Following my discussion on the Internet Marketing Mistakes I Made When I First Started Online, today I shall share with you what I did right when I first started online.

I hope my experience can help shorten your journey to online success.

Here we go…

1. Understand The Principles Of Success

I always find reading boring until I discovered a section called Self Help in the bookstore. Since then, I became a self help junkie, reading all kinds of books and attending all kinds of seminars on success, communication, sales, wealth creation, mind power, brain power and even spirituality.

All these readings eventually led me to quitting my job, starting a few brick-and-mortar businesses and failing at every one of them.

If I had given up my dream then, I may now be another skeptic of success philosophy.

But when I turned to online business, everything I’ve learnt began to apply. Be it the law of giving and receiving, the theory of delayed gratification, the concept of focus equals to power or the idea of think and grow rich, all the principles of success that I’ve learnt are now the foundation of my online business.

Personally, I think such foundation is very important because it keeps me focused on what is really important in building a successful business (or even building a successful life), instead of simply chasing after the money.

2. Learn Programming

Many gurus suggest that a marketer should focus on driving the business and should outsource other technical stuff such as website creation to others. For me, I prefer to learn and do it myself.

I’m not trained in HTML, PHP or Javascript, but I make it a point to learn enough so that I can communicate with my programmer at the same level and do minor programming or debugging work when necessary.

The advantages of knowing about programming are as follow:
i. I can save money on simple programming work, since I can do it myself.
ii. I can respond faster to any bug report and system improvement.
iii. The more I understand about programming and its strengths and limitations, the more ideas I can come out with.

3. Build Something

The idea of affiliate marketing sounds great - making money selling other people’s product, with no worry of customer support. Hence, many internet marketers started as an affiliate.

But what I do differently from other affiliates is I will make sure that in the process of promoting as an affiliate, I build something that belong to me.

The idea of building something is very broad. You can build a list, build a reputation, build a traffic funnel, build a network of people or build a virtual real estate.

For example, if I want to promote a forex product, instead of simply posting adwords to send traffic to the product or building mini site specially for that product, I will create a forex content site or even create a forex web service. I’ll promote my own website instead of promoting the affiliated product directly.

If the product that I’m promoting is discontinued, I can always promote other similar products. The most important thing here is I’m spending my time to build something that will give me traffic in long run.

4. Go Passive

Let me ask you a question. If you can spare 1 month of your time, would you spend that month doing something that will earn you $5,000 in one go, or do something that will earn you $200 every single month?

Some people told me that they’ll choose the $5,000 option, and they will repeat the process and earn more $5,000 every month. After one year, they would have earned $60,000!

But for me, I will go for $200 every month. I will repeat the process to earn more of such income. My first month may be merely $200, but if I spend 1 year to build the same kind of income, I would have established $2,400 every month by the end of 1 year, and $24,000 every month after 10 years. After 10 years, I can stop working and still earn $24,000 every month, whereas in the first case, once you stop working, your income stops.

You may think this is an ideal situation and things may change. You are right. There is no real passive income. However, with such income, I can stop working for weeks or even months and my income will still be pretty stable. More importantly, I don’t have to worry if I can pay my bills next month. This gives me peace of mind to continue building even more websites and earn even more.

Different people prefer different ways of doing things. What I’ve presented above is what I THINK I’ve done right. You may have different experiences. Whether you agree or disagree with me, leave your comments below, so that others can decide what is the right thing to do for them.

I’ve been thinking of what to write in our blog to welcome 2011. Finally I decided to talk about some of the internet marketing mistakes that I’ve made in the past, not last year, but since I started venturing out online.

I hope my experience can help you avoid some pitfalls and hence smoothen your online journey in 2011.

Without further ado, here are the internet marketing mistakes I’ve made.

Mistake #1. Not believing that internet marketing is for me

This has to be the TOP mistake that I’ve made.

Back in early 2000, I was already learning about internet marketing and trying a few things without any success. My mentality was “let’s see if I can make some money online”.

I was never serious about internet marketing because I had so many other options of making money at that time.

After a few years, I failed in ALL my brick-and-mortar businesses and I was $50k in debt with the bank. At that time, online business was my last chance, as the initial investment was minimal. It was a case where I either made it online or I would have to shelve my dream and get a job.

Now it seems to be a blessing that I failed in all my offline businesses.

Mistake #2. Lacking marketing plans

Whenever I have a good idea, I’ll act on it. But there were not one, but two occasions where I spent months preparing and building a new website and when everything was ready, I realized that I had no idea how to market that website!

Of course, those websites are now sitting there collecting virtual dust, while serving as a reminder for me that I must have a foolproof marketing strategy for a new website even before I register the domain name!

Mistake #3. Hoping that there is a holy grail

There was one time when I bought a 100,000 email list from a renowned internet marketing guru, naively thinking that even if just 1% buy from me, I will be rich!

I prepared a good opt-in offer, since I knew I needed to convert it from a cold list to a warm list, and I also prepared a series of autoresponder to convert the opt-ins to buyers. Everything seemed ready, but when I massed mail to the list, I hardly got any click through, not to mention opt-in or sales.

I knew that things can’t be that simple. But sometimes you just want to prove yourself right and give up that hope!

Mistake #4. Being a cheapskate

When I first started online, I was really behaving like a cheapskate. I signed up lots of newsletters and spent time reading all the free articles I could find.

But when I started to make some money and gathered enough courage to invest in ebooks and video courses, that was when my internet marketing skills really took off.

Mistake #5. Using encrypted script

If you want to run a dynamic website such as a membership site, a forum or perhaps your own traffic exchange site, you’ll need to use a server-side script.

A big mistake that I made when I ran my first dynamic site is I bought an encrypted script, which means I can’t modify or even see the script as the developer is trying to protect its copyright.

It is very bad because whenever I experience a bug, I need to feedback to the developer and worse still, if I don’t like any function or want to add any new feature, there is nothing I can do. I even offered to buy the source-code from the developer, but was turned down.

One person’s mistake is another’s lesson. I hope you’ll find these lessons useful.

Though I’ve made some mistakes, I have also done something right during my early days. In my next post, I’ll write about things that I did right when I first started online. Stay tuned!