The Quick Start Challenge

Internet Marketing Tragic

I am an internet marketing addict. I suffer from shiny object syndrome. I went to my first internet marketing seminar nearly 7 years ago in November 2011. I am not really sure what I was looking for but I could smell an opportunity that leveraged my background in business and in technology. After all, my partners and I had sold our consulting business to the world’s largest web development firm in 1999 (USWeb/CKS). I had helped my clients build the first internet shopping engines in UK and in South Africa. I was an internet pioneer. I understood the ideas. I listened avidly to the presenters and I bought a few programs and I started work on nearly all of them. I made no sales. I never did finish anything. What really grabbed my attention were software tools that could get one into push button marketing. As something of an IT geek, I was always keen to find tools that could automate the whole process from creating sites to generating traffic to making sales.

For a while I became an IM seminar addict. It gave me a chance to travel a bit and I got to meet quite a few IM gurus along the way. Quite a few of them are still around – many are not. I bought a few more programs and I did get a little smarter at smoking out the snake oil salesmen from the real stuff. I was keen to work with people who sold stuff that actually worked and could train beyond how to press which button to make something work. I was building a nice library of partially used programs.

Sitting at the back of my head was a feeling that I did not want to go back to what I used to do. You see, I worked as a management consultant for 25 years. I was always a very good problem solver and was always much more interested in doing projects than selling projects. I really do hate selling though I am told that I am pretty good at it. I do not deal well with rejection – blame it on the bullies at school and in the army and on a few girls along the way. So the model that was building in my head was to find a way to sell other people’s products as an affiliate in as automated a traffic way as I could find.

Am I a Finisher?

Roll the canvas forward and I can safely say I am not any good at it. My whole life I have had a head full of ideas about new projects that have not got off the ground or ever got finished – programming in Pascal; writing betting programs in BASIC are early examples. Maybe I am just not a finisher. Does that make me a failure? I have finished a lot of things.

• I have 4 university level qualifications, two of which were obtained while doing full time work
• I have moved country 3 times and lived in 4
• I have 3 adult children, all university level, after a marriage that lasted 25 years
• I built a career as a management consultant and I helped a lot of people dramatically improve their business. Barclaycard now holds 80% market share of the revolving credit market in Germany based on ideas fermented in their offices in Hamburg
• My partners and I built an amazing consulting business over a 6 year period that grew as big as our main competitor, McKinsey & Co, took 50 years to build. We were able to sell the business for an amount that has allowed me to stop working aged 45 and survive two market crashes and a divorce
• 4 years ago, I started a program of learning that has allowed me to take over management of all my investment portfolios – that is working so that I do not have to think about ever getting a job and it is producing better returns than my fund manager did
• I have always been a keen cyclist. I did not know when I joined my first Cycle Across Australia how far I could ride on a bicycle. I did ride all the way across Australia that time and 6 times more. I did not know that I could ride 200 kilometres on a bicycle yet I did complete a Super Randonneur series in 2006/7 covering 200, 300, 400 and 600 km endurance events in one calendar year. In fact I completed 3 of those events in one month in November 2006. I am a finisher.

I have push button websites working in niche areas close to my passions – e.g., in cycling and cooking and coffee and interests – e.g., health and depression.  I have niche sites in areas that are growing in popularity – e.g., in yoga, in foreign exchange, in bodyweight training, in drones. I even have an unboxed drone in my study – two years and still unboxed. I have followed the physical products sales via Amazon in drones and coffee and cooking and footcare and camping equipment.  I have bought the programs on building profiles on Twitter and Facebook and via magazines and book writing.

A lot of that is working and lot has fallen over. I have tried multilevel marketing (MLM) in cryptocurrency – another growing field – and was making really good progress on one until the product provider ran into scaling problems just as I was about to ramp up. I even have some internet marketing names in some of my downlines.

Focus On What Is Working

Internet marketing has really eluded me. My investing coach always says

“keep on doing what is working and stop doing what is not working”

For some time now I have been doing exactly that on Internet Marketing. I unsubscribed from almost all the email lists. I stopped buying tools and gadgets and stopped going to seminars. All I have kept going are automated tools to deliver content to some of my profiles on social media and kept up building following on Twitter profiles especially. I also have some lead generation solo ads running to build lists.

Why then did I start the Quick Start Challenge? The email subject line said “Come and Join me on the Inside”. It was an email from Paul O’Keeffe whose email list I did not unsubscribe from. That said, there are 137 emails from Paul in my inbox – mostly unopened. I have bought a few things directly from him and through his links. I always value that Paul will tell things the way they are and will stand behind what he supports. I sat through his introductory video and I listened to his interview with Dean Holland – all the way through. Well for $14.95, I felt it was worth one last shot.

After all Dean was describing a story that was not that different to mine. I have spent about the same sort of money that he did. Yes, he had to find a way to get Internet Marketing to work. I did not as I can rely on my portfolios and my investing prowess to keep fed. The key thing is I sort of know Dean. He is a friend who has stood by one of my friends in tough times. We are Facebook friends. I have seen his wedding photos. He is in my MLM downline after being introduced by one of his friends.

This is one last shot at getting Internet Marketing to work.

What are my chances of succeeding this time around? I have learned the hard lessons of FOCUS. 2 years ago I wrote up my first investing journal on Steemit.com. I set out to write up every single trade that I make and to explain what my thinking was at the time. The benefit to my investing and trading has been enormous as I have a library of 299 posts to go back to, to reinforce my learning. More than that I have the disciplines in place to do the writing. And I get paid in STEEM to do it – my account is now worth $17,615 – mostly from writing and curating content. And I have built a following of readers who follow my posts.