What if what you believe will make money online is wrong?

If you are like most of my readers, you would naturally assume that most make money products are scams or geared to the unwittingly ignorant people who truly think that they can make $1,000 of dollars doing nothing more than twiddling their thumbs 4 hours a day. But what if I were to tell you that even those of you who assume that this is the case will still not make enough money to even consider themselves “part time” internet marketers?

I doubt that many who are reading this have experienced a $100 day, never mind a $1,000+ day. Most haven’t even experienced a $100 month.

What if what you believe will make you money online is….wrong???

Why brick and mortar businesses have it right and most internet marketers don’t get “IT”…..

I am going to use a real world example here so bear with me and then YOU tell me how building a business online is different……

Let’s say that you make the best cookies in {insert your city here}. Your family & friends all tell you that you should build a cookie making business. After a lot of thought, you take your nest egg and invest into materials that you will need to create your “dream”.

You find a street a little off the beaten path and open up your storefront. At this point, no one other than your friends and family and those who just happen down the street know you exist. You, in effect, may as not exist to the rest of the city because they don’t know you are there….but the ones that do love your cookies….

You talk with your landlord and he agrees to give you a sign on the street to help with visibility. Your sign helps with your “brand” but still, the only folks that know you exist are the ones that go down the street.

You don’t have enough money for advertising in the paper or on TV so you decide to do it cheaply. You hire a couple school kids, print up some flyers with a coupon and send them to work placing your flyers in doors and on cars in the area.

Because of this, your immediate area, in the very least, knows you exist. You start to get traffic into your store from people who are either curious about what your store or want to buy cookies. And in essence, you start to sell cookies.

The only problem is you are barely making rent. More traffic would mean more to your bottom line. However, you don’t have a budget for advertising…in short, you are struggling. The people who do come to your store love you. Some actually talk about you and suggest you. But it isn’t enough to really ramp up production.

You have hit a wall.

You decide that you need to advertise in more communities. There is a major street two blocks up and you decide to go out in your off time and stuff cars around a local supermarket. You do a one day only sale in which anyone who comes in can “buy one & get one free”.

As a result, you get more traffic. From that traffic, a handful become “regulars” and buy cookies on a regular basis. They also become “mavens” professing how addictive your cookies are.

Chalk one up for the team, right?

You learn of a charity event in town that is going to be dessert based. People will pay $50 to get into the place and get to “taste” desserts from various vendors. You decide to donate your time (and cookies) to the event. As a result, more people know about you. You get lucky….a local news station covering the event decides to interview you. You are suddenly on the map. Although it doesn’t help your business outright, people now know you exist.

I am going to stop right there as I could go on and on in terms of strategies to get seen and stay visible….

Your Cookie business = your labor of love…what you are ’selling’ to your market (could be content..could be an opt-in form…could be actual e-commerce)
Your storefront = Your website….
Your signs and flyers = funnels for your traffic to get there…
The charity event = places where your potential leads will discover you…

Can you spot any difference between this offline cookie business and an online business?

What if you were simply building properties for adsense? Any difference?

What if you were selling a product that was drop shipped? Any difference?

What if you were selling yourself? Any difference?

While some may argue that start up costs would be the difference I would have to disagree.

It doesn’t matter what business you are in. In the end, when everything is whittled down to its simplest common denominator, the bottom line is that every business is searching for leads.

• A restaurant’s leads would be those that eat with them
• A grocery stores leads would be those that buy groceries from them
• A hair stylist would get leads through walk-ins (if the salon is known) and word of mouth
• Wall-mart gets it leads from its strong brand

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that generating leads online is pretty much the same. You generate leads through word of mouth. You generate leads through association. You generate leads through pay-per-click. You generate leads through organic listings. You generate leads from being a stalwart in your market….

Those with the ability to get the most leads make the most money.

Whether it is online or offline is irrelevant.

And I know some of you will probably realize that leads is just another word for traffic. It is and it isn’t. You see, traffic can be untargeted. Leads are targeted. Leads become regular buyers. They talk about your product…whether this is simply content on a page or an actual product doesn’t matter. There is a huge difference between traffic and leads….

Adsense? You may not be gunning for leads yourself but you are advertising those who are. You are hoping that your visitors are targeted enough to click on a link. The advertiser is hoping that the visitor you sent them is interested in their product. If they are smart, they have a system in place that will help them retain the lead.

How do businesses get leads? Once again, the medium is irrelevant. Offline, this could be through conventional advertising or word of mouth. Online, this could be through conventional advertising (CCM brokers, contextual ads, banner ads on sites in the same markets), SEO advertising (through Search engine optimization), or…you guessed it, word of mouth.

Fact- All leads will cost you something. Everyone is looking for free traffic. In fact, so many people are looking for free traffic that most don’t bother looking for anything but. For whatever reason, we all want to believe that the internet = free….or cheaper in the very least.

Those that sell you on SEO for traffic are the most guilty of this. Free traffic, they say. And who doesn’t want something for free, especially if the potential for making money is so high from that traffic.

But once you start to factor in the time spent building up external links, paying for link services and ‘optimizing’ your site, you will realize that free has very little to do with SEO.

If it is going to cost you hundreds of hours in time and thousands of dollars in links to rank for a competitive keyword, then it is hardly free.

And let’s not even talk about the cost of retaining the ranking….

And what about the long tails that will get you a smattering of traffic here and there? Are they the answer? The reality is that while the long tails will get you traffic, they still have to be maintained. If they aren’t maintained, 9 times out of 10, they will lose rank. And if you are maintaining your 900 properties to make $100 a day, how much work is that? Does the work measure up to the costs?

…so much for FREE….

The ones that do the biggest disservice for the make money online “dreamers” are the ones who offer “proof” of their skills. The Shoemoney’s of the world that hold up the 100k check or the sites that show “proof” of their clickbank sales or adsense earnings.

The masses eat it up. However, they don’t factor in the actual “costs”. These marketers show them the gross, not the net. I have said this once and I will say it again…

A 100k check will look a lot less impressive if it cost you 90k to make it, right?- And in all likelihood, there was a cost that wasn’t factored into the equation…..

And yet so many marketers choose to believe what they want to believe. They don’t think in real business terms and don’t take into account the actual cost of their marketing plan.

Just something to chew on though.

A buddy of mine who wants to start a music business (he sells “sounds” for people interested in techno music and who need sound effects) online asked me for advice on how to build and promote his start up.

Easy, I told him. You build a adwords campaign to test the waters to see if there is interest. Then, once you discover the keywords (or conversations) that converts, you have to figure out an average percentage of buyers as opposed to clicks (cost) and determine if the product in and of itself has enough margin to make it worth it….

…if it doesn’t, then you either figure out a way to raise the margin (either through backsells, continuity or generate a way to keep buyers buying) or you decide to do something else….

It REALLY is as simple as that. And yet, most of us are more concerned with tips, tricks and crazy strategies that are good for the moment. And don’t get me wrong…I have been down more than a few rabbit trails in my online career…

The only point I am making is that I believe that 95% of all internet marketing wanna-be’s have it all wrong. They haven’t deduced what it is they are doing down to its most simplistic component and because of that, they can’t create the appropriate strategies to make money online.

Instead, they chase the “dreamer” strategies. The real world don’t work that way. Why would you think it would be any different online?

Just my opinion though…and you know what they say about opinions.