Earn Money Online Blog

Happy New Year – What are Your Plans for Internet Marketing in 2010?

New Years bring many good things. Many people make resolutions to do certain things differently in 2010 than in the old year. In my journey in internet marketing if anything I’m resolving to keep doing more and more. The last year saw 622% growth in my revenue in online sources over 2008. 2008 saw a bit less growth over 2007 (340%). But still… during the “worst economy since the Great Depression”…. to see that kind of growth is fun, exciting and in many ways validates what I’ve been doing the last year or so. It only makes me wonder what I would be seeing if I were doing Internet Marketing full time instead of squeezing it in as a third job. So… .what’s the secret to making things work and earning money online with a blog?

It’s really no secret. It’s the same story that you’ll see over and over in every field. Hard work, persistence, patience. Some things don’t work out well. Learn from the mistakes. But don’t, whatever you do, don’t fail to take action. I’ve boiled it down to the folloiwng: brainstorm, research, build. Not every idea is going to pass the research phase, some you’ll find don’t get much traffic or the competition is very stiff and it will take years to break into the top search rankings.

Some, get good traffic and you want to build it in spite of the fact the competition is stiff because you know that in several years you’ll be able to compete with them and in several years you can take them on if you start today. Patience is one of the things that is in short supply in internet marketing. In reading the forums I see it every day. “I’ve been working on my site for a whole month now and I’m not making any money. What’s wrong with me?”

Expectations…. in spite of the hype and sales pitches there are very few people that make it overnight in internet marketing to turn things into a full time subsistence and put food on the table operation. It takes time. You need to invest time in it, but you also need to wait, you need to gain age for your sites and reputation for your sites. You need to gain links and search positioning. You need the one thing that can’t really be bought…. time!

Start working at it a bit at a time on the side, develop and develop your site or sites persistently day in day out, week in, week out, month in and month out. Build content, build links, continue. Move onto new ideas if you wish but keep feeding the old ones. That’s what I’ve done. When the whim hits me to read up on an old hobby I go back to the site related to it and work it a bit more. Sites that get really big I consider breaking the content up into subsites and hosting them elsewhere (blogspot/wordpress for instance.)

The articles (depending on article directory rules) can be reused for promotion off site to get inbound links. The point is keep working at it. If you resolve to anything for the new year, resolve to be relentless. Most of you reading probably have day jobs already. That’s fine, pour the time in you can, whittle away at the corners here and there. Keep whittling. Even with a small pocketknife it’s possible to whittle a giant oak down to size. It’s not something you’ll do in five minutes and in many ways it’s not easy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible!

When you’re getting started it may be hard to decide how to manage the little income your getting, but go ahead and plan. I like to use 15% of the income from online work to plow back in for article writing, outsourcing of all stripes, subscriptions. If I could I would push it up a bit greater than that. Some months I’ve gone ahead and claimed the 100% take to go back into the business as our other income has allowed. It has payed off over the last year as I’ve used outsourcing to multiply my available time.

It was two years ago in January that I decided it was time to start putting what I had learned about search rankings and online marketing into practice and build an online business. I had a false start in that year chasing fools gold of sorts, but by September of 2007 I had latched onto the way that I’ve focused on since. That has already turned into some significant money each month, but it’s still not able to replace all my other income (yet). As it gets closer though it will be time to consider diversification so that I can have other options.

Relentless, just like water. Water seeps, wears down rock, infiltrates everything eventually. Small trickles of water can give way to large streams…. Here’s to a prosperous and happy 2010!

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