South West eCommerce

Money in the game

When I was a young child, my parents were in the Salvation Army.  I’m not any more, and neither are they but there were a lot of great things to be learned from the Salvos.  Among the benefits of it included that I didn’t drink until later than most of my contemporaries, and I’ve still not got my head around gambling the way some of my day job colleagues do.  Overall I’d say these things are positive, but there is something to be said for how focused the risk of gambling makes you.

When I was about ten years old, my mother worked at what we now call a nursing home, caring for a lot of people who in many cases were there for the rest of their lives.  Occasionally she would be asked by some of the old men to go to the TAB and place bets for them on the horses.  Now horse racing always looked like a bit of fun to me, but I’d never got that involved in watching it, just enjoyed the spectacle of these big brown horses and the tiny, brightly coloured men racing around.  Even when the dollar each way belonged to someone else, having money in the game pretty soon focused us on which horse had been showing some speed in recent races, and which of these tiny men was short, thin, and skilful.

So it’s been for the rest of my life.  I can find something interesting, but until there’s a real cost or risk to me, I’m an outsider.  As soon as I’m properly in the game, I start to learn and the difficulty of it is no barrier.

So today’s challenge for so many of you is going to be, how do I get into the game and put some risk there, but not risk my house.  I’d guess at this point it’s fairly simple.  There will be things you need to do, and time you need to spend, so list the time and cash you need to spend and START.  I’d like to make a challenge and then I’d like to make a prediction.

First, set yourself a budget of $20 per week and four hours per week to spend on this.  Figure what you want to do to get into the internet business and start down that path.  As soon as it’s set, start on your business.  My recommendations...

1-      Go to Commission Junction, find a product or two that you want to promote and sign on.  Pick something that pays $20 or more per sale, and that you have some interest in, because you will soon enough want to start writing about it.

2-      Get yourself a dot com domain name that at least somehow matches your product.

3-      Find reasonably priced hosting.

4-      Find the cheapest way to build a website, get it built, stick it up, complete with affiliate links.

5-      Start marketing through articles, adwords, your own email list, and any other idea you can.

6-      Put a page on there with real articles of real information you find, and have an adsense account, separate from your affiliate page.

It’s as simple as that.  Start today, set aside time to read, and do everything you see makes sense.  Read all the time.  People out here are interested in your success.   Inside your time and cash budgets, keep going.  Truth be told, you might find that you make more cash out of adsense once you’ve started writing and you might find that the product you’ve chosen is hard to sell or that traffic is hard to get.  Then you’ll make $1.00 from an adsense click, then you’ll find that one of your products made a sale, and then you’ll get a taste for what is going on.

So I also said I’d make a prediction for you.  If you do this you’ll make a few sales and at 6 months you will not be hugely successful.  You might have broken even, you might not.  At six months you will however, have begun to feel how much success is just out there and you will have a sense of where you are not getting it right.  This is invaluable.  Indeed the process I’ve just outlined is about  making mistakes and learning from them.  When you’ve done a little of it, you’ll be ready to cut through the wishful thinking and get onto stuff that’s valuable, but be clear, I don’t know of anyone who’s really successful who never made a mistake.  Just remember to write down the things you learn.