Eight Internet New Year's Resolutions

By Terry Dean

The Internet time moves at light speed...and by most standards people call an Internet year only 90 days. Every 3 months is a full year in Internet time.

Because of this, I sit down and examine my business plan every 90 days. While doing this I have come up with 8 Internet New Year's Resolutions.

You must make these eight commitments if you expect to prosper throughout the years to come.

1.) Buy Your Own Domain.

If you want to do business online, get your own domain. Having your own domain gives you more play with the search engines, shows a little more stability, and all-in-all lets the world know that you mean business.

Is it possible to make money from a free server? Yes, it is possible to make money, but wouldn't you prefer to be making maximum money from everything you do. The fact that you are on a free server will always be in the minds of your visitor and could hurt your sales. Don't take that chance.

Coming off of a major Web Hosting problem with one of my primary web accounts (we were up and down for 2 weeks), I am even more convinced that you must make sure the host you chose has good customer service. The one I just transferred from was horrible. After waiting for three hours on hold one day, they basically told me they didn't care if I hosted with them or not. This web host was ranked Number three in the world by C-Net Central on the Web Host List!

I have several web hosting accounts, but the one I have been most satisfied with has been Virtualis...mainly because their technical support responds within an hour at any time of the day. They even dare you on their main page to test out their technical support and compare them to any of their competitors.

Go here for Hosting: http://www.virtualis.com/vr/tdean2

2.) Start Your Own Opt-In Email List.

I have been checking my own stats and the stats of the affiliates I have, and I have noticed a very interesting trend. Around seventy percent of my sales come from my opt-in email techniques, and my top ten affiliates are all aggressive Opt-In email list owners. By "aggressive" I mean that they own an Opt-In email list and they regularly send offers, sales, solo ads, and more to their list.

If all of the top affiliates have their own Opt-In lists in my programs, I expect that the same can be said for most other programs as well.

If you want to make money with your own products or as a member of an affiliate program, you need to start an opt-in email list.

Personally I prefer Postmaster Online and the Postmaster software for my lists. If you are on a budget though, you can get started using the free service at http://www.listbot.com

3.) Target one Specific Theme and Market.

Don't try to be a jack-of-all trades, or else you will end up a master of none. The most ineffective sites try to put together a hodgepodge of information on many different subjects and topics.

The key to success online is to focus. You need to make sure that your whole web site only focuses on one targeted niche market. Don't sell web hosting and Pokemon trading cards on the same site. Don't try to mix up 20 different affiliate programs on your site. It simply won't work.

Focus on one market. For example, if you are selling to Internet marketers, you may sell a downloadable report as your primary product. Then, you may also offer web hosting and a video series as other backend products. This would be focusing your web site on one theme and market.

There are thousands of opportunities online, and that is often where much of newbies confusion comes from. You can make money in any market. You just have to find one that is fun for you and that you know how to target.

Just because someone made $100,000 last month with a specific product doesn't mean YOU should be selling it. You can make money with anything online if you have positioned it correctly. The most successful people are almost always the ones who have chosen the product they LOVE selling.

4.) Create at least one of your own Products.

You can make money in affiliate programs, but the biggest profits almost always come from having your own product or service. Many Internet marketers have limited themselves to only receiving around 25% of the money they could be receiving if they would just find or create their own products.

You could create your own information product. What are your interests? What is it that you enjoy studying about? What have you accomplished in your business, life, or hobbies? Create a report, book, or audio tape about it. Then, you will have your own product.

You could find a product that is currently being sold offline - either locally or through magazine advertising. Make a deal with the owner of the product and try to become the exclusive dealer of it in the online market.

You could create a service. There are many different service businesses which are opening up online. If you have learned how to develop web sites, offer this. If you enjoy competing on search engines, start a submission service. If you enjoy writing, become a ghost writer for other people's articles and books.

Once you own a product or service for the online market, then you could become the affiliate owner instead of just another affiliate member. By the way, if you are interested in having your own affiliate program installed for you, please email me at yoap@bizpromo.com and I can send you more information on owning your own affiliate program.

5.) Develop Multiple Traffic Sources.

Use many different sources of traffic. Submit to search engines. Place free classifieds...especially at Yahoo. Join pay per click search engines such as Goto. Submit articles to ezines.

If you only have one source of traffic such as a search engine, what happens when that search engine changes their policies? You could instantly disappear overnight (Alta Vista just did this and drove some people virtually crazy). All of your traffic would be one. So, always focus on having as many sources of traffic as possible.

Start a viral traffic strategy where your traffic continually grows for you...using a system such as the HitTrafficker which we have available at
http://www.ezfree.net/free/users/main.shtml

6.) Develop Multiple Income Streams.

You need to have more than one income in your business. Many of the most successful sites out there will be making money in a dozen or more different ways. Throughout this new millennium you will find that the trend is to build a stronger relationship with a set of customers and then make money many different ways from those same customers (it is at bare minimum 7 times easier to sell to an exiting customer than to create a new one).

I don't recommend a lot of affiliate programs, but here are three of them which I am currently receiving checks from and that have always paid on time (by the way, they are all two-tier programs):

Virtualis Web Hosting - Virtualis is the web host I have had the best experiences with and they pay very handsomely for referrals:
http://www.virtualis.com/vr/tdean2/vrp.html

Postmaster Online - Postmaster gives you 50 autoresponders that automatically follow-up and a complete integrated email solution for a very low monthly price:
http://www.postmasteronline.com/home/10683

Mike Enlow's Masters of Marketing - Mike Enlow is the king of Joint Venture marketing and he has created a member site where you can learn from 50 of the best mail order marketers or all time:
http://www.enlowcircle.com/go/1056/associate.html

7.) Make a commitment to your own education.

The greatest marketers are also the best students. They learn from those who went before them and they "copy" ideas and "methods" which have worked time and time again. I personally feel that I am one of the most intense readers you will find on online marketing...as I constantly want to stay up to date and know exactly what is working online.

Being a student doesn't necessarily mean going to school or college. You may be a student of your market. You may study, test, and poll your potential customers to find out exactly what it is that they want from a business.

Over the next year, commit to join several Internet training sites and purchase books/videos which will help you with your online training experience. You can either learn from other marketer's mistakes...or you can take your turn and repeat them.

8.) Make a commitment to family.

Don't just commit to do business. Commit to your family as well. The purpose of an online business isn't just to make money. It is something more important than that. It is to create a lifestyle which you and your family can enjoy for the rest of your life.

Working 12 hour days isn't where it is at. You have to work hard to set up your web site and get it running, but the purpose of the Internet is so that you can automate as much of your business as possible. Use autoresponders, real time processing, digital product delivery, etc. to all cut down the time you actually have to physically be working on the business.

The goal is to work yourself out of a job. Online we can accomplish this. We can work hard to create an automated system which does most of the work for us.

Then, we can enjoy our lives.