Email to an online marketing friend -

Today I got an email from a marketing friend I've been talking to a bit over the past couple weeks.

She sent me a couple links and asked me if it was too many programs...

I quickly realized that this is a HUGE problem we face as online marketers. We join way too many things and try to get way too much stuff done yesterday.

What I told her (in essence) was this:

You have to ask yourself, What are Your GOALS?

I still join too much stuff - I've signed up for stuff and never opened it - never confirmed response, nothing. Dozens of things like that. I've also signed up for Dozens of things where I took a 3 second look at it and knew it wasn't for me - I've also signed up Dozens of things I liked, promoted them for a couple days, and gave up -

Anything you can think of, I've done :)

When I started getting very serious though, I realized I couldn't just Bounce Around - I had to be really BUILDING something.

So I got damn serious about traffic exchanges. I created my own splash page, bought an upgrade through Home Income Team for pro upgrades at 7 exchanges, and started surfing about 8-10 hours/week (and yes, that is a lot of damn surfing :)

I focused ALL my energy there - I built my own follow up series on my aweber account - Called it power traffic - Used it to promote GDI, some of my traffic exchanges, and my tips on getting the best results from our surfing efforts -

I think it turned out AWESOME - I have over 150 referrals for Web Biz Insider - I have over 300 referrals for Easy Hits - I got over 100 referrals for HIT - I got 50ish referrals for Traffic-Splash, 40ish for Hit Safari - I got over 100 people on my personal email list -

Still wasn't making much money though - Traffic Exchanges are not good for this - But I kept working - I figured as long as I was building an email list, things would work out

Long story short - I kept thinking about my own marketing. What didn't work, what did work - What online marketers would sign up for, what they wouldn't - Ways to advertise to my list - How to get more on my list - All kinds of stuff - I was always thinking about ways to improve and streamline my business -

This is the email I sent - I think it's good advice for anyone:

I don't know how many programs you are in overall, but it is definitely a BIG problem to have too much going on at once -

What I do is focus my efforts into 1 thing at a time - Some things are simple. The million leads for free thing is great - I just spend 3min's/day here, click through a few ads, and then post my ads - It's also easy because I now have 4 different ads that are saved. So I just go in and hit send on whatever I want to advertise that day -

I'm all about automated advertising - I earn my real money using Pay Per Click marketing. My latest site, free site signup, I have 7 signups now over the past 3 days - That's $350 earned - and it cost me about $15 in advertising - and all I ahd to do was setup my campaigns (about an hour), then test different pages to find out what got people to sign up -

I would recommend you focus on 1 thing at a time - I would learn traffic exchanges and use that million leads for free to start - I know you want to stay free - You should be building a list or downline in something though - Just randomly joining new stuff is one of the quickest ways to get frustrated and quit - You need to give something TIME - But you also need to be ready when it doesn't work and it's time to move on (i've had to move on from about 100 different things that were just garbage)

Right now I'm focusing all my efforts into 1 thing: Getting people to MY website - In turn, getting them to join MY Email List - This in turns give me a way to keep in contact -

So all this advertising and work your doing, you need to ask yourself - What is my GOAL here? Where do you want your traffic to go? What do you want them to do? What do you want it to do FOR YOU?

If you just say "make me money", then your in the wrong direction - That is a slot machine marketing mentality and it's the exact reason 97% of people fail

You see what I've done last week right? With the Viral Ebooks campaign - I give away the ebook to entice people to join my email list - Once they join, then they see the ebook ad - I have 16 downline members in less than 1 week now for this program. Everyone who joins my email builds my list AND has a chance to earn income for me - PASSIVELY

It takes time to get to this point, but you have to ask yourself really, what are you doing? What are your real goals? You need to be building downlines and ways of getting OTHERS to do some work "for you" - You give them good products, but if you keep doing the same thing, you get the same results...

Do these articles direct people to you? And your products? If not, then why spend your time there? Do you have a blog? Do you have your own web presence? Why would you do article marketing, if people will ONLY go to an affiliate site if they click through?

I wrote tons of articles, and all of them direct to me and my home site -

Just ask yourself where you are heading - That should tell you where you need to focus your efforts

And this is what I'm talking about - The more I learn, the more I realize so much more there is -

But if you are asking yourself these kind of questions, you can only improve yourself and your online marketing -

To your success - Paul