Myth #1: You can get rich quick online.
We hear all the time and see sales pages all the time that claim that if you do this and you do that, you’ll make $100,000 next month. You’ll make $10,000 tomorrow. You can do a $1 million launch in two weeks. We’ve all seen something along those lines, whether it’s more or less, but we’ve all seen something like that online.
I think that it makes it real easy for us to get frustrated when we set up a web page or we set up a squeeze page and we get 15 subscribers and we maybe make one sale. Then we go a few days and nothing happens.
We get frustrated and sometimes we’re even following this plan that’s supposed to make us rich tomorrow.
The bottom line is that doesn’t happen. That’s hype. Perhaps you’ve been bitten by that hype before and that’s ok. This is a brand new year. Recognize that the hype doesn’t work and you have to build something solid.
The online business is no different than offline. It’s no different than opening up a sandwich shop. If you open up a brand new sandwich shop in your town, you’re not going to sell a million sandwiches your second week, no matter how much publicity you get, no matter how good the sandwiches are.
Even if you were to do a huge number of sandwiches, you probably wouldn’t even be able to keep up with the business, so the natural way that you grow an offline business is you start by advertising some. People would come to the shop and some of them would like the sandwiches and they’d tell other people.
You’d run some specials and month after month you’d do more and more business. Frankly, the first few months with your sandwich business you wouldn’t even break even. You wouldn’t sell enough sandwiches to pay all the bills.
Hopefully by the end of the year you’re in profit. Then the next year you make a nice profit .And that’s kind of how online business is.
You’re not going to get rich quick. There may be a 1 in a million shot that you’re going to just stumble on the perfect product with the perfect sales page at the perfect time and something big is going to happen.
Unfortunately, even for those people, the 1 in a million shot that something like that possibly might happen, they tend to be one-shot wonders because they never learn the foundations of making something happen.
They never learned how to drive traffic. They never learned how to create back-end products. They never learned how to build that business. So what happens is they have this one shot, they make $20,000 - $40,000 maybe the first month, and they’re never ever able to duplicate it.
I’m going to kind of go through my background in a few minutes and you’ll see that my last five months were decent, and before that every month grew by a little bit every single month. Your first few months can be really slow and you can’t let that frustrate you.
Myth #2: You can generate plenty of FREE Traffic Online
There’s this idea and you can buy plenty of ebooks on it. In fact, I think there was a seminar a couple months ago, several thousand dollars worth of a coaching program to teach you how to generate free traffic.
The funny thing is, I just have to laugh when I see it because I look at each one of those sources of ‘free traffic’ and none of them are really free. They all have a cost involved, whether there’s time, whether there’s money involved, every kind of free traffic.
Article marketing – of course that’s my favorite source of traffic – and I hope I’ve never called it free traffic. If I have, let me know where it is because I’ll change it, because article marketing is not free traffic. It may not cost you dollars to write the article, but it costs you time.
If it takes you half an hour to write the article and you’re worth $20/hour or $30/hour at whatever work you do, that article really cost you $10-15 to write. If you pay somebody $5-15 to write an article, if you pay somebody to submit it – whether you do it yourself or somebody else does it, it’s not free.
Sometimes you’ll hear that affiliate marketing is free traffic. Affiliate marketing is not free traffic. You’ve got to pay out ½ or 2/3. Sometimes on higher ticket items maybe you’re only going to pay out 1/3 of the product price. That’s not free traffic.
I’ll tell you this, over the last five months I generated over $15,000 on average. Most months were well over that. One was shy of it by a few hundred bucks. And I don’t have any affiliates. I don’t have anybody selling.
The thing is, I get asked sometimes, “Why don’t you have an affiliate program?” Frankly I’m selfish, because if I had an affiliate program and I was paying out 50-60% plus fees, I’d be giving away well over 2/3, probably closer to ¾ of my income to affiliates.
It might be great for the affiliates, but in order for me to net the same thing I do right now, I’d have to do $60,000 per month. One day I’d like to do $60,000 a month, but right now $60,000 would be a lot. That’s $720,000. One in a million people online every get to that point. So I don’t choose to do it with affiliates.
Back to the idea that it’s not free traffic. You’ve got to pay for it. Blog traffic is not free. You have to take the time to get in there and work the blog.
Web 2.0 is not free. You have to take the time or you have to pay somebody to do it. And time really is worth something. If you’re not full-time online and you’re working this thing part-time, maybe you’re spending 30 hours a week working it, there’s two ways you can do it.
You can work it for 30 hours a week and that’s your time you’re putting into it, or you can go to work somewhere at $20/hour, 30 hours a week, make $600/week on the side and then put that money into web traffic. It’s the same difference.
Whether it’s time or money, it’s not free traffic. I’m not going to beat a dead horse here, but there’s no such thing as a free ride or free traffic online.
Even myself, you might look at some of my traffic. You might say that some of my search engine traffic – and maybe 5% of all my traffic comes from just organic search – you might say that’s free traffic.
Well, actually it’s not free traffic because I wouldn’t get it if I hadn’t spent time and money having links posted and creating inbound links and writing articles to create that link traffic, so once again, even organic search engine traffic is not free traffic.
Myth #3: Internet Marketing is easy to learn.
It’s not easy to learn. It’s a skill just like anything else. It’s a skill just like plumbing or electrical work or physics. It’s a skill. It’s not something you’re going to learn in 30 days.
Sure, I can teach you some specific skills in 30 days. I can teach you a number of specific skills in six months. There’s plenty of other people out there who can teach you how to do something specific.
But realistically you need to spend probably several hundred hours on any one thing online before you’re going to get good at it. If you’re working on this 30 hours a week and let’s just say the average is 200 hours to learn to get good at one thing, that’s an average of seven weeks for each thing you need to get good at.
Maybe your sticking point is your website. You need to learn how to publish a web page. For you to get to where you’re efficient, you’re going to need to spend some time.
Same thing with traffic. To get efficient at one thing you’re going to need to spend some time. It’s not going to happen overnight. Sure, you’re going to have some light bulbs that come on, but none of it’s going to happen overnight.