What’s Stopping You From Succeeding?

by Dean James

Today I want to ask YOU a question. What’s stopping you from succeeding online? What’s the biggest challenge/obstacle you think you need to overcome? What’s the thing between you and achieving your dreams when it comes to online business?

Be Honest – Not With Me, With Yourself

Be absolutely honest with yourself on this one. Don’t say that you don’t have enough time, because everyone can make time if they really want to. What is it? Really?

The only thing that will ultimately stop you from achieving success online, is YOU. It isn’t a technical issue or lack of knowledge, it’s your own mind conspiring against you ( if you let it ). By removing a perceived obstacle, you open up the floodgates for achieving success.

Patience Is A Virtue

We all want overnight riches. This is something that is possible if you are a guru who is well established and doing a big product launch. Well it is and it isn’t. What people don’t see is the months of hard work that go into that day when the ‘guru’ makes a million dollars in 24 hours. What people don’t see is the months and often years of hard work it took to reach that landmark in their career. What people don’t see is the costs of creating the product and all the affiliate commissions that come out of the bottom line. Some marketers never make it. For the regular guy and girl the chances are you have a website or you are writing articles and you want to make money with it.

If you don’t have  a website, it’s not a necessity but really… honestly, you need to get one.

Once you have one you need to stick at it long enough for it to hit paydirt.

Here’s an example of one website I setup. Here are the traffic stats for March 2010.

1343 unique visitors for March 2010 or around 45 visitors a day. Some people would be quite happy with that.

This is what happens when you stick with it and keep doing the right things… Traffic stats for March 2011

 

6610 unique visitors in March 2011 or around 220 a day. My target is 500-1000 uniques a day. Also forget Adwords when you are starting out, it’s getting harder and harder to make a return with that and most people just burn their money up.

Decide You Will Be Successful

Once you make the conscious decision to become successful in any walk of life including online business, you have made that leap of faith that is required for an entrepreneur to create their own destiny. You have got to believe.

Further Learning

Never stop learning. Always take at least a little time out of your day to learn something new that will help you with your online business. What area of internet marketing would you like to learn more about? ( traffic generation, adsense, seo, affiliate marketing, list building, blogging? etc )

Let me know by posting a comment below. Don’t be afraid to say exactly what it is because by doing so you’ll be helping others that wanted to say exactly the same thing as you but didn’t.

soloadsales

by Dean James on April 8, 2011 · 16 comments

Internet Marketing

{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }

Joanne Jobson Walsh April 8, 2011 at 5:19 pm

I have been trying to get traffic and links to my website since last June. I have bought packages and bought Guru BS and nothing seems to work. I have thought many times of giving up. But, my personality is not one of being a quitter. I am determined, but I do NOT wish to spend thousands of dollars to get my website ranked on Google. I wish that someone would come up with something that is legit and stop selling these big one red button BS stuff. It really is annoying that people think you are soooooo stupid. I may not be the brightest light on the tree but I know these things do not work. I have spent money on what seems to be legit stuff from people who are well known and it still is BS. If you can help me I would be forever grateful.
Regards,
Joanne

Dean James April 8, 2011 at 5:37 pm

@Joanne J W

Are you trying to rank for competitive terms? What kind of links have you been building since last June? That means you have been link building for around 10 months now so you should be seeing results for all but the most competitive of keywords. On a new site it can take a little longer than working with an aged domain but 10 months is more than long enough to be seeing results.

It’s good to hear that you are not a quitter. NEVER QUIT. Never. Sometimes it’s okay to change your approach when what you are doing is absolutely not working, but you have to be persistent. Most people quit JUST before the point they were about to succeed. Temporary failure lends itself to ultimate success as long as you are following the right recipe.

You don’t need to spend thousands to get ranked in Google. What exactly have you been doing to date? PM me with your search terms and your website URL.

Software is just that, software. It’s how you use those tools that equals results. Some software out there is crap, plain and simple. On the other hand there are some software tools that reduce manual labor and automate processes that are time consuming. You can work smart with software but anyone that believes it’s possible to push a red button and see income come flooding into their bank account is deluded. The IM industry is in a bit of a state at the moment because people want EASY and they want PUSH BUTTON so unscrupulous marketers sell the masses this in order to get sales. People by nature are inherently lazy so it’s easier to sell someone something that is portrayed as being so easy, you push a button. You mention work to most people and they run a mile. This is not intended to insult anyone that has bought this kind of stuff, we’ve all done it ( even me in the past ). The truth is most people would like to press a button and swing from a hammock sipping Pina Coladas but deep down everyone knows this is pure fantasy 🙂 To get results you have to put the work in. You can leverage things to work smart but everything worth having requires hard work. Easy money is possible but only after foundations have been laid.

There comes a point where you have to ask yourself the question, “How long do I want to see results for? Do I want to actually build a business”. The way I see it, short term things are the ‘fads’ that work temporarily and then stop working. You end up just chasing your tail, trying to maintain a level of income that is meaningful to you.

Contrast that with someone that tests out markets and then scales up on the ones that they are having success with. They are connecting with people in that niche and building assets at the same time. Examples of this include building authority sites, targeted lists of prospects, products the market actually wants. This is when you go from making nickles and dimes to life changing income where you have a presence in the market ( things get easier once you are at this point and you find people start coming to you literally offering you money. You’ll find that people offer to buy your website without you even putting it up for sale, they’ll offer you money to mail for them, they’ll offer to write free articles in the hope you’ll link back to them, they’ll want to partner with you and they’ll even offer you super affiliate commissions just to promote what they have to offer. And so it goes on ). Once you have leverage in the marketplace it increases your options but your focus should be on connecting with the market and increasing your visibility, particularly in markets you are already making money in and where other people clearly are as well. Too many people waste their time trying to crack a market that just isn’t working for them. Go where the money is and find a starving crowd.

Drop me a line Joanne and I’ll take a look at what you are trying to achieve.

Joanne Jobson Walsh April 8, 2011 at 5:55 pm

Hi Dean,
Thank you for taking the time to answer so fast. I have been paying for links and also using software to get links. I also used ineedhits which was totally useless. As for traffic I have used many ideas that people have sent me and none seem to work. I am just here pulling my hair out and trying to find something that will work. Linkdominators (think this is how you spell it) has been creating links for me but when I checked for the links they did not show up. He said that I used the wrong keywords. Well, I don’t think that this would really make a difference if he actually did send me all the links he said. My website is as above: http://www.weightlossdivajj.com. I have tried and tried to improve my website, I have bought SEO from GoDaddy who is my host etc.. etc.. nothing seems to work. I just do not know what to do. There has got to be something out there. Some nights I am so tired I get sick and cannot work on my website anymore. That is how much work I do to optimize it. I am fedup as I said. I am trying to do affiliate marketing as you will notice on my website. That is my main thing right now. I wrote a few blogs but that did not help. I followed Potpie Girls One week Marketing but the guys she uses are something like $197.00 per month. I cannot afford that! I don’t think any company is worth that kind of money. Alex Goad has a program out called Rank Builder and that is $40 something per month after you sign up. What is will these greedy people anyways. Alex Goad is a millionaire and he still wants over $500.00 per month for his links etc. Any comments??
Regards,
Joanne 🙁

Dean James April 8, 2011 at 6:16 pm

Hi Joanne, Don’t waste any money on anything that just sends you hits, it’s traffic that is next to useless. To make money from niches you have to get inside the mind of what your target consumer wants. All you have to do then is set up a conduit website to funnel that visitor to take an action they were already highly likely to anyway. That aside, a couple of comments:

#1 – Your Fat Burning Furnace hyperlink isn’t clickable so you’ll want to take a look at that.
#2 – What keywords are you trying to optimize your website for? Truth About Weight Loss? or? Are you getting any organic traffic to the site?
#3 – What you pay for a service all depends on your ROI ( return on investment ). It’s all relative. If you spend $197 a month and make $500 a month ( for example ) then it’s a great monthly investment. When you are starting out you want to keep your outlay on such services to a minimum until you are making good money.
#4 – Alex Goad is a millionaire because he knows he can charge $xxx a month and people will pay that much for the service he is offering 😉 You will find he also has a funnel in place that introduces customers to higher priced-products. The ones that were/are happy with lower price purchases will pay more for a high-end product.
#5 – Your affiliate links should not be raw. Put redirects in place so they don’t actually look like affiliate links.

I have never looked at linkdominators. Did they send you reports of what work they undertook and completed? Your homepage is only showing 14 inbound links at the moment.

Hey, don’t get tired and sick working on your website. It should also be fun. Let me know what keywords you are trying to rank for and we can go from there. Also what is your maximum monthly financial budget for promotion of your site?

Joanne Jobson Walsh April 8, 2011 at 10:03 pm

Hi Dean,
I must thank you so much for giving me these ideas to look at. As I said I am not very savvy when it comes to this stuff. What in heavens name is a conduit website? I have never heard of this. I have heard of funneling.
The keywords that I am using are weight loss story, weight loss picture, truth about weight loss and hot to lose weight. I have not had one visitor to my site. That is why I am getting so frustrated.
Linkdominators sent me a huge list of all stupid links. About 400 of them. When I went in to check only a few showed up. So I don’t know what Ivana and Alex are talking about. They keep telling me to buy more links.
I don’t really understand your statement #5. How would I put the name of the product and the link on my website. Thank you for letting me know that one of them is not working. I will check that a little later.
If I am guaranteed my money back if I spend so much per month and the product does not produce then it could be $200.00 per month or more. I have not really given it much thought as my only goal was to get my website ranked maybe at even 10 would be good for now. I have just had so many stumbling blocks and hurdles to get over that I guess I wonder when I go to bed at night if it is all worth it. If I saw just one sale I would know that it was. I will understand if you don’t answer until Monday. Most people take the weekend off. I just sit here and play around with my site or look for answers. I wish a big light would turn on and I would GET THIS THING CALLED INTERNET MARKETING.

Renee Kratz April 9, 2011 at 8:59 pm

Hi Dean,

I purchased your Content Cash Secrets some time ago, and had already purchased XSitePro2 software. But have to admit to being sidetracked by the next “Magic Program” that dropped into my mailbox. I now find I really do have to “dig in” and focus on one thing and get that earning for me instead of jumping from one program to another.

I only work part time, so I do have the time to put in to make this
work, and I also am not one to quit!!! My question is I have decided to concentrate on Adsense sites, and am wondering if I should build them using XSitePro instead of the Wordpress platform? I was disappointed that XSitePro didn’t provide replays of their webinars as I was working during the times they were on, which is why I turned to using Wordpress. Which is the better platform for an Adsense site?

I’ll worry about backlinking once the sites are built.

Regards,
Renee`

Dean James April 10, 2011 at 1:53 am

Hi Joanne,

I’m not saying anything bad or otherwise about Link Dominators. I have never used their service. What I will say is this. They appear to be a backlinking service with services starting at $77. Now it’s true that SEO results can take a while to kick in, so it depends how long you have been using their services and if you’re checking for backlinks in Yahoo it can take a while for the search engines to pick them up and count them. Even then, they don’t show all of them. With that said, I would concentrate on the on-site optimisation of your site FIRST.

What does that mean exactly? ( you may ask ).

It means dedicating a page to each of the keyword phrases you want to rank for. So if you want to rank for ‘how to lose weight’, have a page that is all about how to lose weight. I won’t go into the intricacies of on-site SEO but you can do some background reading on this to get upto speed. Trying to opimise a site for lots of different keywords over one long page ( a one page website ) is not the way I recommend you go.

What you end up with is a multiple page site that targets specific keywords for each page. So you’d have one page on “Weight Loss Picture” and another on “How to Lose Weight” etc. I’m assuming at this point that you’ve analysed your competition and checked that the traffic figures for these phrases is worthwhile. For example you could rank #1 for “I’m The King Of Weight Loss” but if nobody is searching for that, you won’t get any traffic or make any money. The next thing you need to consider is how far along in the buying process those visitors will be. Is someone looking for a weight loss picture actually ready to buy a weight loss product? Put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer. If you typed in “Weight Loss Picture” what would you be looking for? Possibly a before and after picture as a result of someone following a diet plan perhaps? You know those links you have for weight loss products? You should turn those into individual pages that talk all about that product.

I hate to say ‘Stop using a service’, but stop paying out for links until you have addressed the things above. You’ll just be throwing money away that could be spent on other things. A link building service will happily tell you to keep b-u-y-i-n-g more links because they are making money out of selling these packages. That’s fine if you are getting results, but I am advising you that you need to take care of the above first.

Let me know how you get on and I can give you more insight/advice. The only thing you need to worry about right now is what I have detailed above. Write and optimise pages for your target keywords and check traffic/competition levels to ensure it’s worthwhile. Think about what makes you buy and apply that to your site. Don’t hard sell on anything either.

It’s clear to me that a lot of advice out there is just bad and I know how frustrated you are feeling right now, because I have felt like that when I first started too. I used to wish people would give me answers, but it was a case of putting jigsaw puzzle pieces together until things finally made sense. Finding a good, knowledgeable mentor and resources is the hardest part because there are so many ‘overnight gurus’ online that haven’t actually made their money in the trenches, merrily dispensing advice and burning out beginners.

Dean James April 10, 2011 at 2:07 am

Hi Renee,

Good to hear from you 🙂 FOCUS is key! In fact it’s the one thing ( coupled with dogged PERSISTENCE ) that will ensure your success. Without it, you’ll keep getting distracted by the next ‘must-have’ tool or ‘program’ guaranteed to make you overnight riches. We all know these don’t actually exist and anything worth having requires a little hard work. Jumping from one program to another will burn you out and cost you a fortune in the process. You already know MORE than you think you do.

Concentrating on Adsense sites is a good way to get started and an easy way to see money coming in. Once you see money coming in, you will be more motivated to make even more money. You’ll feel good and positive about things which will spur you on. How quickly you start making money is the thing that tells your mind that you’re getting results which are worth pursuing.

Once you are making a reasonable amount of money, I then recommend you diversify and create additional income streams from other sources, but one step at a time. First thing is first, start making money with Adsense by building content sites and get that working for you before you focus on anything else.

Wordpress is great for blogging and it has an army of fans that will tell you it’s the only way to go, but for Adsense sites in particular you simply do not need it. You can build a static site with a html editor using a template or with a sitebuilder like XSitePro2. Personally I would go for the latter and give Wordpress a miss. It’s much easier to manage on so many levels and if you ever sell the site you can just send them the files. You can do the same with Wordpress but it’s a little more complicated and if you want to change hosts it’s a bit of a pain.

I agree on the XSP 2 webinars, did they not include the replays anywhere? Sounds like an oversight on their part if that’s the case. Maybe they wanted big numbers on their webinars.

I’m not plugging this hard, but I have a couple of spots open to build a custom Adsense site for anyone interested at http://www.qualitynichesites.com ( $197 ). Turnaround is usually 7-10 business days. This service is useful for anyone that feels like they are losing their mind and just wants an Adsense website that’s setup for them. I realised the other day that what takes me a few hours can take someone starting out literally weeks. That said, it’s a good idea to learn how to do some things yourself as well.

Keep me posted on your progress.

Dean

Brian April 10, 2011 at 4:40 pm

Dear Joanne,

That background color on the type has definitely got to go. It is making your website hard to read, keep it white. Next the thing I see is a lot of type to read to find out what the point of it all is. Focus on making your site easy to read and avoid big blocks of type . Use titles to let people know what your site is all about. You only have about 3 or 4 seconds to get there attention then they are gone. They should know within that time what the site can do to help them out, use the title lines for announcing the befits.

Dean James April 10, 2011 at 5:41 pm

Thanks Brian!

Joanne, Brian is right. Choose colors that make your website easy on the readers eye. Break up long pieces of written text so they are only several lines each ( i.e. natural paragraphs ). You can add sub-headings etc where appropriate in content. A lot of people have short attention spans, particularly on the net where unless it is clear as to the purpose of the page, they will exit and you usually lose them at this point forever. Once your website is successful you will want to capture some of those visitors by getting them subscribed to your newsletter.

Alun Maxwell April 11, 2011 at 1:20 pm

Hi Joanne,

Dean has covered a lot of what you need to hear re your website. I agree with the comment that the background colour is unhelpful to you – too dark. Anything that makes it harder to read is worth rethinking. As Dean said, go for much shorter pages, short paragraphs, and more bullets and emboldened text on key words or phrases. Your main categories of topic under ‘weight loss ‘ all need their own page, reachable in a navigation bar (I’d recommend putting that on the left, not on top, so you can keep adding to it). These ‘tier 2’ pages can then link off to ‘tier 3s’ which can be sub-topics of your topic (‘tier 2’) pages.

Don’t do tier 4 pages. Every page should be a maximum of 2 clicks from your Home Page.. Also, link every page back to the home page using that page’s keyword phrase in the link (‘anchor’) text.

Then link pages together as long as it makes sense to the reader, and the ‘linked to page’ is a natural follow on from the ‘linked from page’.

Every page should be optimised around one keyword phrase with high demand and not too high supply. Wordtracker or Market Samurai are good tools for this, and keyword research is well worth doing before optimising pages for phrases that are either impossibly competitive or have negligible demand. Hope that helps, and ditto everything Dean’s already suggested.

Joanne Jobson Walsh April 13, 2011 at 12:52 pm

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I guess that I will just have to start from scratch again. It took me about four months to get this darn web-site up. I don’t even know when one page begins and one ends. GoDaddy is very helpful but they keep changing things all of the time. I went in to change stuff last night and screwed up the whole web-site. Thank goodness I did not publish. I might just hire someone to do a site for me as I am getting so tired. Does anyone have any suggestions of a reasonable company to do this. Thanks again for your help.

Dean James April 13, 2011 at 11:50 pm

Joanne, It depends what kind of site you want to build. If you want a site that is monetized with Adsense ( if you don’t have an account it’s just a question of applying for one ) we can build that for you ( http://www.qualitynichesites.com – 3 spots available at discount and turnaround time is 7-10 working days ). This just gives you the asset to start driving traffic to rather than creating everything from scratch. The benefits of that is that the site is setup correctly and it’s easier to get started earning than making product sales. If you want an affiliate site there are resources that will teach you how to do this yourself. So it depends upon what you want and what your budget is.

Dean James April 13, 2011 at 11:53 pm

Alun is right, keyword research is a vital part of the site building process. Personally I do my keyword research before I even start building a site. A lot of people will try to rank for very tough terms that require 1-2 years of consistent hard work. They don’t realise they are going after terms that are too competitive. In the end they give up and move onto something else, frustrated that their efforts have not been rewarded. The moral of this story is : Do your keyword research and don’t try to rank for terms where competitors are spending literally thousands of dollars promoting their sites.

Dean James April 25, 2011 at 1:41 am

@Joanne – I just had a quick look at your site. I recommend you make the following changes.

1) Change the links to the products to blue. At the moment they are blending in as they are the same color as the written text.
2) Add a graphic that advertises a product.
3) Don’t bury all the links right at the bottom of the page.
4) Your links are not cloaked at the moment. Don’t link to products with a raw affiliate link if you can help it.

Rachid May 8, 2011 at 7:54 pm

Hi Dean,
Thank you for this useful post.
I just started created my first website, also i have a many free blogs.
Thanks
Rachid

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