At least once or twice every week, I'll be at my desk (or at the dining room table) with my Franklin Covey planner open and a stack of laminated checklists in hand.
"What are you doing, honey?" she calls, already knowing the answer.
"I'm planning", I reply with a smile.
She laughs and I get back to work.
She laughs because she swears I spend half of my time "planning". But, if you ask me how I'm able to get as much work done as I do in only 3 hours a day, I'll point to a black Franklin Covey planner with about a dozen laminated checklists inside.
Building an Internet business is easy. Seriously. I'm not saying that it's not complicated, because it is. I'm just saying that it's easy to accomplish if you just have a system in place.
There's very little in this world that can't be accomplished with the right set of action steps in front of you.
Today, I'm going to give you such a system for building your Internet business. There are only 4 steps...
1. Decide What You Want To Do. Do you want to run an eBay(R) business? Be an affiliate marketer? Buy and sell reprint rights? Get involved in niche marketing? While all of those things will likely find their way into your plan in time, you gotta begin with one thing at a time.
My recommendation: Choose a "broad" topic you are interested in and begin building a list of folks interested in that topic.
2. Determine A Weekly Action Plan. After you decide what you want to do, it's time to determine how to get it done. What I do is this: I create a weekly set of action steps. That is, I have a set of things I do on Monday, on Tuesday, and so forth. Decide how many hours (as little as ONE) you want to work each day and schedule yourself a reasonable amount of things to get done in that time frame. Repeat this process week after week.
My recommendation: Begin writing ezine articles to promote your list ... and affiliate programs. It's the easiest way to get free traffic and build your list at the same time.
3. Devote Yourself To Staying On Schedule. The important thing here is to stick to it. The easiest way that I know of to make certain you develop discipline in your schedule is to NOT set unrealistic expectations. Give yourself ample time to do each day's action step - don't overschedule. Look for progress along the way to celebrate. Reward yourself when you've reached a milestone. And, remember, you're GROWING a business. Just like physical growth, it takes time ... it WILL happen if you remain committed.
My recommendation: Weave in simple activities related to the following categories - List building (ezine articles), product creation(conduct interviews or hire ghostwriters), site development (making your site convert more visitors into buyers),and education (continuing to learn new ways to grow your business).
4. Develop Additional Shortcuts. As you get better and better at working with your lists, creating products and tweaking your site, you'll want to continue to improve your business with new ideas, strategies, tools, and resources. The key is simple: never stop learning!
My recommendation: Visit forums. Read articles. Download reports. Identify sites and resources that CONTRIBUTE to your success in educating you. You want faster results, bigger increases, automated processes, and other ways to get more accomplished and more profit, with less work involved.
Everything depends on your developing a plan and sticking to it.
And that is the REAL secret to building a high-profit Internet business!
You can use affiliate marketing techniques to help you spot opportunities on the Internet. Use affiliate marketing to promote other people's products and services. When a sale is completed, you earn a percentage of sale amount. If you can't convert the traffic into paying customers, you don't earn a single cent.
There is very little risk involved in affiliate marketing. You start off by driving traffic to the sales page. After about a hundred or a couple of hundred visitors or so, you get a good feel of whether the offer is converting well enough or not.
This is the perfect way to test a market. There is no need to spend money to develop a product, only to realize that nobody wants to buy it. When you find an offer that converts well, simply develop your own products - but do it better.
You see, it all starts from affiliate marketing. If you like, you may even test different markets at one go. Very soon, you will be able to see for yourself, some concrete results - which market is lucrative with rapid buyers, and which market appears to be just luke warm.
Once that is over, just keep your eye on the profitable opportunities. If you want to make more money, just rinse and repeat what you have done.
Here is a business model that has been proven to work - build a list of prospects or customers, and sell them products over and over again. Even though it sounds simple, some marketers are still not building a list.
Without a list, you can't really grow your business. For instance, you may have a $100 product. To make $1000, you have to sell 10 copies of that product. That means having to acquire more new customers. As we all know, acquiring new customers can be costly.
Assume that you don't acquire any more new customers (which is unlikely). Can you still grow your affiliate business? You can work on developing more products to sell to your customers. That means making more sales from your customer database. That greatly increases the customer lifetime value.
The lifetime value of a customer is the amount of money that he spends with you. If you make $2,000 profits just be selling to this same customer, that customer's lifetime value would be $2,000.
Here is where it gets interesting. Now if you know that for every customer you acquire, you will earn an average of $2,000 during a customer's lifetime, how much would you spend to acquire that customer?
This is what many affiliate marketers are not doing enough of. They make one sale, then forget all about the customer. Think of ways to serve the same customer several times over. It's much easier to sell to an existing customer than to sell to a completely new customer.
Setup a simple squeeze page to capture the contact information and keep in contact with your customers. You will be making 3-4 times more than what you are earning now.
Both Jimmy D. Brown & Gen Wright are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Jimmy D. Brown has sinced written about articles on various topics from E Books, Marketing and Adsense. Believe it or not, there is a tremendous "operations manual" that you can download to help you create a plan that works for YOU. Check out "