When they discover the ‘make money online’ arena and find out you really can build an enormous income from home… they want to know that it works before spending any cash.

Ever wonder why ‘bum marketing’ is so popular? Because it involves no loss of money… just time. You write articles, point them to your webpage and hopefully you’ll make a sale.

Same goes for folks learning SEO. You can figure out how the search engines work and how to get your pages ranked just by soaking up info on forums and then putting in the man-hours. No cash lost there.

You can make money without spending a dime it’s true. But is it the best way to go about things? No siree!

I hope this doesn’t sound condescending. I’m only writing this because for many years I too was a cheapo marketer, refusing to shovel money into PPC or to outsource anything until I realized…

You can’t grow your business until you invest in it.

Not only that but if you’re not spending money, you’re spending time. And time is precious.

There are only so many hours in the day… there’s no way you’ll ever achieve everything you want if you’re doing all the donkey work yourself.

So…

Don’t be afraid to put some cash into Adwords. Never fear about outsourcing those articles. It helps you in the long run.

But there’s another reason too…

Money loves speed.

If you can get an idea and put it into action fast… you’re much more likely to follow it through and be successful with it.

Say for instance you wanted to test a page on your site to see if it converts.

Now you could save money, write some articles and wait… and wait a little more… until you had a couple of hundred visits to make the test worthwhile.

Or… you could throw a few dollars at Adwords and find out in the next hour if your page works.

And if it doesn’t, you may have lost some cash but you’ll have failed fast.

When you fail fast… you begin to see what works and what doesn’t.

This gets you on the right track quickly.

Stop being cheap, invest in yourself and grow your business… rapidly!

It's so easy when you work on the net to be distracted by every shiny bauble that comes along.

I've come to realize the trick is to pinpint one market, create one business and work on only that.

Not only that… immerse yourself in your business until you're obsessed with giving every single customer the highest possible value you can give.

After all — you don't want your customers to buy once and then disappear. You want them to buy again and again.

Form a relationship with your customers – don't think of them as just numbers or 'traffic' you're throwing at a page in Clickbank.

I picked up a great phrase one a mentor of mine today – 'relentless pursuit'.

Focus on one direction and keep at it until you have the business and the clients you dream of.

But remember to keep a balance. When you're lying on the beach you better be thinking about the hot sun and the sea breeze and not whether you've been Google slapped!

Focus, focus, focus. Pick a direction and ignore everything else. But enjoy life too.

Just a few random thoughts for a Thursday…

Of course, some strike it lucky, they realize early on that making their own products is where the money is… but for others (me included) it takes a little longer.

Here's my own set of trials and tribulations I suffered before quitting the 9 to 5 and working from wherever and whenever I want.

And before you think I'm leading up to some slimy sales pitch, I'm not…I just want to see if any of my subscribers identify with this rocky road and I also want you to know you'll get there as long as you keep on going.

It was in 2005 I think I began to look for alternate ways to make money. I remember sitting in my workplace thinking "there's got to be more to life than this…"

I knew I enjoyed writing and design but I also knew it was darn hard to make any money with those two skills.

I started looking at the eBay for "work from home" opportunities and of course ran into the usual get rich quick schemes. Have you ever browsed the business section of eBay? So many scams. Must admit, it can be fun to try some of them out just for the thrill. I remember a roulette strategy a friend of mine tried out… we were making money, our pot going up and up and up. Then we swiftly lost it all. Hey ho!

Around this time, I remember stumbling across my first genuine ‘make money online’ forum. Not the Warriors mind you, a UK version called The Trader I think. It had a small membership but I remember realizing that some people really were making large amounts of money by building websites.

Hmmm… I thought, I had enough spare time at my job, I might give this a try.

Back then however, folks hadn’t really caught onto the fact that building QUALITY websites was the way to go and so I got sucked into the whole page generation/adsense crap. If you don’t know what I’m talking about… the trend back in 2005 was to slap up hundreds of pages filled with junk and, crucially, adsense ads. Google wasn’t as sophisticated back then and so would rank any old page and you’d get easy adsense clicks.

A lot of people made a lot of money doing this. I wasn’t one of them.

Nevertheless, I was undeterred and over the next couple of years spent more time at my day job learning SEO, affiliate marketing, product creation and copywriting than I did doing my actual job.

But we’ll keep that between ourselves eh?

You’ll be able to read the full story in the report you get when you sign-up but over the past few years, from page generation nonsense to earning six-figures from home, I’ve learnt a few little pearls…

1) Getting to know other marketers is vital. I mean… building relationships makes everything so much easier. And don’t do it in a fake way because you see it as the fast route to making a few bucks. Strike up a genuine interest in how another marketer works and get to know them. You’d be surprised how many guru folk are actually very warm and welcoming.

2) Don’t sweat the small stuff. I used to obsess on tiny technical details like alt tags or getting the right secondary keywords etc. None of that is as important as creating value of some kind. Make each webpage, report, blog post or even Tweet as valuable as you can and people will find YOU.

3) Trading time for money isn’t a crime. Everyone’s chasing the mythical automatic income. It is possible but if you want to quit your job sooner rather than later, find something you love doing and offer to do it for a guru or even head out to elance or guru.com just to get yourself started.

When I realized people would pay me to write copy it set me off on my way to becoming a pretty darn good copywriter. I now write for some of the biggest names in the biz. That’s not to toot my own horn BUT if you can find something you enjoy doing online, it makes trading time for dollars a whole lot easier and success will come more swiftly.

4) Copywriting is VERY important. That last point reminded me, copy is at the heart of everything you do online. Either read some of the classic books on copywriting or pay someone else to do it for you. It’s that important.

5) You need to be selling SOMETHING! It’s amazing how many people (and I was one of them) wonder why they’re not making any money when they’re not actually selling a damn thing. Get that sales page up, get that pre-sell page up and drive traffic to it. That’s all there is to it really. Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, blogs, social networking, yadda, yadda, yadda… just sell something of value and don’t sweat the trendy stuff.

Alright… I’ve rambled on long enough.

I hope the penny dropped for you or you’re a little more motivated (hope I haven’t depressed you!) Two more things – watching an episode of The Wire each day helps break the day up and it’s the best show ever made.

Also… working from home isn’t as amazing as you might think… you just might miss the work environment. If you DO work from home, make sure you get the hell out of the house at least once a day.

The online life is great, but it’s not worth going stir crazy over.

Peace!

It's the weekend and I just know you're itching to make your first affiliate sale without blowing cash on PPC.

So… here's a little technique to get you doing just that.

Go find a product you'd like to be an affiliate for, make sure it has a decent payout and make sure there's not an overwhelming amount of pages on the web about this product. Try Clickbank, MoreNiche, MarketHealth – places like that.

Use the keyword tool at Google - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

…to make sure folks are actually searching for your product. You want to see phrases like "(product name) reviews" or "(product name) discount code".

And don't forget to check the competition.

Now here's the important part…

Go and buy a domain name containing the name of your affiliate product. Maybe something like (product name)reviewsonline.com or even buy(product name).org

Write 3 or 4 posts about the product, give it a favourable review but also point out its flaws.

Point people to your affiliate link.

Make sure it's easy to see, preferably before the posts at the top of your blog or just below the header of your webpage.

Now write 3 or 4 articles and point them to your site/blog/webpage using the product name as your anchor text.

Then… sit back and wait for the affiliate sales to roll in

Ok… it's not quite as quick and easy as that. You may need a few more inbound links, you may have to mess around with the layout.

But you'll soon understand the power of a relevant domain name for the keywords you want to rank for.

Anyhow, give it a go and if you want any help drop me a line at — thecompleteguide "at" gmail.com.

I'll add you to my MSN or we can Skype if you like.

I want to help you make some affiliate sales, so take advantage of me while I'm in an inexplicably fantastic mood.

So I receive an email from my webhost — "I've suspended your site".

What for I wonder? Over the bandwidth limit?

Nope, I go take a look and guess what? My entire site has been replaced by a hacking forum.

Evil scammy spammy hacker people.

Everything had been wiped and me being the dozy person that I am who doesn't backup his blog… the whole 3-4 years of posts have gone too.

No matter, it wasn't a money maker really, just a way for me to share my thoughts.

So I'll start again. And this time, back stuff up.

All I can say is… beware of Wordpress updates, never update straight away, the flaws and backdoors are rife… a hacker's dream.

Onwards!