If You Build It They Won't Come

I am still trying to make a serious income from internet marketing. No, it has not happened yet. But, yes, I think that I may have finally found an approach that will get me started. I’ve made a little over $30 so far this month on Amazon, which is more than I made for the whole other 10 months so far with them.

In addition to the numbers game (that is, many websites, many promotional approaches, many products/niches) it is a fast-moving and fast-changing situation. What works today may be banned by the web gods tomorrow (i.e., Google or eBay or Amazon changes their rules overnight).

This leads me to a major principle – make a strategic plan and avoid doing just one activity for income (diversify). Translate the strategic plan into a daily plan for how you will build up the numbers of websites and promotional activities over time.

And, another big point – keep checking your stats (website visitors on AWStats on your website’s cpanel) and adjusting your activities accordingly and adjust your choice of products to promote by their ability to be sold. At first you’ll be thrilled to be selling anything for any income. But you quickly realize that if you get a click on Adsense, it may only bring in 3 cents, whereas the same space set aside for an Amazon product might bring you a few dollars commission (even if they don’t buy what they originally clicked on to get to Amazon from your site). But, higher end products with bigger price tags and/or information products with high margins between the price and the actual cost can bring in even more money.

It can take the same amount of effort to promote a site set up to make a little as the same site set up to make a lot of commission money. Include that notion in your website planning.