Internet Business In A Nutshell Part 1: Paying Your Dues

I know it’s not a pleasant topic. Neither does anyone wish to hear that they don’t know enough to succeed right out of the box. But, for me to be completely honest with you may require that you try and accept that most of these “gurus” (these days they like to call themselves “mentors” too) are lying to you by omission.

I’m not saying you’re stupid, or even ignorant, for goodness sake. All I’m saying is maybe you don’t know everything you need to know to do your own market research, then sell like a madman as an affiliate until you know where you fit in the grand scheme of things, then create your own digital products, or maybe you don’t know where and how to best sell your existing physical products or services, let alone learning how to write attention grabbing sales copy or honest too goodness “pre-sales” technical reports, then proceed to market your wares all across the Internet using the latest in digital media with the skill of a ninja using every possible means at your disposal… just out of the blue or overnight. I’ve only very rarely seen that happen and I know lots of smart people.

For heaven’s sake just think about it a minute! In the corporate world all these widely varied skills get divided into completely separate companies! There are research companies, outsourcing and freelance companies, graphic design companies, web-master and web development companies, marketing companies and even further companies for customer support.

When you begin running your online business you are expected to fill all of those roles, all by yourself, at least at first, unless you can afford to start hiring other companies to do the work for you from the beginning and if you could do that you probably wouldn’t be reading blogs trying to find your answers.

The truth that nobody wants to tell you is that it takes a lot of time and effort to learn things like how to find a decent market, how to get the right information, how to figure out what to promote and then create, or even just how to sell whatever is it is you’re trying to sell online. I won’t lie to you. It isn’t usually easy, or fun, or glamorous, or quick. The honest truth is that it’s a helluva lot of work to do anything worth doing unless you’re already blessed with some sort of magic money tree and you can afford to waste dollar after dollar until you figure out how to turn a profit.

But, here’s the thing. These illusions that these “gurus” are selling, while usually not as easy as portrayed, are technically real and do exist for many persistant people. I suppose that fact is how some of the more shady "gurus" get away with misleading people and leading them to believe that just anyone can make a fortune online in a short time with little effort.

Eventually it IS possible to work 3 hours a week, or less, and still watch those huge checks roll in month after month or every two weeks, by switching everything to auto-pilot while you go on vacation. Imagine spending a few weeks working your tail off and then taking the next 6 months off and travel around the world if you want to. Once you know what you’re doing, that does become a possibility.

My friends and colleagues and I live the dream and we’re not that special, I can tell you. The secret is we work long hours when we have to and we just don’t ever give up trying new things.

But, it’s not something that the average person can do cold turkey, and you only get there after putting in your dues; a lot of long hours to get things started.

Ahem, that is, unless you know the right people… people that can save you time and money by letting you know what works and what doesn’t before you waste your time and money chasing everything under the sun.

But, learning just the basics takes time and learning everything you need to know could take years… especially the way the sharks out there like to try and slow you down by filling your head with useless information to cause you “information overload” and keep you buying their products. To learn only what you need to learn to do it quickly, you need to find someone to show you how to do it right from the beginning.

So this will be my attempt to put the whole thing is some kind of nutshell.

I will begin the next installment with various ways to conduct useful market research from you computer.

Then we’ll get into a little bit about affiliate sales and finding your “niche” in a market. …Then product creation, web design, marketing and copywriting and even customer service and anything else I can think of that might be helpful.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Online Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.