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Google Analytics - if you’re exploring internet-based business of any kind, it is inevitable that at some point you will be told to use Google Analytics.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is basically a tracking system for internet traffic, that is, visitors to web sites.

If given access to the website, Google can record a lot of information about the people who visit that site - where they are located, how they reached the website, which page they looked at first, how they navigated around the website, from which page they exited the website, how many pages they viewed, how long they spent viewing the pages, and even what words they typed into a search engine, if they came to the website from a search engine.

As you can imagine, this is priceless information for the website owner.

Google Analytics is free, which is great when you are just starting out online, and it is fairly easy to install.

Even if you don’t own the website directly - say, for example you are writing lenses on Squidoo, or Hubs on HubPages, or a blog on Blogger.com - many of these platforms support Google Analytics and encourage their users to track visitors using Google Analytics.

What Information Does Google Analytics Show Me?

Once you have Google Analytics installed on your website, you will be able to log in to Google Analytics at any time, and see a dashboard for each of your websites.

Each of the sections in the dashboard is a summary report, and you can click for more detailed information.

The Google Analytics Visits Graph

At the top of your Google Analytics dashboard, you will see a graph of the visitors to your website over the past 30 days, one graph point per day. Google Analytics can display the graph with one dot per week, or one dot per month, so that you can see longer-term trends.

You can also ask Google Analytics to display the graph for more days, or fewer days. When you adjust the time period for the graph at the top of the Google Analytics dashboard, all the Google Analytics reports lower down the page are re-calculated for the new time period. This is particularly useful if you see unusual activity on your site, and you want to narrow in and discover the source.

In this example, Google Analytics shows that the site received fairly consistent traffic of around 20 visits per day, except for a dip on December 24th and 25th (I wonder what might have caused that?)

The Google Analytics Site Usage Statistics

Google Analytics will tell you exactly how many visits your site has received, how many page views, and it will calculate for you the average number of pages per visit. In general, if you have a site where you want visitors to read your content, more pages per visit is better.

On the right of the Site Usage section, at the bottom, Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your visitors were “new visits” - people coming to your site for the first time. In this example, Google Analytics shows that the 678 visits account for 609 actual visitors.

Google Analytics will also tell you the “bounce rate” - how many people took one look at the first page of your site and immediately left again. The lower this figure, the better, but don’t be surprised if it is always over 50% - there are a lot of impatient scanners browsing the internet!

The Google Analytics Visitors Overview

Google Analytics knows a lot of information about your visitors. If you click “view report” in the Visitors Overview box, you will be able to see a breakdown of the web browsers your visitors are using, the type of internet connections they have, operating systems, screen sizes, and much more.

This information can help you to make sure that you set up your pages to be fast-loading, attractive and readable to all your visitors.

The Google Analytics Map Overlay

Because every computer has a unique address, and these addresses are registered, Google Analytics knows the location of each computer which browses your site. Google Analytics will display a map of the world, showing where your visitors live. Darker areas have a higher proportion of your visitors.

In this example, Google Analytics shows the majority of visitors to this site live in the USA, and the rest live in other English-speaking nations.

The Google Analytics Traffic Sources Overview

Of all the sections in Google Analytics, this is the one I consult the most.

Google Analytics will tell you where your visitors are coming from - whether they types or pasted your URL into their browser directly (this includes people who clicked on a link in a downloaded email), whether they came from a search engine results page, or whether they are a “referral” - which means that they clicked on a link to your site from another page on the internet.

If you are actively promoting your website, this part of Google Analytics is your best friend. It will tell you what is working, in which case you can do more, and it will also show you the places elsewhere on the internet which are sending traffic to your website - places you may never have known existed.

The Google Analytics Content Overview

The Google Analytics content oveview will show you which pages on your site are the most-visited.

If you click on “View Report”, you will be able to get detailed information about the paths your visitors took to and from each page on your site.

The Google Analytics Goals Overview

You can use the Google Analytics goal tracking function to measure how many visitors to your site are taking the action you plan for them to take. This action may be buying a product, subscribing to a service, or opting in to your email list.

You tell Google Analytics the sequence of pages your visitors travel in order to accomplish your desired goal. Google Analytics will then track the number of visitors who complete the sequence, and if you hit “View Report”, Google Analytics will show you the percentage of visitors who dropped off the goal path at each step.

As you can imagine, this is the kind of information direct marketers adore, because it will show you exactly where you need to re-work the text on your page to make the largest improvement in your conversion rate.

If your website makes money through pay-per-click or other forms of advertising, and you are not actively building a list of subscribers, then you will not need to set up a goal path. This section will always show 0 goal conversions in that case.

How Do I Register For Google Analytics?

You will find Google Analytics at http://google.com/analytics.

If you already have an Adwords or Adsense account, simply log in using the same email address - you are automatically registered.

Otherwise, register by filling in your email address and a password.

How Do I Put Google Analytics On My Website?

The short answer to this question is that Google Analytics will supply you with some HTML code, called the “tracking code”, which you put on every page of your website.

The devil is in the detail, of course - getting the code in the first place, and how you get the code on every page of your site.

We will be publishing a series of blog posts with specific instructions for using Google Analytics with special sites like Squidoo, HubPages, Wordpress blogs, blogging platforms, and software-generated websites.

If you have created your own website using an HTML editor, then you simply add the Google Analytics code to your footer template, which is used on every page of your website.

Of course, if you have made 100 pages for your site already and not used any kind of template, you have a long and tedious task ahead of you, pasting the code on each and every page, one by one!

How Do I Get My Tracking Code From Google Analytics?

To get your code from Analytics, you set up what is called a “website profile” for your website inside Google Analytics.

Click on “Analytics Settings” in the top left corner.

Click on “+Add new profile” on the right side.

Paste or type your domain name into the box.

Click “finish”.

Google Analytics will now display a snippet of code called “javascript” - copy this code.

You will notice that the Tracking Status is listed as “Tracking Not Installed”. Once you have pasted the snippet of code in the right place, Google Analytics will verify your code, and it will begin to track traffic on your site.

In coming weeks, we will feature specific Google Analytics “How To” information for various Web 2.0 sites and site-building platforms. We will also look more closely at the Google Analytics reports, and the information they can show us.

Why Use Google Analytics?

If you’re not particularly technically oriented, then all this may seem like a bit of a hassle.

Having a background in marketing, I understood immediately why the hassle is worth it.

When we were doing direct mail campaigns, we used to place ads or send out letters with little coupon codes, and then when the replies came back in we would count up by hand how many responses came from each code, and we would make tables of numbers just like those reports you see in Google Analytics.

We needed to know which ads and letters had worked, and which ones hadn’t.

Of course, the information was far less detailed and accurate that what you get from Google Analytics, but it was all we had.

When I saw how the record-keeping part of the marketing process could be fully automated, I was beside myself with joy!

As Peter Drucker says, “What you can’t measure, you can’t manage”.

If you want to manage your prospects into taking action on your site, you have to measure what they are doing now. There is just no way around that.

Google Analytics takes all the legwork out of measuring what your customers and prospects are doing, freeing up your time to take the information, make decisions based on the information, and put those decisions into action - immediately.

I love my Google Analytics displays, and I can safely say that we wouldn’t have the passive income we have today without the information Google Analytics has given us along the way.

The desire to have everything we want, effortlessly, is a childish desire.

In truth, as adults we actually wouldn’t enjoy that as much as we expect. As adults, we enjoy being challenged, we enjoy stretching ourselves, learning new things, rising to the occasions and discovering that our best is much greater than we had dared to dream.

As babies, we are small and helpless, and we genuinely need to be given “something for nothing”. As adults, getting something for nothing makes us feel small and helpless all over again, which triggers an even greater desire for more something for nothing.

Ironically, the truth is in everything the supposed “overnight successes” say, if we just knew what to listen for.

Without exception, the people who attain great success in a short period of time are not doing what they do with the goal of achieving great success in a short period of time. If you make success your goal, you have already failed.

These people are doing something that they would do whether it made them money or not - and in many cases they were doing it for free for a long time before it began to pay them anything at all. Rather than pursuing some notion of “success”, these people were expressing their own passions.

The danger in falling for these fairytale stories is that we say to ourselves “if I just do what they did, I will become succssful and wealthy, and then I will be able to do want I really want to do.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Doing what you really want to do will lead you to your personal success faster and more directly than imitating someone else who appears to have the life you want. Every success story has unpredictable twists and turns - events which happened at just the right time as a result of something apparently unconnected to the quest for success.

Following your inner drives will take you to success more surely than following in someone else’s footsteps.

That’s not to say you won’t have mentors - of course you will. But you won’t choose them because they are hugely successful. You will find them because they will be teaching something that you want to do.

For many, the hardest step in the journey to success is the first step - knowing what you want. It certainly was for me!

We’re coming up to the New Year.

Instead of making yet another resolution about making more money, why not resolve that 2009 is the year in which you make contact with your inner compass, and start to follow it?

You may find that is the key to living happily ever after …

Whenever a cultural feature turns up repeatedly all over the world and in all time periods, we can safely assume that there is something about it which is fundamental to the way our brains are wired.

The heroic myth of the person who begin in humble obscurity, struggles through adversity, collects some trusty companions, and ultimately triumphs by achieving “success” (whatever success means in the local culture) is absolutely universal.

The hero may be obscure and humble, or he may begin as a Prince and be humbled by circumstances, but either way, he is born to greatness.

The roots of this myth lie in each individual’s life experience, which is the same no matter where he or she is born.

Adults (and even older kids) are biologically wired to find babies cute and adorable, especially babies with whom they spend a lot of time. Babies spend the first year of their lives receiving constant adoring attention, just for existing.

Then, as they get older, and they start getting into things that are dangerous or forbidden, people start frowning and saying “no”. The adoring looks drop off, and if another baby arrives in the family, the adoration is diverted to the newer, cuter model.

All of us feel emotional pain as this happens to us. Once we had everything we wanted, just for existing, but now we need to do something “good” or “clever” or “cute” to earn it. We are outraged by the betrayal.

We all remember, subconsciously, that time when it all came effortlessly, and we all long to return to that Garden of Eden time.

The heroic myth taps right into that longing. “You can have your kingdom back,” it whispers, “you can have everything you want, effortlessly, if you just work hard, overcome adversity, maintain a positive attitude, and find the right vehicle to get you there.”

The media feed us the heroic myth because our hurt and outraged inner children lap it up and feel momentarily comforted. It’s not gone forever - I can earn it back. Sigh of relief, pass the chocolate.

Sales letters tap into our need for heroic hope. They hold out to us the hope that we can earn our way back to the life where everything cames, easily, and we don’t have to conform to the annoying demands of other people that we do boring things, tolerate atrocious people politely, and stay indoors on gorgeous sunny days.

Success means doing wht you want, when you want, with whom you want - doesn’t that sound like the Garden of Eden?

As long as we yearn to be loved and given everything we want or need without having to earn it, we will be susceptible to the lure of the promises in sales letters.

Making money online, like any other businesses and professions, is seen by many people through a rose-coloured filter. We look at Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Ashley Qualls, J.K Rowling, Robert Kiyosaki, Warren Buffett, and the myriad of dot-com millionaires, and it looks as though success happened quickly and easily for them.

The media don’t help - they relentlessly plug story after story about plucky and dedicated individuals who have had apparently fast success, and who apparently modestly make reference to things like “hard work” and “good fortune” and “a great team”. The media play down these self-deprecating comments.

But it’s not the fault of the media. The media don’t cause this. One thing they do well is figure out what we want to hear, and give it to us by the bucketload. The media keep selling the notion of “overnight success” because we are desperate to buy it.

If someone promises you a quick and easy way to increase your income by $1000 a month, or to earn $10,000 a month, and they give you screen shots of hteir earnings and quotes from five other people who have used their system and got great results … let’s face it, some of you reading this now are already wondering where to enter your credit card details, aren’t you?

We don’t care what we have to do, as long as the result is quick and easy. And we don’t care how much it costs, if we’re going to earn it back almost immediately anyway. As long as we have the asking price - or we can put it on credit - we’re in.

Don’t feel guilty - this is not anyone’s fault. We are all hard-wired to respond this way, which is why all sales letters are fundamentally the same. It works.

Over my next couple of blog posts, I will be explaining how this psychological process works, and how you can set yourself free from the compulsion to jump whenever a sales letter snaps its fingers.

You don’t need to be around the internet for long, especially if you’re trying to make money online, before someone uses the term “social bookmarking”.

We recently ran a seminar for a group of people who were setting up websites, and quite a few of them had either not heard the term “social bookmarking”, or didn’t know what it meant.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

The idea behind social bookmarking is simple - we all have websites bookmarked in our browsers. Wouldn’t it be neat if we could share those bookmarks with our friends, workmates, or other people who have the same interests? And if we could access them from any computer in the world?

Why not build a website which can store everyone’s bookmarks online?

Once social bookmarking sites were established, it was logical for the search engines to give weight to links from those sites. After all, if someone had bookmarked a site, it meant they thought it was cool, and they wanted to be able to find it again. And if lots of people had bookmarked a site, then the chances were good that the content there was valuable.

Once it became known that search engines value links from social bookmarking sites highly, it was only a matter of time before people began “gaming” the sites - getting machines or minimum-wage workers in third world countries to flood the social bookmarking sites with bookmarks. This resulted in many of the social bookmarking sites setting strict Terms of Service, and if you breach those TOS, you will be banned in an eyeblink!

However, there is good reason to have your web site’s pages social bookmarked.

At the recent seminar, we introduced the attendees to one social bookmarking site - digg.com. They buddied up and bookmarked each other’s sites, and we also asked them to bookmark our Internet Basics page, but only if they felt it was valuable and worthwhile bookmarking. About fourteen people ended up bookmarking the page. Here’s what the bookmark in Digg looks like: The Basics of The Internet.

A couple of days later, we noticed a rush a traffic to our website - to the Internet Basics page. This was a brand new domain name, just registered, and we hadn’t done anything to promote the site, but suddenly a flood of over a thousand visitors hit our site in a single day!

It wasn’t coming from Digg, though …

We used Google Analytics to track down the source of the visitors. A popular blogger, Jason Clarke, made a post on his blog about our Internet Basics page.

How did Jason Clarke find our one new little web page in the middle of the millions, billions, or possibly even trillions of web pages which now exist?

Apparently, the news about our page had come to him via Digg …

In the past month, since that first rush of visitors passed, we have had another 700+ visitors come to us from Jason’s blog post. In addition, over 160 other pages around the internet have linked to our page, and it has been bookmarked by other people at other social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia.com.

This is the way social bookmarking is designed to work - word of a web page spreads “virally”, as real human beings look at the page, think it’s good, and pass on the news.

Now, for social bookmarking to work well, you must have something on the web page that people will actually find valuable. In other words, you need to produce quality content. There is no point in bookmarking a page of ads, or the “buy it now” page of your shopping cart - you won’t get the viral effect.

When you have quality content, social bookmarking can help to get the word out. Just remember to read the Terms of Service on your social bookmarking site, and stick to the rules.

Every social bookmarking site is a community, and the rules are there to protect the members of the site from being spammed with worthless links. The rules not only protects the members of the community for spam and the site owners from complaints, they also ensure that the search engines will continue to value links from that social bookmarking site highly in the future.

Sometimes I hear comments which disturb me.

I was at a seminar recently, and there were about 200 people in the room, excited about the income-earning potential of affiliate marketing.

In one of the question sessions, a person got up to the microphone and said “I am not a technical person. I don’t want to have to be watching all these numbers all the time [Adwords campaign metrics and conversions]. Can’t I just do this without all that hassle?”

The first worrying point for me was that this person knew so little about computers that they thought of looking at numbers on the screen as “technical”. The second point of concern was that this person wanted to operate a business without monitoring the performance numbers. This is the equivalent of wanting to fly a jumbo jet at night without looking at the instrument panel!

As a business owner, you live and die by your profitability. You can work incredibly hard in your own business and still lose money. If you don’t know which activities are making you money and which ones for costing more than they bring in, then you have no way to improve your business performance.

Paying for traffic, using Pay-Per-Click advertising, is a great way to go broke fast of you don’t know what you are doing. Google will gouge you on click prices until you can’t possibly make a profit, and it is only by watching the numbers and adjusting your sales process to improve the numbers that you can ever hope to get clicks at a low enough price to sell affiliate products profitably.

Every business has its “dashboard” - the numbers you watch to monitor the performance of the business.

For an online business, the dashboard will include Google Analytics, or an equivalent tool, to tell you how many visitors you are getting to each page of your site, where they come from, and what they do while they are there.

It will also include your Adsense or other PPC advertising reports, if you are a PPC publisher; your Clickbank and/or other affiliate program earnings reports; your shopping cart reports, if you sell your own products on your site; and your bank account - after all, those earnings aren’t real money until they show up in your bank account!

Have you noticed that all the people selling internet marketing products will dangle enormous earnings in front of you? They will give you the example of a half-blind drug addicted single mother of handicapped triplets who went from being bankrupt to pulling in over $100,000 a year in just three and a half weeks using their Bright Shiny Object, with the clear inference that you, a fully functional human being, could obviously do better than that.

If you have not yet earned your first penny online, this is a very dangerous train of thought for you.

It will have you reaching for your credit card before the speaker has even finished listing the incredible bonuses included with their Bright Shiny Object.

But that is just not the way it works.

If you talk to the speakers, most of whom are earning in that sort of bracket now, you will find that they did not have that type of on/off, black-to-white transition to earning big money online.

Even those for whom the tap turned overnight, like Stephen Pierce, whose first money-making website started earning him $35,000 per month from its very first month, didn’t come from nowhere. Stephen had been working on the core value of that website, options trading recommendations, for over 15 months, full time, earning nothing whatsoever at all, before he created the subscription website which started to bring in money. That included giving his tips away for free on bulletin boards, creating a free website to give them away, and creating an email list of subscribers who were hungry for his product - all of this while earning nothing, nada, zip, zero point zero zero dollars.

Building an online business is NOT a get-rich-quick scheme.

If you want one of those - I’m sorry to disillusion you, but they don’t exist.

I know people who were apparent overnight successes in making money online, real estate investing, multi-level marketing, and traditional business.

In every case, without exception, those people had done their “success apprenticeship” in another vehicle - often more than one other vehicle - before falling into the one that worked for them just as they were psychologically ready for huge success.

If you have not yet done your apprenticeship anywhere, then there will be no overnight success for you.

What is a “success apprenticeship”?

Some people are lucky enough to be born to parents who start teaching them the laws of success during their childhood - parents who have, themselves, carved out success through their own vision and hard work, and know how it is done.

Others find a mentor early in life, and follow their advice, no matter how difficult it seems.

Some people go in circles, not understanding why they can’t make progress, until their mid-life years or later, before they start to find the teaching they need to shift their attitudes and create success.

It’s never too late to start, and it’s never too early. You’re never too old, too young, too tall, too allergic, or too busy.

All it takes is making a decision.

And then, years of work.

Most of the work is on your own mind and attitudes, and developing the skills you need. Only a short time of actual real-world work will then produce the income and lifestyle you desire. However, until you have done your apprenticeship, all your real-world work will appear to be frustratingly fruitless.

Your “success apprenticeship” involves choosing a vehicle - internet business, share trading, real estate investing, multi-level marketing, traditional business, commodities trading, whatever - it really doesn’t matter - and working at that vehicle with 100% effort for 3-5 years. Once you have learned everything about yourself that vehicle can teach you - which you won’t in less than 3 years - you can move on and choose another. Work that one with 100% effort and dedication for 3-5 years, as well.

At some point, you will have uncovered all your personal quirks that get in the way of success, and you will also have gained some very valuable skills. When this happens, you will find yourself gravitating toward the people who are teaching in the field of your next chosen vehicle. You will start to develop the relationships which will take you to the next level of thinking and operating.

At that point, your income will explode.

Do not listen to anyone who promises you an easier way.

Unless you are in the 1% or less who were born with a natural ability to have everything you touch turn to gold, you will have to undertake this training process. You have probably been doing it in fits and starts all your life, actually, but then giving up in frustration and blaming the vehicle for “not working” instead of gleaning every possible scrap of self-knowledge from the process.

Become a successful person, and the income will follow. It never happens any other way.

Hi Everyone!

Chris here - the geeky and far less literary half of chrisandjennyford.com

Each week I’ll be posting about a variety of topics that we all need to know as we start our journey making an income on the internet. Being a bit of a propeller head my posts mostly focus on the technical aspects of your business, but I promise to explain everything in very simple terms, and only provide as much detail as you need.

So to kick this off, I’d like to let you know about a series of videos I’ve made (well I let Jenny do a couple) providing a basic introduction to the internet. I’m sure most of us can use the internet - send e-mail, visit a webpage - but very few of us probably know much about what happens behind the scenes. If you have a business on the internet I feel that you need to know a little more. Not a lot more, but at least enough about the basic concepts so you can create domains, build websites and so on.

We’ve called this series of videos “Internet Basics” and you can find them on our website - Internet Basics - or you can see them on our brand new YouTube channel (look Mum, I’m on TV - well Web TV)! Take a look, let us know what you think. If there are topics you would like to see covered, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Cheers for now.

Chris

Photo: flickr.com/photos/karljonsson

Since developing our online businesses, I have come to realise that there is something decidedly smelly about the way the internet marketing industry works.

It is completely possible to make money online - we do - but it is not at all like the image that it is portrayed in all those sales letters and sales pitches from stage.

I knew nothing at all about internet marketing at the beginning of 2007. I was vaguely aware that people were running seminars about it, and I had thought to myself that I should probably check it out sometime and find out what it was all about, but my life was full, and I hadn’t got around to it.

One day in 2007, I think it was May or early June, I got an email offering me a free ticket to one of these internet marketing seminars.

I’m one for following up on coincidences, so I went along. I was really pleased to run into two of my friends in the lobby as we waited for the doors to open. One was a real estate investing friend, and the other was from a Team Management and Leadership program I had done about five years before.

The term for this, which I have since learned, is “social proof”. Because these other people that I respected were also at the event, I was immediately reassured that it was something worthwhile.

Its just as well, really, because some of what went on that weekend certainly tested my faith!

Every single speaker had something to sell. And of each 90-minute session, about 30 minutes was a sales pitch.

It wasn’t so bad for the three of us, because we took advantage of that time leave early and get our coffees before the main crowd left the room and swamped the single cafe on the premises.

However, it was annoying. My time is valuable, and I was giving up time with my family, because it was a weekend, so it was doubly valuable to me.

I am a reasonably intelligent person, with a fair bit of business experience, so I was quite disappointed with some of the speakers. They managed to use up the whole hour that wasn’t their sales pitch with “fluff” like photos of their homes, cars, and kids at Disneyland, or screen shots of big paydays from Clickbank or wherever, and basically provide very little information of value - and then they asked us to pay them $3000 for their products!

Why would I hand over $3000 to someone who just wasted 90 minutes of my time giving me nothing useful or specific that I could use?

Fortunately, there were a few speakers who actually provided some good content, enough for me to work out some of the business models for making money from internet marketing, and to pick one to try for myself. There was also a copywriter there who offered to review and critique any sales letters I wrote for a whole year as a bonus with his product - that bonus alone was worth the price of the product, so I bought it. Never logged in to his forum, never got on a conference call, never signed up for the email lessons - but I did get my sales letters critiqued!

Afterwards, I got to thinking about the other people in the room. People who have not had experience running thier own business, or developing a business strategy.

I used my business skills to understand the different business models people were talking about, and to choose which business model suited me.

I chose a business model which would be easier for me to do, because I already had most of the skills required to do it.

But most people don’t know enough about business models to figure out what the business models are - especially based on the sometimes vague and often hype-filled talks the seminar speakers give.

In fact, I would lay odds that most of the people in that room didn’t even realise that the speakers were talking about radically different business models from one another. Some people bought two or three packs from two or three different speakers, and there is no way that they were going to be able to use everything they bought.

1. There is a bunch of stuff that speakers tend to assume you know - but many people don’t.

We have put up a page on our site called “Internet Basics”, which will hopefully start to fill in the assumed knowledge for people, so you have a better idea what the speakers are on about.

2. There is more than one way to skin a cat - or make money online.

There are several very different business models for making money online, and they require different skill sets. They also suit different personality types.

3. Seminars often throw a “fruit salad” of speakers at you, who are talking about a wide range of things, and when you are new it is really hard to tell which one can actually help you to make money.

You need to have your own “business plan” - an understanding of your goals, the skills you have, and the next skills you want to develop - before you can make a sensible decision about which internet marketing products and services you should buy.

4. Seminar speakers expect you to fail.

Don’t get me wrong - the genuine ones really hope you will succeed, but they don’t expect it.

Sadly, it is a fact of human nature that a majority of people left to their own devices will not take action, even when they have paid for a product or service.

Seminar speakers know that the majority of their clients will not even read or watch the materials in the pack, let alone try to apply them. In fact, someone I know did an experiment - in a 10-CD set, CD number 6 was blank. He had a big “apology gift” prepared for the clients who reported it to Customer Service. Out of over 1000 people who bought the 10 CD set, just three (3) people noticed that CD #6 was blank, and asked for a replacement. That’s 0.3%, three in a thousand.

Now, the existence of this phenomenon allows internet marketers to get lazy and careless. Some do get lazy, and some don’t, so you need to find out about a given speaker from their other clients - but you can’t believe the video testimonials they show during their presentations. (More about that in a later blog post!)

Because so many people aren’t going to do anything, some internet marketers just don’t bother with providing much follow-up help and support. You’re on your own.

Now, even if you are very motivated and you are willing to put in a lot of time and effort, you are very unlikely to accidentally stumble on the right things to do without some guidance. Especially if you are new to the whole industry, or new to being self-employed, or new to sales and marketing.

I believe that many more people would use these $3000 products properly and make money from them if they had the proper guidance from the start.

If they bought the right products in the first place.

If they developed their skills in the right order, focusing on one thing at a time.

If they earned money - even just a little - while they were learning.

If they knew what the “end game” was - the long term business model for internet marketing.

And if they had help and support at the moments they got stuck - from someone who actually knew what they were talking about.

The problem with the internet marketing industry is that it throws a vast array of products at people who have no real way to determine what, if anything, they should buy right now.

Then it throws them in the deep end with their newly-purchased probably-unsuitable products, to sink or swim.

And if they sink, it turns up in their inbox or at the next seminar, saying “never mind about that - it’s old news anyway - buy this new thing and you will finally get going”.

There is no STRATEGY to this merry-go-round, and for most people it will only end in disappointment.

There is now so much free information available about internet marketing that you can educate yourself to the point where you can develop a strategy of your own - without spending a dime.

If you invest the time in the beginning and develop a strategy, you are much less likely to make expensive and time-wasting mistakes. Nobody in the industry will say this to you, but it is the truth.

Take advantage of all the free stuff you can find, but don’t buy anything unless it fits with the next step in your strategy.

Photo: flickr.com/photos/adactio

Hello, and welcome to our new blog. On this site, we will be collating information about how to make money online.

Well might you ask - why?

So many people out there are putting so many pages and posts up every day about making money online. And most of it is just recycled stuff from previous how-to-make-money-online posts and pages. Much of is out of date, vague or misleading, or just plain wrong.

The newcomer trying to get the information they need to get started making money online can easily go in circles, paying $27, $47, and $67 on a regular basis, or giving over their email address until their inbox is bursting at the seams with yet more pap, drivel, and sales pitches, and never find the piece of information they really need to get going.

What’s worse, much of the free information floating around has been written by people who have not yet made a penny online!

Now we are not rich yet, by any means, but we do make money online. It took us almost a year to find the missing little bits of information, put them together with what we already knew, and get some processes and tools in place to make it all work.

We took some wrong turns, wasted a lot of time and money, and got thoroughly fed up with it all.

We’d like to be able to promise you that if you read our stuff, you will avoid all that.

But it’s not so.

There is an inevitable learning process which takes place, and you will, without a doubt, make mistakes. You have probably wasted some money already, and in all likelihood you will waste some more.

What we can do, and what we don’t see anyone else doing, is shine a light down the path ahead, so you can see where you are going, and you don’t get utterly lost.

There is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It may not be as big as some of the gurus make out, or it may take a bit more effort to make it that big, and the rainbow might be a little longer than you have been lead to believe.

But it is possible to make money online, and to set up your business so that you literally make money while you sleep.

We do it, and we are here to help you do it.

What is different about our site is that you won’t find pictures of expensive cars and big houses here.

You won’t find head-spinning descriptions of high-tech software that automates everything so you just pay your several thousand dollars, and you become rich. You won’t find sophisticated strategies for tricking Google into listing your site on its front page. You want find vague and waffly “steps” that don’t have enough detail for you to actually follow them.

What you will find is a bridge - a bridge which will take you from a brand new beginner, who knows almost nothing at all about business or the internet, to someone who is earning an income online.

At that point, you will be in a position to understand the high-tech software description, or the sophisticated Google-fooling strategy, and will be able to pick the occasional gem out of the raft of rubbish that will be served up to you in this industry.

And, you will have a bit of money coming in, which you can invest in buying the occasional gem when you see one. We firmly believe you should “earn while you learn”.

Buckle in, because it’s a heck of a ride!

Regards,

Chris and Jenny Ford