If You Build It They Won't Come

My immediate disclaimer (and the protective humor of this whole site) – I have been trying and trying to re-make myself into an entrepreneur. No luck so far. I have learned an incredible amount, including from people and resources that did not affect my bottom line.

In January 2009, after losing massive amounts of money in real estate, forex investing, and book publishing (all with good intentions, due diligence, but very bad timing and even worse intuition about good markets), I set my goal to master internet marketing online. Computers come a little more naturally to me than any of those other businesses, so I had hopes. Not high hopes, but hopes.

Plunked down a lot of training program money for high end coaching and membership programs to accelerate my path to success. Mostly accelerated my depletion of savings.

So, where am I now, 11 months later?

Discovered that the amount of money I spent on a given program had no relationship to how much it taught me. One of the best investments amounted to a few hundred dollars to buy a few Clickbank products (yes, I get commissions if you buy through my links — please!), but they were truly worth it. They began to fill in my lack of understanding of what a good niche might be (see my list of Good Resources for Newbies in the sidebar).

The main point of this post is to tell you that lots of people who sell their products to internet newbies have (a) technical tools; (b) good isolated gimmicks; and/or (c) massive amounts of information to throw at you.

But not a lot can (a) teach well or (b) give you a real program, system, or plan for how to set up your business in a way tailored to your individual abilities, inclinations, and skills. The good news is that there are some people in the internet marketing expert world out there for real, and the “right program” is probably different for everyone. I’d suggest that you start with the people with systems, though, instead of the latest gimmick product launch.

In this blog, I’ll try to tell you about my discoveries and my failures. I think that my overnight success may be a few months down the road, but I think now it may be possible.  What’s first?

Make a plan.  I can finally draw mine now.

Find a training program that has a complete system and a way of thinking about your business as a full business. Go from there. I have started this blog with tongue in cheek (from the domain name on down) to be helpful, to entertain, and to inform. I think that I may have found a system that makes sense to me and that I may finally know enough to stop spending more money than I make.

This blog will help us all follow along and see if I’ve finally got it, by George…

More later…