Are You Having Fun Yet?

Internet marketing is neither sexy, nor particularly fun on most days, and it involves a lot of hard work. First you have to learn the ins and outs of marketing online, you have to implement what you’ve learned to start your online business, then you have to keep it growing.

Let’s break it down and discuss this… what are some of the things you need to do?

Well, for starters you need to write a business plan which includes:

• Market research – what business are you going to start
• Set goals
• Determine what tools and services you need
• Determine your budget
• Determine your audience
• Learn marketing strategies
• Develop a marketing plan

Sheeze… this is too much like doing homework. You want to start your business so you maybe skip over a few things, or even all of them. But you’re determined so you move forward.

And lucky for you, you just came across a done-for-you system that promises you can get your website up and running in 30 minutes and you get products to sell. Yipee! You’re going to do that and get this show on the road. You open up your zip file and start reading.

It’s two weeks down the road and you still don’t have the website up and running. What happened? Did you perhaps skip parts in Step 1 like determine what services you need to include in your budget? Services such as web hosting and auto responder?

Backtrack and take another look at your business plan

But, hey, it’s all good. You can get a web hosting service that you just saw mentioned, and you can sign up with this brand new auto responder service that everyone is talking about because it does all these cool things, and, oh yeah, you need to purchase a domain name.

Okay, you’re all set and ready to go. But wait! There’s this fancy website builder that you can use to build your very own website. Great! But, what is WordPress? No worries, you can figure this out.

In the meantime, you are bombarded with all these offers for “the last course you’ll ever need”, the best done-for-you packages, the multitude of ultimate research tools, and enough WordPress plugins and video makers to choke an elephant.

Are You Having Fun Yet?

It’s three months down the road, you’ve spent way too much money, and you’re still waiting for some income. Why? You did everything they told you to do. And you bought all those courses on traffic generation and all kinds of research tools and plugins for WordPress that will explode your business. Why is your business still flat-lined?

You decide to go back to the website builder you purchased a few months ago and build another website. A couple of weeks later, you decide the easy-to-use drag and drop website builder isn’t really all that easy. Css and HTML… what’s that about?

So now you’re at the six month point and you evaluate what you’ve accomplished. Have you learned anything useful? Probably. You learned a little about WordPress, you learned something about traffic, you learned that you know nothing about web hosting, you still haven’t figured out your auto responder, and you’re scratching your head wondering why you even have one.

But you’re one of the smart ones. Many new online entrepreneurs just continue this vicious cycle of buying anything and everything that will build their business for them and getting nowhere. There are many more who just give up and quit altogether.

You’re determined to succeed so you decide to scrap the crap and back to the drawing board you go.

This time you’re going to do it the right way… you’re going to do your homework first!

Step 1. Write a business plan

Market research – what business are you going to start
Set goals
Determine what tools and services you need
Determine your budget
Determine your audience
Learn marketing strategies
Develop a marketing plan

You’ve done your market research, you know who your customers will be, you know what product(s) you want to build your website around, you know what tasks you need to do and when they need to be done, you know how much money you’re going to spend each month (and stick to it!), you’ve determined how you’re going to promote your business to get it started, and you’ve found someone who will help you when you get stuck.

In short, you now have a plan. You spent around 30 days putting it together and learning things you never considered. Now you’re ready to rock and roll.

Step 2. Build your website

You decided that you didn’t want to take the time to do this yourself so you found a service to outsource this project to. You’ve been in contact and they know what you want and the time frame for completion. And of course, this is included in your budget.

Step 3. Create your product(s)

While your website is being built, you can concentrate on creating your product. You know what you want and you know how to do it.

Step 4. Create content for your website

Piece of cake! You know your product better than anyone so you can get the ball rolling here. You can easily write 5 articles on the topic, maybe even 10. But you know your time is limited so you find some excellent PLR material to supplement your own articles. Since the PLR is good stuff in the first place, tweaking it to make it your own won’t be a problem.

Step 5. Create an opt-in form for your website

Hmm… Oh, yeah, you remember you purchased several plugins and services that will create opt-in forms. So you just need to check them out and pick one. Then you think about the website that’s just sitting there on your server and realize you don’t have an opt-in anything. Ooops… you assume they forgot to tell you about that or worse, they just assumed you already knew you needed to add one. That would certainly explain why your auto responder is just sitting there waiting for you to do something.

Step 6. Set up your auto responder

Now you know what this puppy is all about and you know you need to create a welcome email series for your new subscribers that you can’t wait to meet!

But before you can move to the next step you still have another hurdle to overcome. Your terrific website is ready and uploaded to your server, as scheduled. Your website is built on WordPress but, since you didn’t build it yourself, it’s still a mystery to you. You have some reference material to help you and some videos, so you at least are capable of adding your articles. You know there’s more to learn but you want to get this show on the road.

You remember that person who said they’d be happy to help you out if you got stuck so you contact them. Sure enough, they take the time to tweak a few things and teach you what they did so you can do it yourself in the future. You ask for some advice on other aspects of your website and marketing strategy to make sure you’re on the right track. Again, they help you out.

Now you’re ready to move forward to the next step.

Step 7. Promote your website

When you put together your marketing plan back in Step 1 you wrote it in general terms. But hey, it’s not like you haven’t been thinking about that all this time. You’ve gone back to it and made some decisions to refine your strategy. You also know you’ll be referring to it often and making adjustments.

Now you’re ready to open for business and you couldn’t be happier or prouder of all you’ve accomplished. You’re ready to implement your marketing strategy so you get to it.

Are you having fun yet? You bet you are! You have a business up and running and you’re starting to see traffic and sales.

Way to go!