There is one fatal mistake that internet marketing newbies make, that is, trying to make money online.

I’m not trying to be a wet blanket here. I simply want to highlight to you the way Nature works.

Let me share with you a little story:

Recently I was trying to teach my nephew swimming because he told me that he was very interested in learning it.

For those of you who have learnt swimming, you know that before you can swim, you have to learn many things like how to kick your legs, how to blow bubbles in the water etc.

When I taught my nephew how to kick his legs, he tried it for a while and then ask, “I know how to kick now, but why I still can’t swim.” Throughout the session, while learning how to swim, he kept asking me why he still can’t swim.

My nephew is 7 years old. His reaction towards learning how to swim reminds me of many internet marketing newbies.

Many newbies are eager to learn how to make money online. Whenever they learn something, they want to see the money immediately.

The attachment to making money online is often the seed of failure.

Learning to make money online is similar to learning anything else. One should first master the basics.

When the basics are mastered, making money online is just a natural outcome.

This is how the Nature works. If you can recall how you successfully learned a skill, any skill, you’ll agree with what I say.

So what are the basics in internet marketing?

Too many.

Common basics include:

- search engine optimization;
- how to write ads;
- website creation and many more.

You don’t have to learn everything. But you must understand that the more basics you learn, the more money you can make online.

When I first started, I knew nothing about html, SEO or sales letter writing. Like many newbies, I was reading gurus’ newsletters, buying ebooks and courses. Nothing worked for me until I stopped thinking about making money and started learning like a student.

Remember the time when you were schooling? Having to ’swallow’ those lengthy and boring words and make sense out of them? And trying to understand those technical jargons that look alien to you?

That’s what I mean by learning like a student.

If you are simply reading a “how to make money” ebook as if you are reading a novel, you are not really learning like a student. You are merely entertaining yourself.

I know. It’s hard to be convinced that you will make money online if you simply focus on mastering the basics of internet marketing. Just like my nephew who can’t see how learning to kick can eventually make him swim.

But that’s how Nature works.

When the basics are mastered, making money online is just a natural outcome.

Nowadays it seems that everyone is having a blog, but many have no idea how to drive traffic to blog. I hope today’s discussion can shed some light to bloggers who are struggling to drive traffic to their blogs.

From time to time, I get people asking me if they should advertise their blog to get traffic. My advice is always ‘No’. If you have a new blog, remember, advertising it is not the way to get traffic. There are some exceptional cases of course. But in most cases, advertising is not a good traffic source for blogs. (Blog plays a different role in advertising. I may discuss this next time.)

Have you heard of gurus saying that blogging is a way to get traffic?

Yet bloggers are scratching their heads wondering how to drive traffic to blog.

Shouldn’t blogging generate traffic? If so, why do you need to drive traffic to your blog? Shouldn’t you just keep blogging and your blog should generate traffic on its own?

Well, you know things are not that simple.

A new blog is capable of generating traffic on its own ONLY IF it’s optimized for search engine. Else, you’ll have to think of ways to drive traffic to the blog and that can be tedious and even frustrating to some.

In my opinion, if you were to start a blog, it must be optimized for search engine. That’s the laziest way to drive traffic to your blog.

How do you build a search engine optimized blog?

There are just two things you need to do.

1) Write search engine optimized posts

Most bloggers simply blog whatever they like to say. You can do that if you are Paris Hilton. If not, you’re not likely to attract people to read what you’re writing.

A ‘purpose-driven’ blogger will do careful keyword research and optimize his article for search engines before posting it to his blog. Almost every blog post is his arrow that aims to shoot down the top position in the search results.

2) Build backlinks

The objective of a blogger should be to turn his blog into an authority site.

My definition of an authority site is one with a high PageRank. To get a high PageRank, you have to get many backlinks to your blog.

The game of search engine optimization is unfair. Authority sites receive more attention and better rankings from the search engines. You can write very good content but if your blog has no backlink, you’re not likely to get much attention.

Link building is boring and tedious. And you won’t see the return immediately. But it is necessary.

Did I say ‘necessary’?

Besides the normal ways of getting backlinks, such as submitting articles, press release, forum marketing etc, there is an innovative way that you should explore if you are serious.

It’s to create a free online application that people are interested to link to. If you don’t know how to create one, you can always get a freelancer to do it. But you need to come out with the idea.

For example, in the blog industry, many bloggers create free Wordpress plugins. Useful plugins get lots of recommendations from other bloggers and thus backlinks.

Final comments

Building a blog that can drive traffic on autopilot takes time and effort. In the meantime, you should look for other ways to drive traffic to your blog. The way I recommend is to build a list. You can easily build a list through advertising and offering something for free. Then you can send this list to read your blog.

This is the beginning stage, when you have to actively drive traffic to your blog. If you keep following the two steps above, your blog will eventually get traffic from the search engine automatically. This is when your blog can become your faithful and passive traffic generator. This process can take 3 to 6 months, depending on how hard you work.

Today, we’re going to discuss about identifying scam programs and making money through Pay Per Click marketing. It’s in reply to a members question.

Here’s his question:

“There is a lot of money making program out there, how to know it is not scam? I am thinking of Pay per click, how to start with it?” - Alvin Leow

Hi Alvin,

Frankly, there aren’t that many scams out there on the internet. The only thing you should really avoid is Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme is one that typically makes money from newcomers and use that money to pay the existing members.

There are quite a few Ponzi schemes out there, but it’s very easy to identify them.

When choosing money making programs, don’t look at the income potential. Instead, study the business model and ask yourself whether the model is sustainable. If it’s not sustainable, or you have doubt about the model, don’t join!

Alternatively, you can avoid all these get rich quick programs all together and simply focus on the mainstreams of internet marketing, which are things like affiliate marketing, Adsense marketing, Ebay marketing and providing online services.

You mentioned about Pay Per Click marketing. The idea of Pay Per Click marketing sounds like an easy way to make money online. But it isn’t.

Let me explain……

Many people associate Pay Per Click with affiliate marketing. The idea is this: “Pick a Clickbank product, post a PPC ad, get instant traffic and make sales”.

That sounds easy. But the truth is even the best Pay Per Click marketing expert needs to spend a couple of hundreds to test their ads before they can strike gold.

Pay Per Click marketing has evolved so much that it is getting harder for newbies to get involved.

Why?

Because there are many spying tools that can help Pay Per Click marketers to spy on other people’s ads and find out which keywords and ad phrases are profitable. As a newbie, without such tools, you are searching for gold in the dark and that can be quite costly.

I don’t mean to discourage you but it’s the fact.

The good thing about Pay Per Click marketing is that once you hit some ads that are profitable, they can be your cash cow for quite a while.

My advice is if you want to make money through Pay Per Click marketing, make sure that you follow the right guide and run different campaigns in at least 5 different niches. If you simply want to run an ad and test the water, you need to be superbly lucky to hit the jackpot.

Today I’m going to share with you two simple online advertising strategies - one is pretty common and the other one is hardly known!

I call the first strategy “Review And Compare”, and the second strategy “Review And Complement”.

Online Advertising Strategy #1 - Review And Compare

This is the most common strategy used by many online advertisers.

The idea is to pick 2-3 similar products and compare their pros and cons.

You probably have seen such online advertisements before.

There are two approaches to deploy the Review And Compare strategy. One works better than the other.

1) “Independent Review” approach

In this approach, you simply provide an independent review of the 2-3 products that you’re comparing. Many online advertisers will give some star-ratings to the products and ‘purposely’ award more stars to the product that they support.

This advertising approach has been overly used and to be frank, it is not as effective as the second approach below.

2) “Personal Touch” approach

In this approach, instead of writing an independent review, you position yourself as the user of both products that you’re comparing.

The idea is to share your personal experience with the prospects and tell them which product works better for you.

For example, if you are promoting a make money online product, your story can be something like this:

“My name is blar blar blar. I’ve been struggling to make money online….(tell your sad story). Finally I decided to try out product XXX and product YYY….(describe the two products). With product XXX, I made $. But with product YYY, I made $$$. Since product YYY made me more money, if you want my recommendation, I will recommend product YYY. But to be honest, both products have their pros and cons. Here’s my full review of the two products…..”

In your online advertisement (a.k.a. your presell letter), you should include your photograph and email address so that people know that you are real.

The gist of this “personal touch” approach is to appear real and honest. You want to do everything you can to deliver the following messages:

- I’m a real person and I’m reachable.
- I experienced the problem that you’re experiencing now.
- I’ve tried and tested both products.
- Here’s the result I get after trying both products. If you follow what I do, you too should get the same result.

I hope you can see why this advertising approach is more powerful than the first one.

This approach is the basis of our second online advertising strategy…..

Online Advertising Strategy #2 - Review And Complement

In the Review And Compare strategy that we discuss above, your objective is to compare different products and help the prospects to decide which one is better. Using this strategy, the prospects will buy at most one product.

On the contrary, in the Review And Complement strategy, your objective is to recommend a line of products that complement each other.

If done correctly, instead of getting people to buy just ONE product out of the few you’re comparing, you may end up having people buying the whole line of products!

See how powerful this advertising strategy is?

To use this strategy effectively, we need to use the “personal touch” approach, i.e. tell your own story.

Your story can be something like this:

“My name is blar blar blar. I’ve been struggling to make money online….(tell your sad story). Finally I tried product AAA and I made $A. With some initial success, I decided to try product BBB. The beginning was tough. I was struggling to find traffic. Then I came across product CCC that taught me how to get traffic to my website. I followed the instructions and it worked! I also joined website DDD and EEE, which further boosted my web traffic. Eventually, I started to make money from product BBB. Then I tried product FFF, which is a very lazy way to make more money online and I love it. Now I’m making full time income online and I continue to test different products. If you want to keep yourself updated with all the different products I’ve tested, opt-in to my list here….”

Can you see how all the products are linked? You’ll be surprised that people will simply follow your recommendations and buy every product you recommend, including opting into your list!

It’s like killing all the birds with one stone!

To be honest, I didn’t invent this method. It was shared to me by one of my advertisers, who have been using this online advertising strategy with great success.

The reason I’m sharing these online advertising strategies with you is because I’m still seeing many members advertising the product sales letters directly. This is not the best way to sell affiliated products. If you want to be a successful online advertiser as well as a successful affiliate, you should use one of the two strategies above.

Today we are going to discuss real ways to make money online. This is a question posted by our member. Here’s his question:

“I have been working on the internet for 4 years now, seriously, trying to find something that really makes money and as of yet I haven’t made but $1. I’ve read books and more books about internet marketing and MLM and Google and on and on but no matter how many ads I place on over 20 sites, either I get no response or I get someone wanting to sell me something. What should I do?” - Ken Drake

Ken, you said that you are seriously trying to find something that really makes money online. But based on what I read from what you’ve written, you are seriously trying to find ‘quick’ ways to make money, not real ways to make money online.

Sorry for being blatant. I arrive at this conclusion because your experience tells me that all you know is about placing ads trying to make money. That sounds like the common ‘get rich quick’ idea - “Just Signup And Advertise, And Your Will Be Rich”.

It’s not your fault. Most people are like you. They want to make fast money online.

Can you make money with this method? Yes you can. Many of my clients make money that way. But you need to spend money to test which salescopy works, which product works, etc.

Many people don’t do enough testing and they quit too soon. Moreover, if you are on low budget, you may run out of money before you find a gold mine.

I can’t say it’s not a real way to make money online. This method of making money online simply require more skills than simply posting an ad.

Personally, I feel that your #1 mistake is that you are not building an online business.

Take my advice, stop thinking of making money and start thinking of building a business.

I spend money to develop the “Mind Your Own Business” list builder script and give it free to our members because I want our members to start building a real online business. Have you seriously given it a look?

I’m not saying the list builder script is the only real way to make money online. But it’s the way I recommend. Build your own list, run your own affiliate program and sell your own product. You can use your initial sales to fund your future advertising campaign. With your own list, you can also sell other people’s products.

Making money through this method is not without challenge. The main challenge is that you have to think of a good business idea. A poor idea will give you mediocre results, but an good idea can make you very rich in a short time.

If you are someone who aren’t too creative and not interested to think too much, a simpler way to make money online is Google Adsense. You don’t have to know how to write effective sales letter. You don’t have to do any form of customer support. It’s by far the simplest and truly autopilot way to make money online.

Click here to see how I started making money with Google Adsense. No creativity needed. Just keep working and result is almost guaranteed.

When I feel uncreative, bored and tired, I usually simply ‘waste’ my time away building Adsense sites. I don’t have to think too much. Just work - like a robot.

Last but not least, you mentioned that you’ve read many books on internet marketing. If you do, trust me, you already know the real ways to make money online. The real ways to make money online are the ways that you are most reluctant to follow. If you don’t believe, make a list of all the ways to make money online and arrange them in order of preference. Take your least preferred method and start working hard on it. You’ll be surprised that is when you start making real money online!

Learning how to make money with Google Adsense is probably the easiest way to make money online.

In this article, I will show you what it takes to make money with Google Adsense and more importantly, how I got started making money with Google Adsense.

Get ready for some interesting screenshots……

How Much Money Can You Make With Google Adsense?

The sky is the limit, frankly.

But one thing about Google Adsense is that you are not likely to earn a lot of money right from the beginning.

Seriously ask yourself this question:

Would you like to be paid $4k a month? Or being paid $0 in the first month but getting a pay rise of $100 every month thereafter?

If your answer is the former, Google Adsense may not be for you.

But if your answer is the latter, that’s the kind of money Google Adsense can give you - at the minimum!

What It Takes To Make Money With Google Adsense

I’ll keep my answer short. You need to:

Step 1) Conduct keyword research
Step 2) Churn out good articles based on the right keywords
Step 3) Build SEO friendly websites
Step 4) Build links (to boost your search engine rankings)

If you are new to internet marketing, every one of these 4 steps can be a challenge to you. But trust me, each of these 4 steps are simple skills that you can learn and master. Once you’ve mastered these 4 steps, you simply have to repeat the 4 steps again and again.

How I Started Making Money With Google Adsense

To tell you the truth, I had been making pennies from Google Adsense since 2004. But I started making ’significant’ income from Google Adsense after I made a major decision in September 2006.

The major decision was to subscribe to PLRPRO, a premium membership site that gives you 440 unique articles a month in 11 different niches.

One thing I like about PLRPRO is that the founder has done all the keyword research. That saves my work in doing Step 1.

Churning out good articles in Step 2 is also easy, since I already have 440 articles to choose from.

Back in 2006, the only things I needed to focus on was Step 3 and 4. (Today, PLRPRO has grown so much that even Step 3 and Step 4 are semi-automated. With the latest PLRPRO that is launched today, the whole process has been simplified tremendously.)

Before you jump into building your Adsense empire, let me give you a preview of what you can expect.

As I mentioned, I subscribed to PLRPRO in September 2006. In that month, I only built two websites out of the 11 niches given to me. Apparently I wasn’t one of the hardworking members in PLRPRO.

Here’s my Adsense earning from the two websites in October 2006 - $17.57. Nothing impressive. (I purposely blur part of the website url so that you can look at the change in income for each website.)

In November 2006, I made $64.45 with Google Adsense from just two websites. No new website was added in that month.

In December 2006, I added 3 more websites. My monthly Adsense earning was $76.23.

The 3 new websites got established fast and in January 2007, I achieved my first three figure a month Adsense income. In January, I also added 2 new websites.

Things were starting to look promising, weren’t they?

In February 2007, my total websites increased to 9 and my Adsense income for that month was $349.19.

It’s worth noting that out of the 9 websites, 2 of them made me more than $100 a month!

Sidetrack: Take a look at my February stats again and look at my new website that start with www.rom….. I’m very fortunate to have built a website on this niche.

Why?

Because…… Look at what this website is making me now!

$626.54 a month from Google Adsense from just one website! I may be lucky on this niche. So far, it’s my best performing Adsense site.

Ok, let’s go back to my progress……

After 1 year, in September 2007, my Adsense income was $1099.62.

After 2 years, in September 2008, I made $2725.28 from Google Adsense.

Can you see how the income grow exponentially?

All the earnings I’ve shown above are from websites built using articles from PLRPRO, excluding my Adsense income from other sources. This gives you a better assessment of the potential of PLRPRO.

Final Remarks

In my opinion, Adsense is the easiest way to make money online. As long as you are willing to work, you will surely make money. There is no need to know how to write good sales letters or presell affiliate products.

Moreover, in the process of making money from Google Adsense, you will master the skill of generating traffic from the Search Engines. With this skill, you can easily diversify into other ways of making money online, such as affiliate marketing.

Finding free MLM leads or business opportunity leads remains one of the challenges among internet marketers. And LeadsLeap is set out to help you on that.

For those who don’t know, LeadsLeap is a free leads generation system that allows you to build leads and advertise for free in our network.

If you are a LeadsLeap member, have you ever wondered, who is clicking your ad?

In our blog discussion today, I’m going to bring you to our back-office and show you some statistic of the leads that we send to you.

We did a similar study back in July but over the past 5 months, we’ve grown and it’s time to revisit the stats again.

What you are seeing above is a screenshot of one of the tables in our database. This table records the number of clicks received from a particular userid and IP address.

Of course, this screenshot doesn’t show all the records. I just want to give you an idea of how I gather my stats.

For rows with a userid, it means the click is either by a LeadsLeap member or someone referred by the member. For rows without a userid, it means the click is from a non-member.

When I sum up the results over 24 hours, this is what I get:

Members Referred Clicks = 3074
Non-members Clicks = 7368

Total number of clicks received = 10442

From this study, we can make the following conclusion:

1) LeadsLeap generates about 10,000 leads for our members everyday.
2) 70% of the leads are non-members from different IP addresses.

Compared to our statistic in July, the number of non-member clicks have jumped by 300%!!

If you are a LeadsLeap member, this is a good news to you because you get to share the leads that we bring to you.

If you are not a LeadsLeap member yet, and are looking for free MLM leads or business opportunity leads, join us now and start posting your ad in our network today!

Working with freelancers is one of the best form of leverage you can get in internet marketing. You leverage on two resources: time and skill.

The disadvantage is you are now in a position to manage people, and people management can be problematic, sometimes.

This is what one of our members, Gerald Lum, is facing.

Read his full question to me:

———————————————
Hi Kenneth,

I’m facing some problem with my online business. Its not as easy as it seems to be. Being an affiliate is easier than become the creator of the site. One of the problem that I faced is finding the right freelancer for my website development. I also have problem with designer. I usually outsource my website programming and design separately as my own experience tells me that most programmers have no good design senses.

My lst project I got ripped off $1k without getting my website till now. My currently new website designer cannot be contacted for a month. I have not gotten my design for my new website project and hence its delay. My programmer does give me a cheap prices. This could be the reason of the bad services. But I have budget and I really have to try my luck.

There is so many freelancer websites like elancer.com, getafreelancer.com. But how can we really find a good freelancer with budget prices? I have wasted a lot of time waiting for them to deliver my project. How do you find a reliable and with cheap services??

Thank you so much!

Gerald Lum
———————————————

Let me reorganize his challenge into 4 separate questions and answer them one by one:

1) How to stop yourself from being ripped off?

The golden rule is: Never pay your freelancers in advance, regardless of how good your freelancer “sweet talk”!

I had an experience where a freelancer, who had worked with me on several projects, requested that I pay him some money in advance because he had some financial problems. Considering our past working experience, I agreed. He then went missing for a couple of months.

If your freelancer insists that you pay him first before he can start work, the best you can do is to transfer the money to an escrow account. It is a third party account where your money is held by the freelancing website and will only be released to the freelancer when the project is completed to your satisfaction. Escrow protects both you and the freelancer.

You should never be ripped off if you insists on paying after project completion or using an escrow service.

2) How to prevent your freelancer from going missing in action?

You can’t stop this problem from happening, but you can prevent it.

And you prevent it right at the beginning……

Before you award a freelancer with the job, you should always PM (private message) the freelancer. You can PM a few preferred freelancers and see who can respond fast and well. Those who don’t even bother to reply a PM will never get a job from me.

Through PM, you can tell whether they are serious and competent in the project. Sometimes, you can also tell if they are professional or simply a student trying to make some quick bucks.

Also check if they use Skype, Yahoo or MSN Messenger. I will not engage a freelancer who is not ready to chat online.

When the project begins, always make it a habit to ask the freelancer for a dateline in everything he does. Be friendly and not being pushy. You can ask something like “When do you think this part can be done?”. Let him suggest a date to you.

Frankly, I don’t expect freelancers to meet the datelines. Having a dateline is just a way to make them commit, to give them a clear target to aim for and an excuse for me to press them for results.

In the event if you feel that the freelancer is not progressing, you can always use the dateline as the REAL dateline for the project. If the freelancer failed to deliver by the dateline, you can cancel the project and get another freelancer. In my entire online career, I’ve only done it once. In my case, the freelancer went the extreme of not answering all my emails after committing to the project. Thus I cancel the project after the first dateline.

Lastly, make it an effort to email your freelancer every few days and ask them if there is any update for you. This will further reduce the chance of them going missing in action.

3) How to ensure that your job can be completed on time?

If you need something to be done in a hurry, you must let the freelancer know the urgency before you award him with the job. Or else, you should understand that “most freelancers cannot complete their project on time!”

Sounds like a joke but this is the truth.

Once you understand this fact, all you have to do is to give enough buffer for your real dateline.

Let’s say a freelancer says he can get the project done in 7 days, you can expect the project to be completed in 3 to 5 weeks!

I’m not exaggerating.

This is especially true for programming type of job, where there are testing and debugging to be done.

If you expect the completion date to be 3 to 5 times longer than the suggested dateline, you will be happy that most of your projects are done “on time”.

4) How to find good freelancer at budget prices?

The key is this: The more you know, the less you pay and the better freelancer you can get.

For a $1000 project, I can have freelancers bidding from $250 to $1000. The question is, do you dare to choose the low-bidder.

You can try your luck, but ‘luck’ is not always reliable.

Alternatively, you can ask.

During the bidding phase, you can PM a few low-bidders, check if they understand your requirement fully and understand how they intend to deliver the project.

Some low-bidders will not reply your PM. Ignore them. Some may tell you that they’ve under priced. Ask them to re-quote. But there are some who really understand your requirement well and are willing to provide you with their solutions for the price that they offer.

If the proposed solution sounds, you can go ahead award the project to that freelancer.

However, this is only possible if you know exactly what you want. That’s why I said “The more you know, the less you pay and the better freelancer you can get.”

In some cases, you may not know exactly what you want. In such cases, you may have to add a bit of premium to the project and get a freelancer with good reviews, which usually will mean a higher price.

“I am an internet marketing newbie. All I am asking you to do for me is to introduce me to the internet marketing from scratch, that is leading me step by step to the internet marketing system. Presently, I have no website, no list and no business yet.” - Akinbiyi Yinka Akinrinola

Many internet marketing newbies have been asking me similar questions and I usually do not bother reply.

Why?

Because the question is too general. Also, I got a feeling that anyone asking such a question is usually not serious in internet marketing.

But today, for the first time (and also the last time), I’m going to answer this question and post it up on our blog, so that I can direct whoever asking such a question back to our blog.

For all the internet marketing newbies out there, there are only 4 steps to making money from internet marketing from scratch.

Step 1 - Make a decision

Step 1 is to make a firm decision that you are going to make it in internet marketing, no but, no however, no unless, no excuse!

If step 1 is not accomplished, there is no need to proceed to the other steps. Quit now and go back to your comfort zone. Internet marketing is not for you. Nothing is, until you make a decision.

Let me tell you something I’ve never told anyone.

I started to explore internet marketing back in 1999, made my first $100 some time in 2004, made my first $1000 in 2006 and made my first $10k in the same year.

What happened in 2006? Did I stumbled upon a secret formula? Not at all.

What happened was that my offline business failed in 2005. I was $50k in debt and I desperately NEED to find an alternative to make money, so as to pay back my loan and keep my company alive.

For the years before 2006, I had been exploring internet marketing, but I was doubtful whether internet marketing was for me. Moreover, I had many other opportunities available and frankly, internet marketing was the last option in my list.

By 2006, I’d tried 3 different offline businesses, failed at each one of them, and owed $50k to the bank. With little cash on hand, I ran out of all my offline options.

I was in a situation where I either make it in internet marketing or quit my entrepreneur dream and look for a job.

Not to give up my last option, I turned to internet marketing, with no other backup plan!

Here’s a little secret about the universe:

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Opportunities will be open to you. Ideas will come to you. Your saviour will appear.

So, before everything else, make your decision first.

Step 2 - Stop looking for shortcuts

Forget about shortcuts or quick cash. There is no shortcut. What does exist is leverage.

To make money fast, you need to leverage. You leverage on advertising to bring you more traffic in a shorter time. You leverage on freelancers to save your time and provide skills that will otherwise take you time to learn.

Other than leverage, there is no shortcut. You have to take the down-to-earth ‘boring’ steps of building websites, promoting them and doing all the maintenance work.

I’m not saying internet marketing is tough. It is tough initially because you’re still learning. Just like the first time you ride a bicycle. It was tough isn’t it? But once you get used to it, it’s as easy as ABC.

Step 3 - Decide on a business model

There are too many ways to make money online. You can make money from Adsense, PPC ads, Affiliate Marketing, Ebay, MLM etc.

So your 3rd crucial step is to decide on the business model that you want to adopt.

If you want to make money fast, one way is to become an instant guru!

I’ve seen many newbies who position themselves as a guru and start teaching people how to make money online. It works! Many of them who ‘dare’ to pretend to be a guru eventually becomes a real guru.

As a guru, you need to have your own website, your own product and your own affiliate program. That’s why I invested money to create the free M.Y.O.B List Builder Script for our members. Make this script work for you and you’ll become an instant guru overnight.

Read these two articles if you haven’t done so. They will shed some light for you.

What Are The Steps In Creating An Online Business

How To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Step 4 - Keep learning and keep working

Remember, there is no shortcut. You got to work hard and you got to learn fast while you work.

In offline businesses, you can hardly learn because very few people are willing to teach you.

The good thing about online business or internet marketing is that many people are willing to teach you, for free or for a very small fee. As long as you have your own business set up and are willing to learn the ropes, you will eventually grow and become another guru.

Lastly, after today, don’t ever call yourself an internet marketing newbie again. The faster you believe you are the guru, the faster you can succeed online.

I’m quite sure that you have constantly been bombarded with offers from different internet marketing gurus asking you to buy their products or other guru’s products.

The problem is, every product looks good. Even if you have money to buy all of them, you wouldn’t have the time to study them!

The secret, my friend, is to be selective in which guru you listen to.

Let me share with you a little experience of mine:

Some time ago, someone called me on my mobile phone asking if I was interested in making an extra $50,000 in the next three months.

Well, I bothered to answer that call because she was calling from an internet marketing guru’s office. I know that guru and I’ve purchased some high ticket items from him. That’s probably the reason why they have my number in the first place.

So I told her, “Yes, I’m interested.”

She went on to sell me a coaching program from another guru, whom I have not heard before, in a tactful and professional way and frankly, I was impressed.

Before deciding on whether to buy the coaching program, the first thing I did was to Google for the name of this guru and find out how he makes money.

Based on my research, this guru is a national speaker in the self-help industry. He has written many books and been featured in the national TVs. (I don’t know him because I live in Singapore, not US.)

If you remove all the bells and whistles, this guru basically makes money conducting seminars and coaching programs teaching people how to be successful.

I have no intention to become a speaker, nor am I interested to start any coaching program. So whatever experience that this guru is irrelevant to me.

What I’m try to tell you is don’t blindly listen to a guru simply because he is famous. Look behind the scene and find out what he does for living.

If what the guru does is what you envision to do, by all means, listen to everything he says. Or else, that guru is NOT your guru.

Get what I mean?

Let me give you another example.

A few years ago, I got into a membership coaching program by another internet marketing guru, Mark Ling. I invested in his program because he makes millions from Adsense and Clickbank by building little content websites in all kinds of niches that he knows nothing about.

That was what I envisioned myself to be doing and therefore, I got into his program and learnt everything he taught.

Speaking of him, the same membership that I was subscribed to is now free. I highly recommend you to get into the membership because there are tons of videos and tutorials that I used to pay to view.

Click here to get instant access to the free videos and tutorials that I paid to view.

That’s all for today. Remember, the next time you see an offer from another internet marketing guru, ask yourself, is the way that guy makes money the way you want to make money? If the answer is ‘no’, don’t waste your time on that offer.