Productivity
Getting Rid of Buyer-itis In Your Business
Most marketers don’t realize it, but buyer-itis is one of the biggest pitfalls for every single marketer on the Internet.
What is buyer-itis?
Buyer-itis is a term that I created recently while I was trying to define something pretty common… Marketers getting stuck in the mindset that they can buy their way out of a problem. It’s probably best to tell you about it through an example…
John is a marketer who is just starting out, or he is looking for a new method to help him make money online. He visits a forum everyday where other marketers sell very attractive looking products, software, and courses. John buys about 3-5 of these per week even though his business is making a big fat $0 every month. He’s spending at least $50-$100 on training every week, but he feels hopeful that he will uncover a gem if he just keeps digging… buying more and more.
John is stuck in buyer-itis. He thinks that if he keeps investing in training and software, that the will get back on his feet with his business. What John doesn’t realize is that this is NEVER going to pan out and he is going to go broke very quickly.
The fact of the matter is that you have to put in the work before you can see any money roll into your business in Internet marketing. Yes, a course might give you some ideas and structure – but a course will never make you money. The same can be said for software. Just having software on your computer will not product money either.
How did they say it on Austin Powers?
It’s not the size, it’s how you use it!
That might be a crude quote, but I think you get the point. You can spend $1,000 on the most amazingly complex piece of software of training from the most wealthy marketer out there. But if you’re not willing to sit down, hammer out some actual work, and produce results – you will never make a dime online.
Tags: An Internet Marketing Newbie? Best Advice
When you are first getting started with Internet marketing, you need to make sure that you have a solid foundation. There are a lot of people who try for not only months, BUT YEARS in Internet marketing. And by “try” I mean that they go for 2 or even 3 years without even making one dollar online. I don’t mean to offend anyone, but that is just insane.
Albert Einstein once said something along the lines of “doing the same thing over and over and expecting… is the definition of insanity” or something like that.
In Internet marketing, as with anything that takes effort, you have got to be careful. A lot of people will read the above quote and think “well, maybe I just haven’t tried enough methods… time to jump over to Warrior Forum and buy some more WSOs!… away to the bat mobile!”. Well, maybe you didn’t scream out the bat mobile part, but a lot of people think that buying a new course is going to help them make money online.
Here comes hard hitting advice #1: Sorry to tell you, but buying a course IS NOT going to make you money online.
Now that your feet are back on the ground, it’s time to get real about making money online. Money is only made online by selling something. Here are some examples:
- Selling a product via Amazon.com. You could be referring people to Amazon and if they whip out their credit card and buy, then you get a commission.
- Selling products via affiliate networks. Same principal… they need to buy.
- Selling leads to an affiliate network… A lot of affiliates don’t think about this, but when you are generating leads (email, zip, short/long form), someone is buying those from the affiliate network. You are just the person who is generating them. A transaction is still taking place.
Do you get the point?
And now that we’ve figured out that money is only being made when people are buying a product/service, we can get into my next piece of advice…
Advice #2: Higher quality, trusted, and valuable to the customer products are easier to sell… duh!
Do you have a subscription to Netflix? – who doesn’t! Well, my point here is that services like Netflix are very easy to “sell” to your friends and family because they are such high quality, are trusted (not to mention reasonable priced). I wish I had an affiliate link for every family member I got into Netflix because there were a ton.
In the online marketing world, you need to spend some time digging around for products that have that “no brainer” feeling for the customer. It makes your job a whole lot easier and you sell a lot more product with a lot less work.
Changing direction, I just want to cover one last point before we end this post…
Time is either your best friend or your worst enemy. For example, time is your enemy if you are wasting it by surfing around forums reading non-sense threads. On the other hand, time is your friend if you are using it to make money!
I used to spend the better part of my day looking through about 10 blogs in the Internet marketing space. I would pull up my bookmarks, open all of them in tabs, and then start looking for updates. My hopes were that I would find some little tid-bit of advice that would help me make money online.
I never found one!
But… everything changed when I just picked a method and started working.
Advice #3: Focus… Focus… Focus young Padawan
Put your head down and just get the work done. You shouldn’t care if everyone says the sky is falling and all the traffic methods are drying up. Just put your head down and hammer away. Come up every now and then for air (to relax and clear your head), but whatever you do… for the love of Pete… don’t stop and change direction because of a whim.
Well, I hope that you got something out of this. When I was first starting out, I felt like I was one of the many Internet marketing sheep (email list subscribers) being toss around from this method to that method. When I stopped listening to the “experts” and started getting actual work done… I started making money.
Internet Marketing Forums: More Harm Than Good?
I would wager a guess that there are at least 10-20 active Internet marketing forums on the Internet today. I’ve visited a small number of those and remember that many IM forums are paid memberships. Nonetheless, there are thousands of marketers spending hours and hours everyday on forums. But is hanging out on a forum really making you more money?
I’ve been using various IM forums for over 5 years now and I figured that now was as good a time as any to ask this question. The question:
Do Internet Marketing forums do more harm than good for serious Internet marketer’s businesses?
Think about it… Most marketers go to forums for any number or reasons:
- Be social – To talk to other marketers and relate to people who know this business
- For help – who better to ask then your peers
- For work – forums can be a great place to find or offer services
- etc…
But I’m guessing that a majority of the people visiting and using forums are really just being social. Venting about the last search engine update, asking “how do I make money”, surfing around for a method that looks like it will make you money; these are just some of the things I see a lot of IMer doing on forums.
And do you want to know what I believe? I believe that 9 out of 10 of those people never get past that stage.
I’m willing to bet that 90% of the people running around these forums are all stuck in analysis paralysis – which basically means that they are stuck in a “what do I do phase” with their business.
When it comes down to it, I don’t think that forums are to blame for the people who never make money and talk on forums all day. I think that Internet marketing, because it is based on a basic human need, is always going to have a very small percentage of people who are successful. It’s not that there is a scarcity of money changing hands. It’s not because the real secrets to making money are hidden in some guru’s vault. And it’s not because the market is saturated.
None of that is true 99% of the time.
But what is true is that 9 people out of 10 are not going to stick to it or put in the man hours to see their work pay off.
If you need further convincing, just take a look at another market that is HUGE because it is also based on basic human needs – weight loss. Wouldn’t you say that it is quite common for most people who are losing weight to: buy a lot of products, try this and that, never do anything longer than a month, etc… Doesn’t that type of person sound very familiar?
We could keep talking about the fundamental problem here and how to fix it, but I just wanted to point something very important out.
Forums are not the reason that people don’t make money. They might help contribute as a “time waster”, but the same could be said for youtube. The fact of the matter is that some people succeed and others do not. And the people who don’t succeed are usually always to blame for their own failure.
Join The Dark Side Luke
If you’ve been around the Internet marketing world for long then you know how tempting it can be to go to the dark side. Recently there was talk on a few different blogs about how a few forum owners are basically being charged with fraud. It probably seemed like a good idea to them at the time. I mean really, $20 million seems like a good reason to me, but is it really that great to get into these fraudulent and short term projects?
Last year I actually had a fair amount of my business based on a few websites that were quick hit type of websites. When the big G took a look, I disappeared from the search engines and haven’t been back since. What I learned from this was that I needed to start building a real business and get out of the shady little crap sites that I couldn’t depend on.
Do you remember the trial offers that were on the scene last year? A lot of affiliates built their entire businesses on these shady offers and when the shit hit the fan, these guys had to start at square one again.
What we should all learn from stories like that of the DP forum owners and others is that fraud and quick hit projects will burn you sooner or later. It is much more profitable and secure to build a legit business that will bring in long-term income versus quick hit systems that might get you into legal trouble.
Learning To Filter Out Noise in IM
Learning to filter out the noise in Internet marketing is the key to success. “Noise” in IM can come in number of forms, but what they all have in common is that they hold you back from getting real work done. They distract you from taking action and action is where money is made.
One of the worst ways to waste your time is to participate in forums. This might sound quite different from what gurus tell you, but here is my reasoning… Most forums consist of a lot of different conversations all taking place at once, but fundamentally in IM you see:
- Buzz or trends – This talk is usually focused on “what if” scenarios that 99% of the people talking about have not even tested. For example, when Google updated in May, everybody came out of the woodwork on a variety of forums and started crying for help. A month has passed and most of that conversation has died down. However, the people that got very worried and lost sleep over the update didn’t get very much real work done.
- How do I {insert broad term here} – IM forums are notorious for these questions being asked. The most common question is “how do I make money online?” and it is followed by many negative replies on most forums. I’d like to say that it is the forum’s fault for not making their information easy to find (sometimes that is the case). However, more often than not, the people asking these questions are basically afraid of risk. And that is the topic of a new post entirely.
- A lot of other discussions that I see are just variations of these risk avoidance topic starters.
What we all need to realize is that these conversations are usually a big waste of our time. If you want to start making more money online, then you need to approach these forums with a goal in mind.
A good goal when you log into a forum would be to solve a specific problem such as, “How do I install wordpress”.
A bad goal would be going to a forum to find a money making method. A goal like this is going to leave you with less money in your wallet and also in a different direction than when you first logged in.
I’m not trying to get too off topic here, but what I’m trying to point out is that when you start mixing things like forums into your business, you need to learn how to filter out the pointless information. When you sit down at your computer to work, you need to look at your time and actions in relation to how much money you make from them.
Posted in Productivity
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