Wealthy Affiliate Blog

Tired of the Internet Marketing Roller Coaster?

December 3, 2008 – 2:48 pm

Up and Down, Up and Down, Up and Down…

Does this sound like your Internet marketing journey thus far?

If it does, then this post is going to offer you insight into why you are following this continues roller coaster. We are going to discuss how to make sales more consistent, more sustainable and how to avoid economic and seasonal trends reflecting the overall success of your campaigns.

The great part about Internet income is that it CAN BE year round. There are no days off, no hours off…24 hours per day, 365 days per year. However, the road to having campaigns that run in autopilot and generate cash for the entirety of the year can be bumpy at the best of times.

It may look a little something like this:

Make money, lose money, try something else, Make a bit more, lose….

This is the vicious cycle that you do not want to follow. Have you every heard of “writer’s block”? It is a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing. In the above scenario, we like to refer to this as “marketers block”…the loss of ability to begin a successful campaign because of too many outside distractions!

Here is what you want your Internet marketing journey to look like:

Make money, lose money, find out why you lost money, refine campaign, make more money, continue building campaign…

Notice the differences.

(1) Find out why you are losing money (KEY)
In order to improve what you are doing, you need to understand where and why your campaign is not succeeding. This can be done through campaign analysis along with various forms of testing. Some tests can include ad CTR, landing page, and conversion tests. Testing results in campaign modifications…which are forced improvements of a campaign. Again, anything that can be measured can be improved up.

(2) Refine campaign based on findings (KEY)
This is the stage where you take your test results, and you make refinements to your campaigns based on your date. You may change your landing page flow, the headline, or even make the images more relevant. It could also include the modification of ads, breaking up of ad groups, or testing new products to promote. You could iterate through the refining stage many times within the same campaign.

(3) Make more money as a result
That is right! No campaign is every fully monetized…or “tapped” out. There are always ways to stretch the income out of a campaign, even if it is already highly successful. In the beginning stages it will be modifications derived from testing, whereas later on in the campaign lifecycle, further monetization will be the result of email campaigns, join ventures, add-on income streams and bonus structures.

The roller coaster will continue for you if you take the “Try Something Else” (TSE) attitude. Jumping around from industry to industry and technique to technique will only set you back. You are gaining no specialized expertise by doing this! Being a generalist has never helped an Internet marketer become a success.

Here are a couple things you can do to curb the TSE attitude:

(1) Stop buying every marketing book and product that comes out. Not all of them will help and you are digging into money that could be spent on your campaigns by doing this.
(2) Stick with ONE niche when starting out
(3) Don’t quit a niche just because you have failed, learn from it and improve.
(4) Specialize. Start with one marketing technique and become good at it. Do not try to be the jack of all trades.

We hope that you take in some of this info and break your own “roller coaster” cycle. Even we go through “roller coaster” cycles sometimes where we have to go back to the drawing board and really dig deep into the campaign’s fundamentals.

One more thing before we leave you today…

On January 13th, 2009, we are going to be launching something big. If you want to get access to a free 30-page guide on Niche Hunting, go to the following page now and sign-up to the pre-launch list:

http://www.NicheQ.com

The revolution of niche marketing is coming to you in just over a month.

Take Care,

Kyle & Carson
The Wealthy Affiliates