Have an “Internet Marketing Business”? Take Those Words to Heart

Paul Forcey is about to release a great product called “Things I Have Learned in the Past Year”. The non-flashy title should be your first indicator that this is something a little different.

And it is.

Paul let me read a “not quite ready for Prime Time” version of the report, which was complete but still needed a bit of editing and formatting. But it was the content that really stood out for me.

Even though Paul has made his living online for a number of years now, he took a job with a CPA firm about a year ago in order to be around people a bit more. (Internet Marketing can be a lonely business.) Doing so gave him the rare opportunity to see IM from both sides – first as an individual, sole proprietor, then as part of a team responsible for programming, graphic design, SEO and more.

It’s those insights that make Paul’s report so good. But my biggest takeaway was something that Paul touched on at the end of the report, but it really hit home for me.

I’d like to expand on that a bit here.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve was fortunate enough to make my living online for a number of years. But I’ve always struggled to fully understand why it all fell apart. I knew at some level that my income streams collapsed, and I couldn’t stay focused on one money making method long enough to rebuild, but over the past 6 months, I’ve really been digging deeper to try and find the root cause.

The next to last section of Paul’s report is titled: “You are in business”.

In it, Paul stresses that you must treat your IM endeavors as a business – no different really than opening up a storefront in your neighborhood. It struck me that I had never really done that in the past.

I had recently come to the realization that I was mostly lucky during my best years online, but after reading Paul’s report, I decided to put that to the test. I went back and, as best I could, reconstructed how many hours of real, honest work I put in from 2003-2009 to earn the money I did.

To say I was stunned at the result would be a massive understatement.

My best estimate is that, from 2003-2009, I did about 300 hours of actual work on my successful projects.

If you’ve done the math, you already know that I did a little over 40 hours of work per year on my successful projects. That works out to about $1,000/hour.

No wonder I’ve had such a difficult time adjusting to the new reality! I was so lucky and fortunate to have made the money I did during the time I did. Those days started disappearing by 2008, but I couldn’t adjust with the times.

I never saw internet marketing as a business.

I finally get that now. I also ignored the marketing piece of internet marketing. To do this business right has always required more than seeing how many automated tools you could use to generate links. In order to build a successful authority site (which I’ll be doing in 2013), it’s essential that you market the site using all the various means at your disposal.

I’ll take more about this in depth in future posts. Suffice it to say that the offline world and the online world are becoming increasingly parallel in how to successfully approach them.

I’m not sure I would have made any of these distinctions if not for Paul’s awesome report.

Go here and pick up your copy today.