eMarketWorks on the Internet

 Did "they" tell you that you can make a fortune with internet marketing even if you don’t have a product? If so, they lied.

Here’s the mathematics: No Product = No Sales = No Income

Consider for a moment what a "product" is. It’s anything that someone else wants. I can’t make it simpler than that. They don’t even have to pay for it, they just have to want it.

We can describe products in a number of ways, but for our purposes here, we’ll just call them items that you get paid for. Those items can be real physical products (for example, a CD or a car), virtual products (for example, software), information products (for example, ebooks), and others.

The main point today is that either you are selling your own products or you are selling someone else’s products. This is one of those rare times in life when the choices are simple.

In internet marketing you generally have two ways of earning money. You can be paid directly for a product and get 100% of the sale price, or you can be paid a commission and receive some fraction of the sale price. Again life is simple. So here are the ways you can be paid.

1. Sell your own product - you get full price.
2. Get  someone to sell your product for you - you get less than full price, they get a commission.
3. Sell someone else’s product - you get a commission.
4. Get someone to sell someone else’s product for you - you get a smaller commission.

Nevertheless, complexity lurks around every corner and that’s why you need to start with a business plan, or go back over what you have already done and frame it into a business plan.

If you don’t have a product or don’t plan to create your own product, then where do you get a product? Many gurus recommend that you start with affiliate marketing and look for products at ClickBank. You can include that strategy in your business plan. We’ll talk about that and other strategies in another episode.

I think it was Dwight Eisenhower who said, "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." 

Do your planning!

Your labor is one of your most basic and intrinsic products. When you sell it, we most often call that a "job". When you work for nothing, it’s called either charity or sweat equity. When you are new to internet marketing or don’t have a lot of experience (that means you aren’t making much or any money), your product is sweat equity - the time and energy you put into developing your business without being paid for it.

You probably noticed that people who want to sell you internet marketing products don’t like the term "sweat equity" because it sounds like work, and they are selling you the easy way to riches. Forget that - if you don’t work at it, it ain’t happenin’.

I really hate it when I see sales letters, ads, emails, and other hyped-up come-ons telling people with no business experience how easy it’s going to be to get rich with internet marketing.

You even hear that from the "gurus", who have, of course, already put in the 5 or 10 years it took them to be the successful millionaires they claim to be.

And most of their income comes from people who don’t have any idea what they are getting into. Could that be you?

When guru Hyper says here’s how I do it, just do what I tell you and you’ll start making your financial dreams come true in 10 days or so, he (or she) really means, "I’ve been doing this for years so it’s easy for me." If you’ve been doing it for years, it might be easy for you too.

But if you are just getting started and are trying to do this in your spare time, take a deep breath, don’t quit your day job just yet, and think about what you really want to do.

And for God’s sake don’t buy any internet marketing programs that cost more than you can afford thinking that you will quickly pay off the debt with your newly acquired profits

If you think you are going to start from scratch with no experience and make $20,000 in 20 days, then I have a bridge for sale that will interest you.

Making money takes work. If you are not willing to or are not capable of doing the work, you should fold your tent right now. Harsh maybe, but that’s the truth. The get-rich-quick scammers don’t tell you the truth because they are pretty sure you don’t want to hear it.

The truth is that you will have to put in a lot of work up front to get off the ground with your internet business to make any money at all, let alone a profit. The payoff is that things get easier after you’ve done the hard part.

If you are just beginning your new lifestyle of marketing on the internet, or you bought that book about how to become an eBay millionaire, ask yourself how much time and effort you are willing to put in to make your dreams of quitting your day job come true. In reality, ‘quitting your day job’ means changing your day job to internet marketing.

Refer back to your business plan often to keep yourself on track. What, you don’t have a business plan? You should really put some effort into formulating a plan. You will find these websites helpful www.planware.org and toolkit.com.