New to Internet Marketing?
Decide and Focus, or Quit!

by Steve Jackson

When you first get involved with Internet Marketing you'll discover there are unlimited opportunities for income. For example, there is the GoogleCash opportunity where you simply direct traffic clicking on your ads to a merchant's website and collect an affiliate commission. Or, you might choose to build a content-rich theme site over a period of many weeks and use it to earn Adsense income and to earn affiliate income. Or build dozens of ‘quick and dirty” Adsense sites in hours. Or you can build mini- sites for affiliate marketing. Or you can blog for money. You could profit from ebay in a variety of ways. You could write an information product, or choose to sell physical products. And this is only a partial list! Internet Marketing has something to suit (almost) everyone.

But the reality is that each opportunity probably calls for you to learn more than just one skill, and buy and learn more than just one software tool. For example if you choose to get involved with the Adsense opportunity you can end up using a keyword research tool to identify keywords to focus on, an HTML editing tool to build your site, graphics software to build the graphic header, the blog and ping technique with a junk blog  to get indexed in a hurry, RSS to build-up the content on your site, perhaps a separate good quality blog to improve your rankings in the search engines, perhaps another software tool to build a site map, and so on. The different Internet Marketing opportunities have their own Tools of the Trade!

For each of these tools you need to research which one to use; buy it; learn how to use it; then to put into practice. Some individual tools, for example some of the sophisticated software to make automatic post to blocks have quite a steep learning curve and it can genuinely take many hours simply to become familiar with the software, and many more to understand how to apply it correctly.

But if you’re human, and interested in making money (and why else would you be here?)  it is all too easy to be tempted to explore other opportunities while you are still in the middle of making a previous opportunity work. In fact, you probably asked for it! Your research probably put you on the mailing lists of many Internet Marketing experts who send you news of the latest and greatest every day ... and these folk are masters at turning-on your greed glands. From personal experience (me, my friends and my family) I suspect the majority of people who decide to dive into Internet Marketing but never succeed in making a serious penny simply get bogged down with partially implemented opportunities .

The solution is simple but unfortunately contrary to human nature (at least for many of us). It requires four steps:

Give yourself the luxury of exploring the opportunities ... but with a specific time limit, during which you commit up-front to starting nothing and to buying nothing until that time limit is up. This research is NOT trivial. You are not just looking at the income potential of the different Internet Marketing opportunities ... you need to look at the commitments in terms of initial time and ongoing time; whether income is fast or slowly builds up; whether there is out-of-pocket risk or just time-wasted risk; are you prepared to wander to the “dark side” a little (black hat SEO) or is your nature to stick to the straight and narrow; do you want to be dealing with individuals, or just nameless, faceless masses? Do you have a technical nature? Do you have access to someone who does if you need help?

Make the decision. Make it logically .... then test to see how your gut feels about it. When it feels right, commit. I mean, FULLY commit.

Pursue the chosen opportunity to completion, where “completion” means you fail beyond recovery, or you succeed in making a level of income that you considered to be a success for the technique. Learn what you need to; buy what you need to; then DO IT. And be prepared - this often means facing fears; fear of minor failure (starting a technical area where you are a novice), fear of rejection (asking others for links, knowing 90% will tell you “no” in the early days), and the big one ... fear of project failure. Your mind can play odd games with you ... if you move to another opportunity before you give this one your all, you’ve not really failed, have you? Whereas if you DO give it your all and it doesn’t work out ... then you’d have to face your failure.

And while you are pursuing the opportunity discipline yourself not to pursue or even explore different Internet marketing opportunities. Unless you know you have superb discipline this means you do not read e-mail's, newsletters, or sales pages from gurus promoting products that do not relate directly to your opportunity; and do not even read e-mail's, newsletters, or sales pages promoting improved versions of products that are supposed to be improvements on those products you are already using in pursuit of your opportunity. Make what you have, work.

Even if, on completing one opportunity, you choose to go onto a second or even a third entirely different one, doing so in this focused manner means you will probably complete three entire opportunities to a satisfying level of success before you would have achieved even one to a partial level of success if you’d been attempting all three simultaneously. I’m serious; multi-tasking often means a factor of three or four times the elapsed duration to completion of any project. Internet Marketing is no exception.

Just as important, you will actually have mastered the individual skills involved in the opportunities you pursued to completion; this contrasts nicely to having only a fingertips grasp of a variety of different tools and techniques, as is the inevitable outcome if you fail to focus.

In Internet Marketing, this mastery has rewards; you can repeat your success more quickly. You can outsource tasks, from a position of complete proficiency (always a good position from which to outsource). And you can usually transfer some or all of the skills to another Internet Marketing opportunity  in such a way as to make success in the new arena more certain, and more speedy. Not a bad combination!