Article Submission Review

Just give me a system!

• Share

0

After doing this a few years, Mike and I see a lot of the same trends, questions and mistakes over and over again. But by far the single biggest and most frequent one is this. People want a step by step system for making money online. In its basic premise it seems reasonable, and certainly some step-by-step guidance on the subject is, but when you really dive into it you’ll see that it is just completely unrealistic.

What is a system?

The first thing that you have to realize is that a “system” implies some formula that can be repeated time and time again for success. If that were the case, that you could reduce Internet Marketing (or really any form of marketing) into a simple do “A, do B, do C, get rich” system then it could be 100% programmatically automated.

If that were feasible it would be completely exploited until it no longer worked. Think about it this way too, if this supposed “system” were so effective why in the heck would these self-professed gurus be turning it over to you for $27? The fact is it might have worked five or six years ago and even then it’s doubtful if they ever even practiced it themselves. In general, any of these Internet marketing “insider traffic secrets” or whatever are simply selling outdated strategies that no longer work or may have worked just once with some luck, and they’re trying to sell the dream while they still can and pilfer the newbies $27 at a time.

This has become so rampant in the industry that one marketing network has pulled all make money online products entirely from their inventory and will no longer promote them. Plimus no longer lets you sell make money online products. They were sick of the high refund rates, the high complaints and the general lack of ethics so they simply shut it down. Of course Clickbank is where you’ll still find most of these products.

The Dream

The next aspect of this idea that is severely flawed is that the dream that is being sold really makes no sense. Many marketers over the past several years got rich from selling this dream. What is it? The dream is that you can have a small site that makes $30 or $100 or whatever a month that follows a simple “system” and then all you have to do is “replicate” it and create a 100 more sites just like it and “boom” you’re an Internet rock star.

There are many reasons that this doesn’t work but the simplest and most fundamental is that you cannot reduce “marketing” to a simple “mathematical formula”. It just doesn’t work like that. The “system” will always have steps within it that require your personal judgment and that judgment is what will determine your success or failure. Having good judgment is a cycle that works like this.

• Mistakes are a result of bad judgment
• Good judgment is a result of learning from your mistakes
• Thus… bad judgment leads to mistakes, that leads to learning from those mistakes, that leads to good judgment in the future…

The point is, you can’t really have that “good judgment” without going through the process of learning. And this holds true for most things in life – why should Internet marketing be any different?

If you want guidance and wisdom from someone who has “been there and done that” then check this out. If you’re looking for a get rich quick scheme then please, don’t bother…

 

Unrealistic Expectations

Step back for a minute and think of this whole concept of a system from a completely different angle. How many “systems” do you know of to become a CEO of a major corporation? A CEO that makes 2 million a year would be roughly equivalent to an Internet Marketing rockstar making 2 million a year. Do you know of a “system” that will transform someone who has never been in management in his life into a top quality CEO in 90 days? Of course not.

Okay, let’s scale it back again a bit further. There are many online marketers that are making $100k a year online – six figures is kind of the barometer for success online. Let’s equate a $100k a year online earner with a high quality programmer that specializes in Java technologies (just another example). Do you have any idea how much “experience” it takes, how many thousands of lines of code a programmer must write, before he or she reaches that six figure earnings level of an ‘expert’ programmer? Do you think that that can be systemized?

For someone to make it to the level of CEO or expert programmer they had to climb through the ranks and learn the hard way about how a business is run. They had to rise above their peers and succeed where others failed. They had to have tremendous determination and focus and likely made a lot of sacrifices along the way. They had to push forward when others gave up. They had to believe in themselves when others didn’t believe in them.

Listen Carefully…

Now, before you go jumping down our throats, we are speaking from experience here – not conjecture, not supposition, not repurposing someone else’s words – Mike and I have both been down this street before (a few years back). Listen carefully. There was a time when this worked for those that really worked the system hard. But that time is long since passed and even then it wasn’t nearly as easy as it was been “sold”.

During that time Google was not as smart, Adsense paid more and Adwords was much cheaper. People were able to use traffic arbitrage strategies to buy PPC traffic and send them to their network of made for Adsense sites and rake in big money. Lots of people were raking in $20k plus a month using these tactics. Mike and I also got into this pretty heavily with a network of several hundred sites and though we didn’t make $20k a month with it, we made several thousand a month – for awhile.

The Landscape of Internet Marketing Has Changed

Today the landscape of Internet Marketing is very, very different. The Technology is becoming mature and the competition fierce. Google loathes mini-sites today and instead wants high quality and high authority large sites that it can trust – it’s tired of being gamed. Adsense has also been highly tweaked by Google and trust me that’s to THEIR BENEFIT and not yours. They have all kinds of internal metrics in Adsense designed to pay you less whenever and wherever possible.

Google Adwords has got to the point that it is so expensive it is almost not viable for 80% of the people out there – and that’s *exactly* the way Google wants it. Did you know that 80% of the revenue that Google makes on Adwords comes from accounts that spend $100k or more per month? Yet 80% of the users of Adwords only spend $100 per month. They are purposely driving the prices up so that they don’t have to deal with or support that 80% of their user base that contributes very little to their bottom line. In other words, you and me – the little guys are once again screwed.

The Evil Fallacy of Diversification

Another fundamental flaw with this notion of a “system” to Internet Marketing is that you should want to have a 100 sites in the first place. Again, this is rubbish and is a holdover of those that are selling you 8 year old outdated advice that they themselves NEVER EVEN PRACTICED. The jargon that gets passed around Internet forums goes something like this: “Cool, got my first $100 site now I’ve just got to create 20 more just like it”. And then the inevitable but completely ridiculous follow up response: “Yeah, for sure, you don’t want all of your eggs in one basket.”

Complete and utter nonsense – all of it.

Let’s examine this approach for a minute. The single hardest part of Internet Marketing is finding the niche that you can compete in and that makes you money – that’s the single toughest part. Now, if you’ve accomplished that and have a small site that is making a little money and showing you that there is a viable path to follow, why in hell would you ignore that and instead go out and waste time and effort trying to find another one? The fact is that it is about 10x easier to take a $100 a month site to a $1000 a month site than it is to find 9 other $100 a month niches. In fact that 10x is probably underestimated – it’s probably closer to 15 or 20 times easier.

Google wants authority and high quality – QUIT FIGHTING A FIGHT YOU CAN’T WIN! I’m sorry to go off on a rant here, but why do newbie Internet Marketers insist on trying to swim upstream AGAINST what Google wants? It is very clear what it wants, just give that and you’ll find success.

If you want guidance and wisdom from someone who has “been there and done that” then check this out. If you’re looking for a get rich quick scheme then please, don’t bother…

 

Look Offline For Guidance

Let me bring this analogy into the picture here and hopefully end this nonsense of diversification across a 100 sites once and for all. The Internet is just another form of business – nothing more. What works on the Internet is what works offline – solid business practices, intense drive and focus, and massive action. So let’s take a look at this same “diversification” rubbish applied offline.

As a doctor you’ve paid your dues, completed you education and finally become a solid cardiologist making average wages as you are new in the field. Do you (a) congratulate yourself and decide this is the perfect time to branch out into oncology or (b) refine your skills so that you can build your practice?

Now let’s say you’re a mechanic that has struggled to build a reputation as a solid motorcycle mechanic capable of quickly diagnosing and solving the most complex of issues. Do you (a) decide it would be a great idea to open up an RV repair shop and get into that niche too? Or (b) look to expand your existing shop, increase your marketing and exposure, train some junior mechanics so your can support a higher volume of work and increase your hourly rates?

The examples could go on and on forever. The fundamental flaw of this concept is a huge contributing factor to the failure of 95% of new online marketers. In a world of specialists they somehow want to become a generalist. Why? Look in the mirror and please slap yourself if this is the strategy you’re employing – you’ll thank us later.

So why do they do it?

I’ve asked myself this question a lot and I think the fundamental reason that most people go for this diversification strategy is based on “fear”. Mainly the fear of Google and SEO dropping their site or their site rankings overnight. This is not an entirely unfounded fear, but it is also not understood.

Do bad things happen to good people? Sure, sometimes, but not nearly as often. If you’re building a quality site and doing SEO the way we teach it, you don’t have a lot to fear from Google – that’s the first thing to understand. But the more important lesson to learn is that you should be diversifying – but in a different manner.

Diversify your marketing. Diversify your advertising. Diversify your traffic getting strategies. Diversify your lead acquisition strategies. But don’t diversify your business strategy.

Instead of fearing Google, learn to treat it as just another source of traffic and not THE source of traffic. As you can refine your business profitability you should be investing in new and different advertising medium to reduce your reliance on Google. Of course, you should also not be trying to take shortcuts on the quality of your site and content, but that goes without saying.

Summing it Up

Internet Marketing and making money online through sales or affiliate marketing is a tremendous business and we love it. But the key word there is “business” and if you wish to succeed in this arena you need to treat it as such – like a business.

The Internet is not a 30 day get rich quick game – it is the single quickest and most robust method of quickly building a reliable income, however, *if* you do it right. Notice that we said quickly and not immediately. Why is it that most people will stay in a dead end job for 20 years making trivial progress and very little raises along the way, yet when it comes to making money online they want a “system” that deliver is 30 days (or the patient ones are willing to wait 90 days – sorry, not enough).

Guys and gals, there is no single better way to improve your quality of life and be able to earn a respectable income in today’s economy than online. There are a thousand different ways that you can do it – via services, products, affiliate marketing, information products, traffic brokering, site brokering, etc, etc, etc… And yes, it is the fastest way that you can get a full time income that I know of today. You can do this. But you must hit the “reset” button on faulty expectations and apply yourself. A few years back Mike and I hit six figure level income in the first four months. Maybe today it might take you a year or even eighteen months, but ask yourself this. How long would you work if you knew that a six figure income or higher was waiting for you? Change your mind and change your results – it’s that simple.

If you want guidance and wisdom from someone who has “been there and done that” then check this out. If you’re looking for a get rich quick scheme then please, don’t bother…

 

 

Tags: internet marketing system, marketing system, online marketing system