need to publicly state their disapproval.

I’m a bit tired of negativity, so today I’m going to relay to you three “golden nuggets” from three products I purchased from Internet marketers who sell Internet marketing products - the prime targets of the naysayers.

I spent at least $1,000 on each of these information products and they have all had a positive impact on my business and returned more than their cost in increased income and resource savings. Note these ideas - the nuggets - are just a sample of what I learned from the products and as anyone successful knows, it’s the two or three really powerful ideas that make a big difference.

Here are three examples -

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