Back To Basics

Over the past year or so I've tried a lot of different methods of internet marketing, and put in more effort than ever before. I've had some success with most of those methods, but even so, my rate of progress has still failed to be as mindblowing as my rate of progress at the beginning when I first began internet marketing. I think this is because of a few reasons.

In the beginning I didn't know much about the IM world, and had very little knowledge of different methods and kinds of income streams. So I picked one method and just kept doing it until I figured out how to make money with it. Later on, I started to crave more information about IM, learning about different affiliate programs, types of projects, ways to promote, etc. Because I was now learning about all of these different areas of IM, I now lacked the focus that I had in the beginning and could never concentrate on one method or one project for long enough to make it reach its potential. So the basic lesson here is focus and persistence. Pick a method and stick with it until you can make it work. Don't bounce around from method to method.

Realated to that is my personal desire to make the process more "professional" or complex, because I will take some kind of satisfaction out of learning new techniques and having some kind of expertise or breadth of knowledge. So I was trying to complicate things by adding too many new ideas. I really had to stop that and just go back to the simple procedures I used in the beginning. They worked for a reason. Your business is primarily your source of income, and secondarily it can be a source of self-actualization. If a procedure works, stick to it. Don't try to spice it up. You can enhance the process, but only if it adds to your profits.

I also noticed that I started building sites to look more professional, or to look prettier for people I show them too. It worked, when I showed my newer sites to friends they would be impressed by how they looked and how professional of a job I had done. But they weren't making money! On certain types of sites, particularly Adsense sites, simplicity is key. Beauty distracts visitors from the ads or offers. I went back and simplified the designs of a lot of my projects, and now they are generating much higher revenue. The lesson: build sites for money, not for beauty and not for pride. If you need a site to show off to your friends, ok, build one beautiful site that makes no money. But just one!

Those are a few of the tendencies that developed in me after reaching an intermediate level of internet marketing. Watch out for those tendencies because they can creep up on you without you even realizing it. If it happens, think back to how you used to do things and get things back to basics.