I love meeting new Internet entrepreneurs. I love seeing the sparkle in their eyes, the passion for their new businesses and their drive to succeed.
I think it\’s great that people know where they\’re going. It\’s fantastic that they understand it is possible to build a successful online business, something that can give them a stable six- or even seven-figure income, and it\’s wonderful that they\’re determined to get there.
That\’s why I hate bringing them back down to earth.
It took me years to get where I am now. Those years weren\’t all easy. There were failures and disappointments, avenues that led nowhere and great-looking deals that delivered nothing.
There were quite a few successes too.
That\’s why I\’m so determined to share my knowledge with others. That\’s why I write books, give talks and attend conferences. I want to make it easier for others to do the same thing. I want them to achieve success without many of the worries and the cliffhanger moments that I encountered on the way. (There will always be some of those but if I can knock out some of the bigger problems and take years off the journey, I\’ll be happy.)
Perhaps the best piece of advice I can give then is to build your success step by step.
For Internet marketers, that means launching a site and starting with AdSense. Get your site up and running, understand how AdSense works and how you can make the most of it.
Then sharpen your search engine optimization and traffic skills. You\’ll need to bring users in to your site and turn those users into a community.
That means learning how to use social media, now a topic of its own. Building followings on sites like Facebook and Twitter is a huge amount of fun – I\’m having a ball on Twitter – but they do take time and they do take effort.
And while you\’re doing that, you can also start expanding your ad network to include affiliates and ads from other advertising systems.
That\’s a lot to learn and a lot to experiment with. Internet marketing is a profession and like any profession, you have to study the skills, and practice to understand how to use them.
No one ever achieved success in Internet marketing overnight but take it one step at a time and you\’ll get there too.