Many people who are familiar with the Internet have tried their hand at online marketing through affiliates, pay per click campaigns, and other money making schemes. It is a business, and it is a business that many people have made a lot of money. You can check out people like Jeremy Schoemaker (ShoeMoney.com), Darren Rose (ProBlogger.net), or John Chow (JohnChow.com). However, many more of these people fail within the first 3 - 6 months, most likely losing more money than they made. I normally don’t spend my time talking about online marketing, but many of you have asked me what I thought about it and how to become successful doing online marketing.

I would be lying if I told you I’ve never tried it. I have, and since I understand what needs to be done, I’ve been moderately successful at it. I’m too busy with my job (which I love) and other business related issues to focus on it full time. Anyhow, if you could make $1k, $2k, or $3k a month doing online advertising, you would be considered quite successful.

Here are 4 reasons why online marketers fail in their business:

1. Online marketing IS a business. If you don’t have business knowledge and business sense, you will fail. Too many online marketers think that if they put up a website, throw on some Google Adsense and other affiliate links, the money will start rolling in. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy. You need to have a business plan to run your online marketing business effectively. How are you going to generate traffic? Who are going to be your key partners? What value does your website bring that no others on the Internet provide? What’s your growth strategy? There are many other questions that need to be answered, and these are just a few of the key ones. Print out a Business Plan Outline and work through it slowly. Think about the issues and how you will capitalize where others have not been able to.

2. You have to spend money to make money. Do you like it when you see the pictures of people holding up Google Adsense checks for thousands of dollars? Wouldn’t it be nice to cash one of those checks! Many online marketers fail to realize that they probably spent a lot of money to drive traffic to their website and advertise their business. There are methods to get free traffic and buzz to your website, but that’s just one way to generate traffic. More than likely if you are just generating free traffic, it’s making you about $3 - $4 a month in revenue and that won’t even cover your web hosting fees. What if I told you that if you spent $60 a month in advertising, branding, and website traffic you could generate $100 in revenue netting you $40? That might not excite you too much, a lousy $40. But what if I told you that if you spent $6,000 a month in advertising, branding, and website traffic you could generate $10,000 in revenue netting you $4,000?! Yes, that is how business works. You have to spend money to make money. All businesses do this. The trick is to find out what works for you and how you can be profitable. If you can’t figure this out, you will be unprofitable and your business will fail. I understand that not everyone can start spending $6,000 a month on their business. But you can start of small and build off of each successful month. Just like any other business, you can start off small, and using your growth strategy, build upon each successful month when you have more money coming in.

3. Not communicating with your website visitors. You may have great content on your website and expertise knowledge in your field, but are you providing your readers with the knowledge that they want to know? Feedback from your website visitors (positive or negative) is a great way to learn what knowledge they are interested in and how your expertise can help them. When you allow your visitors voice to be heard, it’s a great opportunity to create a community via your website. This can be done by allowing comments on your blog or creating a forum where visitors can communicate with you, and with each other. The best thing about having a forum on your blog is the FREE content that your users generate. Yes, if you are able to build a community on your website they will be generating content on your forum. This helps your website as a whole generate traffic to your site! If I visit a site that doesn’t allow comments on their blog or a forum to discuss the information on the website I feel like it’s a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am”. I get the info I needed and I’ll probably never visit the site again.

4. Using junk content. If you are using free articles as your content, you will receive very little traffic. You know those articles are on a gazillion websites? Google has now cracked down on these types of website that only have free articles and won’t index many of them. They specifically address this on their website:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar

You do not want to waste your time using duplicate content to drive traffic to your website and generate a community. Plus, visitors don’t want to see another article that they’ve seen on other websites. However, these articles can be useful to “complement” your website. You will notice that I post articles that I believe my visitors will enjoy and benefit from. I use my blog for original content and to communicate with my readers. Since this is a business website, I feel that some of these articles have value to my readers and I post them when a good one comes across. I do not post each and every business article that comes to me, but I add the ones I feel others will enjoy.

Don’t follow in the footsteps of failed online marketers. Avoid these four reasons why many of them failed and you’ll already be off to a good start. Remember, online marketing is a business and you have to put in the sweat equity and your money to make sure it will work.

The more business sense you have, the more successful you can be. With any business venture, you have to have a plan to succeed. Go out there and succeed!

“If you fail to plan, plan to fail”

If you are a successful online marketer and have ideas, tips, and advice for others, leave a comment and let them know.

Even though I don’t blog about online marketing so much, there is a lot of other great business information you can learn from the site. I hope you are able to learn some new business skills to become successful and please visit again.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Marketing, 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.