The Naked Truth

This is a post that has been a long time coming. I think. I just didn’t know that it had to come out already!

I am having a hard time finding good and valuable information which I want to share here with you, information which hasn’t already been said on countless other blogs of  much more advanced Internet Marketers than me. Internet Marketers that are having success online. That can write and captivate their audience. Simply people that are much more believable than “old me”.

See, I started looking into “making money online” in September 2007 – just about 2 years ago. At that time I had literally no idea what I was doing and had no computer-/website-/blog-technical knowledge whatsoever. Hell, I had never even heard about the term “Affiliate Marketing” or “Blog”. I had to learn everything from scratch. I fell for literally countless scams, make money online, survey and data entry schemes and overpriced “learn how to make money online” programs.

I learned, had set-backs, paid more money, and spent hours, days, months trying to work out how to earn some cash on the Net because everywhere I was told it was so EASY! The breakthrough always was around the corner.I neglected our home business (ice cream franchise), my children, my friends. I neglected my health and sanity because I stayed up every night till 12 or 1am, absorbing the masses of information thrown at me and trying to make sense of it.

I didn’t give up. I was (still am!) passionate about Internet and Affiliate marketing, and my 2 year efforts have paid off just enough to keep me going. Just…

The Naked Truth #1:

It can take a loooooooooong time before you see any (mentionable) results.

***After 2 years of spending every spare minute online to make some money I am earning between $100 and $250 a month from my online “ventures”. Whooopedoo!

There are many different ideas out there on how you can make money online. One thing I have come to believe (and what the “good guru’s” will let you know, too) is that if you want to be successful online, you need to have a website or blog. I mean, you are on the Web, how do you think you are going to make money if not from a website/blog??? Problem is, you need to find something to blog (or build a website) about that is going to make you money, and then keep researching and updating your creation and drive traffic to it to make it work.

It is also widely believed (in successful bloggers and IM’s circles) that if helps a lot if you have your own personal “Internet marketing blog” where you blog about your journey and successes to riches on the way. Kind of like I have here   It’s just, – when you start out, you don’t really know what you are doing. You can’t give great tips to anybody. You are a nobody!!! There are so many others out there with lots more experience and success, how can you compete? So go and rack your brains on what great tips you want to give everybody who happens to stop by your blog and be interested in what you have to say. Sounds harsh? Well, it’s supposed to! That’s how I feel quite often when I am supposed to update my blog here. Sure, I have learned a lot, but it doesn’t seem important enough or “new” enough (I squeal with laughter now – new??) to insult anybody with it. But giving up? NO WAY!

See, there is something you can do to make yourself heard just a little, and to add actual value to your community of readers: Don’t try to be a professional, don’t try to “teach”, but just tell it like it is from your perspective, what you have learned and how it has affected you. Be genuine and be yourself. There will be others out there who still have to get where you are now and who will value what you have to say.

The Naked Truth #2:

You will need a blog or website to make it online. You will have to keep updating it. Do the research. Learn. Write posts. Generate traffic. It’s all hard yakka. It takes a lot of time. No “easy money” here. At least not for most of us for the first few years.

***I am in a constant state of pressure as I keep thinking “what should I post about next”. Spending valuable time researching topics. Trying to create backlinks to my blogs by commenting on other blogs, being active in forums, writing articles, creating squidoo lenses…

Let’s face it, most of us start off by doing it part-time, in our spare time, at night after a full days work. We’ve got all these ideas and expectations, and then we become disappointed if any form of success takes too long. Well, here is my advice: – Suck it up, and keep going! And if you lose your drive or interest, or it becomes all too hard for you, then it might be time to say Good-Bye to the dream of making it big online. Because

The Naked Truth #3:

To be successful here you need stamina, and you need to be driven and passionate. You need to be ready to sacrifice your free time. Internet Marketing needs to become your favorite hobby.If you don’t think you can do it – don’t.

We are also tempted to try different systems, whatever we come across that sounds viable should be tested as we might be missing the program that might actually deliver us the easy online riches we desire. It’s every Affiliate and Internet Marketers biggest downfall – the variety and bombardment of opportunities and information online. We stop focusing on what we have to do and jump from this to that and back and forth, ultimately achieving nothing. So here it is, the

The Naked Truth #4:

To make it in Internet /Affiliate Marketing you need to be organized, disciplined and have a clear focus on what you need to do next, and what your steps are to achieve your goal. Nobody else will get you organized or make sure you stay on track. It’s up to you, and you alone! Remember: You are trying to be your own boss here, so you have to live up to it!

***I am far from focused, organized or disciplined, otherwise I would already be earning a lot more than a measly $100 – $250 a month, believe me! The amount I am earning is a direct result of how focused, organized and disciplined I have applied myself to my home business so far. I might spend countless hours on the computer fooling myself, but I am not being productive.

If focus and discipline are one of your downfalls, too, there is a fantastic video you should watch, created by no other than Eben Pagan. I am not telling you that it is magically going to solve your problems for you, but it will give you insights in what you can do to help you along with being more focused and productive. I think I will have to watch it a few more times! Improve your productivity dramatically

Are you turned off yet? Don’t be – what I want to do with this post is to let you know that Affiliate Marketing is no road to “easy money”. I don’t want anybody to go on and think that you can make money easily through Affiliate Marketing. So don’t quit your day job over it just yet! It takes time, it takes effort, it takes discipline and much more. Am I disillusioned? You bet! Am I ready to give up? NO WAY!!!!!

The fun only starts now….

1. Affiliate Marketing is FUN!
2. Affiliate Marketing will make you money, once everything falls into place. Just DON’T GIVE UP!
   
3. Affiliate Marketing is a journey of discovery and learning, and personal development.
4. As we learn, we will get better at it, which will lead to success!
   

I personally love Affiliate Marketing, for me it has been a roller coaster ride all the way. Up and down, and around, and the amount I have learned about Affiliate and Internet marketing, and about building websites and other technical things, is amazing. I know I am not there yet, but I can see different things working. It might take a long long time to get to where I want to be, but I will not give up and I know I will get there eventually. It is all a matter of sticking with it, and being aware what Affiliate Marketing can or can’t do, and what is involved to make it work. We shouldn’t be scared or put off or disappointed, instead we should look at what we have achieved so far, and how we can improve on it. Keep learning, keep exploring, and if something works, great, build up on it! Keep going!

Phew, I have exhausted myself writing this post! But I had to get it off my chest. Affiliate Marketing is a great way of making money online, but you need to be aware that it’s not going to be overnight. It requires a lot of hard work and dedication, and then some more. But if you stick with it, you will reap the rewards eventually. I know I will!

Off to have a coffee
now, tada!

So, I hope you are sitting down:

1. I am the artsy one in the Weiss family. One day my whole house will be covered in my own paintings! – If I ever have time to paint and draw again, that is, keeping you all entertained is taking up so much time!
2. Apparently I tend to often interrupt people when they are talking because I get so much into the conversation and want to get my word in before I forget what I wanted to say!
3. I was always really, really bad at writing essays – that’s probably why it takes me a long time to get blog posts together!
4. I am German, studied German administration and got a diploma, just to travel to Australia and end up “for good” there! The Australians don’t seem too interested in what I know about German administration…
5. I have climbed Ayers Rock in Central Australia and dived with sharks at the Great Barrier Reef (!?!? did I really do this?? How old was I??)
6. Since I had the kids (7 and 6 now) I have become the greatest CHICKEN on earth – I see danger in everything, hence me questioning No.5.
7. But I have still started to do waterskiing early this year and really enjoy it! When the season starts again soon I will have to learn how to drive the boat (shiver….) I don’t have a photo of me on skis, just of me and mini-me before her kneeboarding…
8. I absolutely love my two Jack Russells Boomer and Dash, but I am sometimes to lazy to take them for their walk (shame on me!)
9. I don’t like the telephone. Never have. It took me ages to get a mobile phone.
10. I am a “Yes”- Sayer. I can’t say no. I want to please everybody. I HATE my weak self!
11. I am obsessed about my weight. I eat too much. I love food. I LOVE FOOD. Constantly on a diet or other….
12. I am very good at making resolutions about what I am going to do; but I really SUCK at sticking with it!
13. I am extremely compassionate. Sometimes too much, because hearing about certain events can mess me up for quite a while…
14. My 2 dream holidays: Horseback riding in the Rocky Mountains, Painting course in Tuscany.
15. Swimming is one of my favorite sports. I am a water rat.
16. I’ve served ice-cream in our own store in the center of Australia for 7 years, and hated every minute of it. Loved the “all-you-can-eat-for-free” though.
17. Been together with my partner for nearly 15 years…
18. Never in my whole life has anybody asked me “will you marry me?” – …They must all have known that I would say no!!
19. I consider myself a single mum as my partner is constantly away on business.
20. I am currently doing Certificate IV in Bookkeeping – I want to be able to do someting for the unlikely case that my Internet Marketing doesn’t take off! (don’t put all your eggs in one basket, or so the saying goes?)
21. My favorite book right now is Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More fantastic read!
22. One of my favorite things to do is to go for a walk along the beach here with my kids and dogs and watch the sun set over the Indian Ocean…. (are you jealous??)
23. I love to do paperwork and office work. I know – I am a rare breed! And I have always been absolutely pedantic about being organized and neat. I should have married an accountant! – If I ever would have been asked, that is…
24. I cannot lie. I am too honest. That’s probably a good thing!
25. I am a happy person who enjoys life and I am on a quest to better myself by being more mindful, doing 10 minutes of meditation every day (so far I still suck at it, I have to learn), by giving more and being more content.
26. I am always up for a challenge (hint hint!). What I consider my biggest challenge right now is to show all my friends and family that you can actually make lots of money with Internet Marketing!!!

Here is what I have added after completing the list (I will keep adding here as I see fit, on an ongoing basis!)

• I yearn to see more of the world. I have been to lots of countries in Europe while I was still living in Germany, and have also been to Sri Lanka, Thailand and Bali, and of course now I am living in Australia, but I would love to see North and South America, and Africa! Russia, China, Japan….
• I have been snow skiing in Zermatt in Switzerland (at the Matterhorn)
• I have cycled around Bali by myself – now THAT was cool!

Puh, that’s done! I hope I haven’t scared you off now, and you will keep enjoying reading my blog! Thanks, Gene, for tagging me to take part in the challenge, as you can see I have risen to the task, now I will go off and tag my 5 people, too!!! I will be listing the other “contestants” who get the T A G from me right here as they complete their tasks. Watch this space!

Here are the Internet Marketers who were fortunate enough to get tagged by me :

1. Rob Willis – 25 things you may not know about me.
2. Vance Sova – What are Alex Jeffreys students up to?
3. Veronica Purdey – Tagged by Petra for 25 random things

I think I will have to look at all my widgets, plugins and images – might have overloaded the site whilst trying to give you the best experience when visiting my blog Apparently that can happen – too many widgets, plugins and images etc. can considerably slow down loading time of a site.  We will see!

BTW, when I noticed that my site was having problems I immediately opened a support ticket with D9 Hosting (my brilliant hosting company), and they responded literally within minutes, personally! So, thanks, Paula and Dan, for your absolutely outstanding customer service, you have no idea how much it is appreciated!

So, sorry, but here you go, my blog, better late than never! May you have many more exciting years ahead of you!

The blog I created step-by-step whilst writing my ebook Affiliate Marketing S.O.S. has made it to Rank #7 on the first page of Google’s SERP’s – for my main long-tail keyword “healthy diet weight loss“! Whoooooooooo!!! Rank #7 out of 63,700,000 results for the search term “healthy diet weight loss”! BTW, that keyword gets searched for around 10,000 times a month

So, I guess I am doing something right! I am off to enjoy my victory for as long as I can; we all know that Google loves to “dance” and throw search results around from time to time… So if my blog isn’t on page one any more some time down the track, then you will just have to take my word for it that it actually happened!

If you can find my blog on page 1 of Google’s SERP’s, I would love to hear a short comment! Thanks! I am all smiles….

These are the best programs I have had the pleasure to invest in, absolutely no money wasted, good as gold. They all teach you a ton of stuff you will be able to utilize for the rest of your Internet Marketing life. Enjoy checking them out!

Wealthy Affiliate University

One Week Marketing

The Niche Blogger

The Faster Webmaster

John Thornhills Personal Coaching Program (now John Thornhill’s Marketing Masterclass)

Traffic Uncut

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Reason being – the last couple of days have shown me big time that blogging and affiliate marketing really do work. On Sunday I made a $33 sale through my website Healthy Diet Weight Loss – this site has only very few posts on it, and even though I had it up and running since October or so, I have not worked on promoting it or getting traffic to it (the usual “haven’t got the time”-issue). The site gets an average of 4 visitors a day. So I think this is pretty good!

But the best thing is that yesterday I logged into my Ebay PartnerNetwork account and was greeted wit $129.36 in commissions! Just like that. This stems from my website Beach Theme Home Decor which is actually my best performer so far. It gets around 160 unique visitors a day mainly from organic search results, which is great! The site is on the first 2 SERP’s for a lot of keywords. It makes a good amount of money from Google Adsense, and my ebay widget works really well! On the other hand, my Amazon store is not performing so great.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that if you keep working on your affiliate marketing, you will eventually reap the rewards. Nobody said it would be easy and happen overnight (actually, I’m wrong – nearly everybody in the Internet Marketing niche does, if they want to sell you something!), but persistence will pay off.

So don’t give up, whatever you do! Keep up the great work!

Success through Perseverance

You might not believe it, but I have actually FINISHED my ebook – I wrote about it at the end of September, and should have finished it by early August – huh! It’s now end of November, but you know what? It doesn’t matter, the main thing is – I finished it!

I just want to throw in here that no matter where you are in Internet or Affiliate Marketing, I think the most important mindset you have to have is to KEEP GOING, not to give up, no matter what. Keep going until you reach your goal! It doesn’t matter if it takes a lot longer than what you thought, just stick with it and see it through to the end. Remember: You have not failed until you stop trying!

So, I have converted my ebook into pdf, and have sent it off to some of my friends for a read (and a laugh? who knows!). I can’t wait what they will have to say! Hopefully all good

Having finished with the product creation means that I can move on to the next step in John Thornhill’s Personal Coaching Program – Sales page creation! So I will have to dive right in to week 8 of the training, yipeeeh! That’s about half way….. I wonder what else John has in store for me!

Anyway, I hope that this next step will not take me 2 months again…. I’m better off straight away to start working on my sales page! Cheers!

Losing Money

So here I was, the newest of Newbies to Internet Marketing, and I had just spend $4,495 USD to get 20,000 “targeted, unique visitors” to my site. (Read the first part of this story here). When I think about this now it makes me feel sick – here is a tip for any new Internet Marketer out there: Do NEVER EVER spend that much money on generating traffic to your sites, EVER!

But, as I was still all “ready to rock and roll”, I dived into the study material I had received – which, I have to say, is quite comprehensive and valuable -, and I went on to send out the direct mailers which were a free bonus in this “Ultimate Traffic Program”. I think I got about 500 direct, pre-printed mailers on which I had to stick the pre-printed address stickers supplied by GCFN. And then, of course, I had to send them out! Now, because I am in Australia, and all these “targeted leads” were in the US, I had to buy stamps from the US, had them shipped to me, put them on the mailers and sent a package with all of them back to GCFN to put them in the mailbox in the US for me (they offer that service for overseas customers). Total cost: $136.00

All the while this was happening, I was also actively advertising my websites on classified ad sites, as I had been instructed. I spent hours and also quite a few dollars on advertising on classifieds websites.

Losing Money

And the weeks went by. I had bought the “Ultimate Traffic Package” and I was promised 20,000 unique, targeted visitors within 3 months. If that target wasn’t reached, Global CashFlow Network offered to re-run the campaign for no additional cost. And guess what – we fell a few hundred visitors short. And I have to say, they held true to their promise and re-run the campaign no problem.

My problem though was that out of that many visitors to my site, all I had been able to generate was 11 people who had signed up to get more information (one of them being my partner, – I signed him up at some stage to test whether everything was working alright because there were no prospects!). I had made one referral and earned myself $110 USD (when I deposited that check in my account, I had to pay a $15 fee because it was a foreign check!).

When the campaign ran out for the second time, another 3 months had gone past and I had not added any more prospects to my list. None. Zip. Nada. 11 it was. I had received my second set of direct mailers, but by that time I had – understandably! Even the slowest people get it eventually – lost my confidence in the program and its results. I was pretty pissed off and felt ripped off!!!

So one day I decided to go ahead and ring them and ask them for a refund of as much money as I could get back from my investment (which came up to nearly $6,000.00 by now).

I have to be honest – they were terrific on the telephone when I called them. Whenever I had a problem before, I could call them and discuss things. They DO have a great customer support/service and are easy to reach. I rang them quite a few times, and they were always very helpful and professional.

My Money Back

Same thing this time around. I was prepared for a fight (and believe me, I am not a person who likes to make a scene!), but the staff on the line were very good, and after a fairly short time they did agree on paying me back my sign up fee and all the costs associated with the startup of the program. Unfortunately, they could not pay me back the money for the traffic package, but I can tell you, at that stage I was very glad that they had agreed to pay me back $1,694 USD. So I took it and ran – off to more fruitful adventures!

The End.

So there you have it, my story on Mary Gersten’s Global CashFlow Network. Now, I do believe that they mean well (…), and you do get a lot of good stuff to study, and some guidance, but you will not be earning a living online with GCFN – unless you are extremely lucky (that’s my humble personal opinion).

I found a good discussion thread on GCFN here, where you can read up on other people’s experience with them. There is also a fantastic lens on Squidoo about it – somebody else’s experience. I could have written that! Also, I would love to hear your comments about GCFN here on my blog, if you have got any

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know about a great post on Richard Legg’s Blog (I have been a subscriber to his blog for a while, and Richards posts are of the very few that I will have a look at). In his newest post he is asking what is holding us back from success. There are already quite a few good comments.

Gotta hit the hay now – I am in and out of delirium….