The Biggest Defining Moments In My Internet Marketing Career

If you’re anything like me (and I’m guessing you are, unless there’s something terribly wrong with me that no one has told me yet), you probably like to learn exactly how others have managed to make money online. What did they do? Did they go through the same mental and technical challenges that I am? What can I copy from them to find my own success?

I am now making money every day from my online efforts. No, I’m not a super-gajillionaire yet, but my passive income stream is in motion.

I often take this for granted, feeling like I have so much farther to go, but then I remind myself that some people would give anything just to bring in an extra $50 or $100 per week – even if they are already making a little money online.

So, I decided to share with you the defining moments in my internet marketing career thus far, in the hopes that you will find something useful, or at least verify that it’s really possible to bring in a decent income with your computer.

Like many people, one of my first ventures into online marketing was through affiliate marketing – with Clickbank, to be precise. Since I have a math background, something about Google AdWords, with all their statistics and speed of results, appealed to me, so I started out by buying clicks on the Google AdWords network – both the search network (at Google.com) and content network (AdSense ads on others’ websites).

At some point, I noticed I was wasting a lot of money on the search network, but I was picking up some fairly decent sales from the content network. By lowering my bids on clicks, I discovered that I could actually turn a profit by buying content network ads and linking directly to the Clickbank merchant with my affiliate link.

I was in absolute heaven – it was working!

Immediately, my mind was overcome with the idea of $1000 days and millions of dollars flowing to me while I lounged by the pool. That was about 3 years ago.

Well, within a few months, either the competition or Google’s new advertising restrictions basically turned my little money-maker into a non-performer, and I was back to the drawing board.

Next, I bought some internet marketing products, systems, memberships, etc., etc. until I finally came across this wonderful product called Project Quick Cash. Well, I liked the sound of that, so I bought it.

Remember my earlier post about focus? I decided to focus all my time and energy on one small project from that course. This was just before my 42nd birthday, by the way.

Well, what do you…I started making money! I was actually using a slight variation of one of the methods taught in this course, combining AdWords ads with my own free blog, and driving traffic to an affiliate offer on Clickbank, for a market that was suddenly experiencing lots of interest. This is what’s known as “trend marketing.”

I actually had several $300 days on Clickbank as a result of that effort.

In all the excitement, I used some of that money to buy some coaching time from Brian McElroy, whom I had met on the Warrior Forum (http://warriorforum.com). His brilliant coaching suggestion was that I should parlay that success into my own product and sell it as a Warrior Special Offer (WSO).

I did that in short order and had soon made nearly $2000 in a few weeks from that product alone.

As it turns out, Google soon disallowed ads in that market, and my success in the Warrior Forum was due in large part to the hysteria surrounding that market at the time. But there’s nothing wrong with milking a trend, is there?

My next WSO product offering did OK, and a service-related offer creating videos and voiceovers for fellow marketers also brought in a nice little chunk of money for a while, but nothing consistent.

Finally, I decided to turn my attention to one of my passions – playing piano.

Several years ago, I had started building an email list in the piano playing marketing using Google AdWords. I was paying about $0.30-$0.50 per person to put people on my email list, and not doing a whole lot with it after that.

I was, however, collecting their most burning question related to piano playing, and that data sat on my hard drive for several years, until I decided to start organizing it into a product.

With the guidance of Kevin Riley and his course, “From Hobby To Your Own Profitable Home-Based How-To Business Empire,” I created my own how-to guide, put up a sales page, and once again turned to the Google AdWords content network, where I now make regular daily income and get wonderful emails from satisfied customers around the world.

At the same time, I am working on a piano-related blog and this internet marketing blog, in the hopes that I can teach even more people about both topics and increase my income to the point where I can completely control how I spend my time (or as much as possible with a wife and 4 kids!).

I didn’t mean to ramble on here, but I thought hearing my story might encourage you to keep pressing ahead and find what works for you. Guess what?

THERE IS A LOT OF WORK INVOLVED.

Yes, I said the ‘W’ word. You will have to work, but working towards goals like I have, especially in areas I love and feel strongly about – and can help people – is its own reward.

Won’t you join me?

I really appreciate that you keep coming back to my site, it's loyal people like you that make what I do worth it. If you have any questions feel free to email me. Oh, and since you obviously like our site it'd be great if you could share it with a friend... They'll love you for it!