The Pearl – Are there such things as Internet Marketing secrets?

I hope you enjoyed last week’s Part 3 edition of the Oyster Marketing strategy on selling.  Today I am going to talk about the 4th an final stage of the Oyster marketing technique, the pearl.

This is probably the most exciting for me to write about because it is the most mysterious.  Is there that hidden pearl online…or in Internet marketing terms, is there a secret that only a few high stakes marketers even know about?

Are there secret niches? I wonder.

What about secret keywords. Hmm…keywords that make people millions of bucks. Keywords that only certain people know how to find.  I wonder…

I am going to look into this and discuss my personal thoughts on IF there are secrets online, and if so, where do you find these hidden gems.

Before I get started, I want to quote the very first Oyster Marketing Strategy post that made the initial reference to “the pearl”.

Pearls are very rare and in fact, in my 4 years working in the oyster business, I only came across one…and it wasn’t the ideal pearl shape (perfectly round).  I guess you could call this kinda lucky (that I found one that is).

A pearl is VERY rare in the wild and….

….pearl is equivalent to hunting for something that is not there or very hard to find…or an illusion in attempt to earn a MASSIVE PROFIT.

The pearl is what most people look for, yet the fewest people ever find.  I compare it to someone looking for the “secret to success”…when in fact, the secret is that there is NO SECRET (if that makes sense).

So really, what I was saying is that:

If you are looking for some sort of Internet Marketing Secret, you are either going to grow old and grey doing so, or you are going to find something that appears to be a secret, but in actuality it is an “illusion”.

Being in the Internet marketing world for 8 years now, I have a seen and performed a lot of strategies that have worked, and on the same token, many that didn’t work.  In no way were they secrets, rather “techniques”.

I mean, if there was a secret, nobody would tell you right (unless they are really bad at keeping secrets).  Secrets are something that are private…stuff that isn’t revealed.

Do We Know of Any Hidden Internet Marketing Secrets?

Carson and I have never sought out secrets and we refrain from using the term altogether because the truth of the matter is, we FOCUS ON TECHNIQUES.

Any successful investor, any successful restaurateur, any successful Internet marketer, or any successful business person will tell you that they achieved their success not because of secrets, but because of the hard work, testing, implementation, and techniques they applied to their business.

I can honestly tell you that I don’t know any secrets.  In fact, anything that I do know I have and will continue to reveal to you as a blog post and ultimately, to all the active members at WA.   That is why Carson and I created WA…

So, all this talk about no “Internet Marketing Secrets”, but how do you succeed online if there are no secrets?

What really is Internet marketing?

Think about this for a second…

Hope you didn’t have a mental jammer there.   Internet marketing is the act of marketing something online.

Duh.

But seriously, it is the “interaction” between a consumer and a product/offer.  If you, as the marketer, can connect these two distinguished dots, you can succeed.

A consumer starts with a keyword.   A product/offer ends with an affiliate program, some sort of actionable offer, or a product that you own.

To understand the online world, let’s first look at the offline world.

Say you want to sell a hot dog…lots of hot dogs.  Where would you go looking to sell this hot dog.  Would you go looking inside a mall?

Maybe.  But there is a lot of competition there.  Ideally you want to position your hot dog stand in a place where people want your product.

Where is that?  Some place that you would find hungry people that like hot dogs.
Example: A baseball field.  Hot dogs sell well there.
Example: Outside a night club when you get all the hungry drunk people craving food.
Example: At the park where hungry business people go for a walk at lunchtime.

Now, with offline business there is a lot more trial and error to find your magic formula…or your pearl.  Remember, a pearl is not a secret, it is a well-defined technique.  In the online world, things are MUCH, MUCH easier.

Yes, you heard me say that.  We as Internet marketers have things easy.  Does this mean IM is easy? No.  But selling a dog training program online is a hell of a lot easier than trying to find the best place to sell a hot dog in New York City.

Why is Making Money Online Easier than Offline?

And the reasons why…HYPER-TARGETING.   Keywords.  Analytics.  ONE BILLION PEOPLE (with buying power).

This is where it gets really cool.

Want to sell a dog training program?  Target the keyword dog training program in Google.  You can pay for this if you like, or you can work to get your website naturally listed using article marketing and SEO techniques.

In the offline world, you would be a happy camper if you could attract only people looking for your product and only pay for these people.   I am not happy with selling my dog training product to someone looking for a dog training program though.

They are not serious enough.  These are the “window shoppers” of the Internet.

Now, in the case of dog training, I would probably seek out people that are more serious.  People that are looking for even more specific dog training.

People searching terms like:

“how to get my dog to stop digging up the lawn”
“how to get my dog to heel”
“German shepherd training commands”
“help me get my poodle to behave”

Now these people are serious.  They are the people that are in the stores, asking the clerks questions, and a tip or a piece of info away form buying something (or performing an action).

That is where you come in as the Internet Marketer.  That is where the pearl lies.

Looking back, I have had keywords that have converted for me every day.  Single keywords.  Sometimes a SINGLE keyword would make me $100 per day profit.  This is because I did a little digging…a little research, and a little marketing.

A few of the most important techniques I have learned:

• Be relevant
• Choose a niche that is interesting to YOU
• Don’t sell chocolates to a dieter (research your audience)
• Take continual action (do stuff, don’t just read)
• FAIL why don’t ya

Yes, I did fail lots.  Carson and I fail all the time still to this day.  It is part of growing and part of the reason we can find those Pearls online.

Here are some of the biggest failures I have ever had as an Internet marketer:

• Lost $10,000 on a keyword that I accidentally bid $10 instead of $0.10 on.  Google wouldn’t give me a refund.
• Got lazy and didn’t update a site for 6 months.  When I did updated it, the profit explosion was insane.
• Didn’t get into email marketing early enough in my IM career.  Would have many lists (personally) that were likely to exceed several 100,000 people
• In my 2nd  year marketing, I had two months where I let my affiliate marketing business go and had 2 consecutive months that were not profitable. (Note that these were followed by some of my best months ever when I got my butt in gear.)
• I spent 10 months building a site on the side that I never ended up earning a penny from because of a shift on the Internet.

I guess you could say I found out some UN-secrets.  If there were secrets that nobody wanted to know about, I found them out quickly and regularly.  However, I took them all in stride and realized that for every 10 failed campaigns or every 10 mediocre keywords, I was going to find the pearl.

Once I attained the pearl of wisdom (a well defined technique) I was able to reproduce it.  For example, once I found out (back in the day) that people liked review pages, I built them over and over.  This made me heaps of money (although the way you review products/services in 2010 has drastically changed).

To me this is not an Internet marketing secret.  This is a technique.

You agree?

If your answer is yes, you are a good person.   You will find success online just knowing that you have what it takes.

What if you think there is still some crazy secret out there that will make you a business mogul?

If you fit into this category, don’t worry…we are still friends.  I know you have likely been misinformed because there is so much misinformation out there.

Businesses claiming they can make you millions over night.  Internet marketing firms claiming that you can run your business in autopilot without investing any initial work.  Guru’s preaching to you that you need to buy their hidden information (crap) in order to survive in this NEW Internet.

ALL BULL PEOPLE.

Again, remember, if someone has to sell you in the glitz and glam, the hype, the sizzle not the steak, chances are it will not work.  And if it does work, chances are it will only be temporary.

The pearl in the sense of a secret does not exist.

But the company that manufactures the pearl does.  That company can be you.   Hunting for something seems ridiculous.  Creating something that builds the exact same success (finding a pearl) seems like a sound idea…and one that I am going to full-hearted-ly suggest to you.

I know you will succeed online if you stop seeking out the Internet Marketing Secrets.  Instead, look for and build upon the pearls (well defined techniques) that you know lie out there.  We teach those and we know that there are endless ways you can get at them.

This concludes the Oyster Marketing Series.  I hope you all have enjoyed these blog posts and as always, your feedback, comments, questions, and contributions are welcome.  Post them below.

Take it easy.  From one oyster marketer to another.

Kyle
Wealthy Affiliate
www.WealthyAffiliate.com