Home Business
Ode to Newbies who work at home
Abraham Lincoln was famous for his humorous and pithy remarks. One of them was; “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”
In many ways, these words sum up the experience of the new marketer trying to make his or her way in the crazy world of Internet Affiliate Marketing. It is a frustrating, difficult, anxiety inducing and downright anger filled process of making your way through the barrage of information, up sell, cross sell, down sell, sideways sell and any kind of way sell to get to where you want to go. All this while trying to set up a home business.
“You may fool all of the people some of the time”
This is an interesting area of the IM process. The phenomenon is known as buzz marketing. The word goes out to all comers, new and old, experienced and newbies, that a hot new product is about to come out, and if you get in early, you will make the money before the crowd. So you sign up and join the forum for the new product launch and wait for the big deal product that was touted in the presell video. Well, surprise, surprise…it seems it isn’t quite ready yet so instead you can download eight reports and do some reading while you wait. You feel like a chump until you find a thread on the forum where some pros are complaining that they’ve been had. WOW, guys who know all about SEO, siloing, themeing and things you can’t understand have been had just like you. Thank the stars for the 30 day refund policy…hello Clickbank…bye, bye product. Off you go to the next “golden opportunity”. Is that home business up and running yet?
“You can even fool some of the people all of the time”
This is the early stage newbie or new marketer entering the field. If you were like me you started with the simple desire to do data entry. So you pay your entry fee and find out the site isn’t about data entry. It’s an aggregator for all these affiliate sites that will make you a millionaire in three easy clicks…all for another fee of course. Some of these sites have a “system”. So you fork over another fifty bucks and get a sixty page PDF all about Click Bank or Paydotcom or whatever. But no system. OK so you learned a few things you didn’t know but you’re no closer to making a living, not by a long shot. Though you learn fast enough to avoid the pot hole again, the nature of the Web is there are thousands of newcomers right behind you ready to hit that hole just like you did. If they’re lucky they might join a forum and read one of your comments, but more likely than not, they are just going to have to go through the gauntlet just like you did. By the way no home business just yet!
“But you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”
If you make it to this stage, that is, if you have the time, money, and determination to hang in there and work the forums and ask a lot of questions, you’ll soon begin to see things more clearly. The scams with lousy graphics, endless sales pages that don’t tell you what they charge, the so called “free” offers that are never free, will soon be more obvious to you. You might even find a system that works for you. If you are into sales, maybe it’s a product marketing system that teaches you to buy resell rights and shows you how to set up your business. Maybe it’s a Web site building system that teaches you to create you own business out of your hobby or passion. Whatever it is, you have now developed the instincts and ability to see through the smoke. You keep your emotions in check and coolly test and cancel promotions based on your well learned lessons of product quality and market knowledge you now possess. You may not be making a fortune and you may even not be earning anything yet; but you are on your way because you can lay out a realistic plan to develop your home business.
In many ways, online business is no different than offline business, except that in the former, you work at your own pace and answer to only one boss…YOU!
So keep up the hard work and may your travels be prosperous.
