| by Joy Healey |
Are you new to Internet Marketing? Have you been seduced by the adverts promising that anyone can make a fortune with no prior knowledge and skills? How has it worked out for you? Thought so!
The adverts say "anyone can do it" but you'll quickly find that if you're don't have certain basic skills and knowledge you'll struggle. I found out the hard way. For more than twenty years I was a computer programmer, so I came to Internet Marketing thinking that with my background it would be "a breeze". How wrong can you get?
Time to take a reality check. Whether I have found you fresh and hopeful right at the beginning of your Internet Marketing venture, or several months into it, frustrated and disheartened, now is the time to accept the truth and enjoy a more realistic approach.
If things haven't worked out yet, it is not your fault. You have been misled. Internet Marketing, like any other business, needs skills, knowledge and effort. Of course you can buy in expertise, if you have spare cash to pay expensive experts, but if not, help is at hand.
When I first started working online and the sales were slow it didn't even dawn on me that I had a problem. I just thought "I need to put in more time/money/effort" or "this program is no good" - but then I studied other affiliates promoting one particular program where the top earners were making plenty of money while I was only making a little.
We had the same business and compensation plan - what they had, and I lacked, were Internet Marketing skills. I looked right the way up-line for help, but we all had the same skill-lack. Finally I recruited a personal contact who did have these skills, so I could watch the growth of his group and see that the possible earnings were genuine, not hype. At this point I realized that it wasn't the program that was at fault, but my inadequate knowledge.
A prime thing that differentiates those who are profitable online from those who fail dismally, is having a different lead capture page that stands out from the crowd. Successful program promoters will say, "Oh that's easy", but what's easy for the gurus is most certainly NOT easy for someone promoting their first (or even their tenth) program. You need a good working knowledge of domain registration, web hosting, HTML, FTPs, splash pages, how to prepare lead capture pages, frame-breakers, ad-tracking and auto-responders.
I will not explain those terms that you need to be familiar with to take your business online. This is not to show off my knowledge; it is to check out yours. Because if you don't know what they mean and why you need them, you are in trouble right from the start and need to learn fast! The terminology applies to marketing any online business, and the plan I now use works with both my networking and conventional businesses.
Here's why you need your own lead capture page. Suppose a new program comes out, 97% of those who join will promote it with one of a few similar splash pages. After a day or so of the same message being seen over and over in the traffic and ad exchanges people are "immunized" and hardly even see it, other than perhaps to think "Oh no, not that again".
Even if the new company provides you with a selection of lead capture pages, they will still be over-utilized. A completely personalized page is far more likely to attract attention.
Going beyond the basics of attracting attention, you should also collect and take care of your own prospect list, not hand it over completely to the parent company. There are three reasons for this: (a) prospects are unlikely to buy from you on first exposure, (b) so that you can advertise other related offers to them, and (c) so that if, perish the thought, your company "goes to the wall" you still have the list of prospects that you've built up.
To produce a personalized lead capture page you need the above mentioned tools and skills. Like I did, you can probably manage to struggle through the procedure, but if you need to change your page because it's a little stale, not converting well, or to reflect an extra feature of the business, you have to do it all again! True, it's a little easier next time round, but when you're not doing these things daily, they do tend to need an element of "re-learning" every time.
You can sub-contract production of a lead-capture page out to someone on Elance etc, probably even for as little as $20 or $30. But that all takes time, building up trust in a supplier, and, unless you can do-it-yourself, if you need even simple changes, you have to pay again.
As a further example, suppose a new program launches and you're lucky enough to hear about it in time for the famous "first-mover advantage" by the time you've out-sourced the job or struggled to remember how to produce a new lead capture page you've lost any advantage.
There are suppliers for all these items and tasks online, and some of them are "free". That often means that your offer will be competing with your competitors advertising on your page! You may even end up with several different suppliers for variations of the same service; this gets expensive and confusing.
To run a profitable and streamlined business a more professional approach is to find a "one-stop" resource for ready-made Internet Marketing tools and training. This will free up your time to concentrate on developing your business strategy, not wrestling with technical issues. If you're anything like me at learning new skills, it may just save your sanity too.
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