Well, to make a long story short, I took my PC to the local PC repair place and the hard drive had totally dropped dead on me. They tried to salvage what they could but it was no use. Everything was gone, fried, lost forever.

I had to get a new drive, a new operating system and so on. And then it hit me…

Oh my God, I just lost 2 years of work!

Now, I don’t have to tell you how much stuff you can accumulate in 2 years. The number of bookmarks I had in my Internet Explorer alone was over 100 at least. How was I going to get all these sites back? For that matter, how would I even remember what all the sites were?

And then there were all the programs I installed. Sure, I had the CD for most of them and could reinstall them with my new system, but what about the programs I downloaded off the Internet? I didn’t even have the receipts for them anymore because they were lost along with everything else. I would probably have to buy them again.

Needless to say, this experience was a total nightmare for me. But I learned something from it. I learned to back up ALL my work regularly. Since that time, whenever I had a PC crash, it was a minor annoyance at worst.

For those of you who aren’t sure how to go about protecting your work, there are several ways you can do this.

1. Backup Hard Drive – This is the most expensive but is probably the best way to go. By having a backup external hard drive, it’s very easy to simply take your data and transfer it from your main PC to the backup drive. You should do this at least once a week.

2. CD Backup – If you can’t afford a backup drive, at least get yourself some blank CDs and burn your data onto them. Mark the backup dates on each CD so you know which one is the most recent. It’s not the most efficient, but it is cheap.

3. Raided Drives – This is for people who really have some cash to throw around, and yes it is even more expensive than just having a backup hard drive. By having raided drives in your PC, your data is automatically backed up to the other drive without you having to do anything.

However you decide to protect your data, make sure it gets done. The last thing you want is to go through what I went through.

Trust me, it’s NOT fun.

Then it all changed overnight.

I found Secrets of the Big Dogs. It was an advertising system that was very well structured itself. This made it easy for me to get into a routine since the system consisted of about 12 different advertising resources. So each day I’d get up and go to each resource, one at a time and place my ad. After I was done with all the resources, I then worked on my ads for the next day.

After I finished doing all that, the next step was to track my clicks and sales for the day and see which resource was giving me the most traffic. Then I’d check to make sure that all the resources were functioning properly and if not, I’d contact the site owner.

There were other things involved in my day but the point is, as I began to do this more and more, because I was in a routine, I was getting faster and better at it. This allowed me to do more things in my day and actually add to my routine. I added additional advertising resources and thus increased my income.

I can’t stress this enough. If you don’t get into a routine, you can’t run an efficient internet business. The problem for most people is getting into that routine. Well, there is a very simple way to do this, though it does take some discipline.

What you need to do is this. At the end of each day, make a schedule for what you plan to do for the next day. Put numbers next to each item in order from first to last. Don’t move onto the next item until you have completed the item that you’re working on.

If you find that you’ve scheduled too many items for the day, cut back on a few things. Just make sure that you focus on the things that are most important. What are the most important items? The most important items are the ones that DIRECTLY add to your income. All other things are secondary.

If you’ve never been in a routine before, it’s not easy. But once you get into the swing of it, you’ll find that your day becomes disjointed if you don’t stick to that routine. Yes, eventually it DOES become habit.

That’s when you’re on your way to running a successful internet business.

I had to think about that for a minute. Finally, I gave him the answer that I thought he had wanted. I told him that they wanted to work from home and were looking for a product that would give them a good chance of doing that successfully. That’s when he hit me with the next question that I wasn’t quite prepared for.

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“Why do they want to work from home? What’s so great about it?”

This was a question that I thought had an obvious answer. People wanted to work from home because they didn’t want to have to work for a boss. They were tired of the grind and wanted to work for themselves, to be able to work when they wanted at what they wanted. And then came the next question.

“But why?”

I was totally confused. I wasn’t sure what my relative was looking for.

To make a long story short, what my relative was getting at was the psychology of why people do things. Why do these people want to work from home? Why don’t they want a boss anymore? What is it that they’re ultimately looking for?

The answer was freedom. They wanted the freedom to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. Freedom is one of the greatest human desires. The whole concept of the United States of America is based on the individual’s freedom.

In an earlier post, I discussed the reasons why people buy things. The number one reason was to have a better quality of life. That is the ultimate desire of each person. They buy things because they want their life to be better. If they feel that a purchase will make their life better than they will make the purchase. It’s that simple.

Unless you understand what it is that makes people buy things, you can’t push their hot buttons. That is what all of writing sales copy is about, pushing people’s buttons.

Teaching you how to understand a buyer’s psychology is beyond the scope of this article. There are plenty of great resources that you can tap into. The point of this article, however, is to make you aware that unless you understand the psychology of your buyer, you’re not going to be able to sell to him.

Okay, how do you go about market research? Just to say you have to do it is one thing, but doing it is something else.

Because market research is so involved, it would be impossible to go over how to do it in complete detail. So, what follows is a brief outline on how to go about doing market research.

Choose a Niche – Decide what niche you want to work on. It doesn’t matter what it is. The key is to narrow it down as much as you can before doing your research.

Do Keyword Research – Use a keyword research tool such as Wordtracker to find out how many people are looking up this niche on search engines each day. You want to do this to get a general idea of how much demand there is.

Do Competition Research – Go to the search engines and look up how many competing internet business sites there are. If there aren’t many, you’ll have a decent shot at breaking into the niche. The more competing sites there are, the harder it is going to be for you to break into this niche and make money from it.

Surveys – Take as many surveys as you can. Go to forums, message boards, discussion groups and so on. Talk to as many people as you can. Find out what they are looking for in the niche you plan on tackling.

These are just the basics of running an internet business, but if you do just this much you’ll have a pretty good idea of whether or not your niche is worth going after.

But then something happened.

I started to notice that my clicks were starting to go down. Not a lot at first, but they were nevertheless decreasing. I was getting between 45 and 85 clicks a day. Then some more time went by and I was getting between 35 and 65 clicks per day.

I was noticing a trend. FFA Hosting sites, which are still profitable today, were not as great as they were when I first started. Because of this downward trend, and the resulting fewer sales, I realized that I had to find other sources of advertising to pick up the slack.

Trends are like the weather. They’re always changing. This is why it’s so important to keep track of trends.

More recently, Squidoo has become a very popular form of promotion online. Google loved them and there was a ton you could do with a Squidoo lens. Marketers were getting great results with their lenses.

Then something happened.

A bunch of spammers got into the Squidoo system and created a ton of spam lenses. As a result, what Google did was lower the importance of Squidoo in their rankings. Suddenly, marketers who were getting tons of traffic from their Squidoo lenses were getting almost no traffic at all. The environment around Squidoo had changed and because of the shift in the trends, marketers had to scramble to find a way around this.

Bum Marketing was another hot trend for a long time. When it came out, all of a sudden, lots of marketers were writing articles in order to promote their internet business. While this trend has tapered off a little, Bum Marketing is still a pretty hot trend online.

Another big trend was Butterfly Marketing. When the script first came out, everybody and their grandmother was putting up Butterfly Marketing sites. Those who jumped on them first and came up with some twists were the most successful.

Keeping track of trends is nothing more than just keeping your eyes open. Go to forums. Find out what’s new. Go to the search engines and look up the latest Internet marketing news. The Internet changes so fast that there are things happening almost everyday.

By staying on top of trends, you are staying ahead of your competition. This could mean the difference between running a successful internet business and one that brings in seven figures annually. Even more importantly, if you’re not aware of the things that were once working that are no longer working, you may end up putting your efforts into things that bring you no results at all.

Keep an eye out for trends.

They’re ALL around.

I then had to go back through all my receipts from credit cards, payments made to me and what have you, and try to get a handle on things. If I had kept records right from the start, I wouldn’t have been going crazy trying to get all this together.

But there’s more to keeping records than just to know how much you’ve made and spent so that you can pay the IRS their share when the end of the tax year rolls around.

You need to know where your business has been, where it is and where it’s going. If you don’t keep records, you’ll have no idea if your business is improving, getting worse or what. You’re going to notice that over the course of time, certain trends.

For example, you will find out that in the summertime, things will slow down. This is because a lot of people go away for the summer and aren’t sitting in front of their computers.

In December, you’ll notice that just around Christmas time things also slow down. That’s because people are out buying gifts and they’re not spending money on internet business opportunities. Yes, some niches, like gift niches, do well during Christmas, but for the most part, this time of year is pretty dead.

Okay, so how do you go about keeping records? Well, you can do this simply by just putting everything into an Excel spreadsheet. Excel is more than good enough for tracking income and expenses.

If you want to get fancy and invest a little more, you can get something like Quick Books. For most small home businesses you probably won’t need something that powerful, but as your business expands, you’re probably want to have a professional record keeping program.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to keep records. You can’t run your online business in a vacuum. Plus, seeing how your income is increasing each month will give you tons of incentive to keep going. Sometimes that knowledge that you’re in profit is all you need to push yourself to get to the next level. If you don’t know where you’ve been or where you are, you will have no way of knowing where you’re headed.

Keep records. The IRS will thank you and YOU will thank you.

Then, one day, a friend of mine called me and told me a secret. He said that if I wanted to really have success on the Internet, I had to create my own product. Well, at first I kind of dismissed him. I was convinced that I could make a good income as an affiliate marketer. But finally I gave in.

Within one month of creating my own product, my income increased by over 400%.

Okay, you’re probably wondering why product creation isn’t higher up the list.

I’m going to tell you.

Even though your chances of making a lot of money increase with your own product, creating one is not essential to being successful online. You can do very well as an affiliate marketer. You probably won’t make as much as you would if you created your own product, but you can still make money. That’s the reason why it’s not higher up the list.

Okay, so how do you go about creating your own product?

Well, that all depends on what kind of product you want to create. The most common kinds of products in Internet marketing are digital information products. These are easy to make. All you need is a word processing program and some way to create a PDF file from your word document. A free solution that works very well is Open Office.

With the technology available to us today, creating an informational product is so easy that it literally takes seconds to create after all the writing is completed. The writing is the hard part.

The point is, and I am speaking from experience and not from something taught to me in a book, if you want to take your business to the next level, creating your own products is the best way to do that. Not only do you get to keep more of the income from each sale, but you also have the benefit of a team of affiliates helping you market your creation.

The best thing to do, when it comes to product creation is to sit down and think about what your interests are. Take one of them, research it to see if there is a market for that interest and then, if there is, create a product based on that interest. It’s called niche marketing and it’s one of the most lucrative marketing methods online today.

Product creation may not be at the top of the list, but it’s a darn great way to increase your income significantly.

Well, I graduated and started looking for a job. After one year, that’s right, one year, I still couldn’t find a job. Nobody would hire me out of college with no experience. I was starting to think that I was never going to find a job.

One day, my girlfriend, who was soon to be my wife, brought home an advertisement for a computer school. Well, to make a very long story short, I went to this school, which was a 6 month course, and no more than one week out of school I got my first job.

Think tech skills aren’t important?

Okay, you’re probably thinking, “Why do I need tech skills to run an Internet business?” Well, let’s see. How may things do you think require having some kind of technical skill?

To start with, one of the most important things that everybody needs in order to establish an online presence is a web site. Unless you’re going to spend big bucks to have somebody design that site for you, you better at least learn some basic HTML skills.

What about if you want to track ads and advertising campaigns? Well, you can certainly go out and buy some of these fancy programs to do this, but can you imagine if you knew a little PHP and MySQL? You could program these things yourself.

What if you decided that the area you wanted to get into, as far as making a living online, was creating software products? Well, again, unless you’re going to outsource the work to a programmer, which is always a risk because of confidentiality agreements and the possibility of your programmer running off with your idea, you better be able to create this stuff on your own.

There are other reasons for wanting to have some technical skills, such as just being able to take care of your own computer should you run into problems, but I think this is enough to make you realize that not having tech skills puts you at a terrible disadvantage next to just about everybody else online.

Okay, so how do you get these tech skills? Well, there are several ways you can go about doing this.

1. Go To School – This is probably the most efficient way, but unfortunately the most expensive as well. There are plenty of tech schools, online and offline that will teach you just about everything you could possibly want to know, from HTML to PHP programming to setting up your own network. The more education you get, the better your chances of running your business without any technical problems.

2. Search Engines – There is plenty of free info online on just about any technical subject around. The disadvantage of going this route is that you have to do a lot of digging. Not everything is in one place and not every site has complete instruction on any one topic. So you will spend more time going this route than it you want to school. The advantage is that it’s free, so if you don’t have the money for school, this is always an option.

3. Books – This option is between schools and hitting the search engines. There are hundreds of books in print on a number of tech subjects. Amazon.com has more titles than just about anyone else. The benefit to going the book route is that books are a lot cheaper than paying tuition to go to school and with books. You don’t have to go digging for the information. It’s all right there.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to at least get some technical knowledge if you’re going to run an Internet business. In the long run, it will save you a lot of outsourcing costs and a ton of grief if you should ever develop problems with your computer.

“Son, there is nothing wrong with being independent. Certainly you do want to be able to do things for yourself. But no man is an island. Occasionally, we can all use some help from somebody else. It never hurts to have a friend.”

No, I never forgot those words, and as I went on in my life, I tried to make friends whenever I could because I soon began to realize that life was hard and that if I wanted to get things done without knocking myself out, I was going to need help.

How does this apply to running a home based business?

If you’ve been at this for any length of time, you know that there is a lot involved with running a home based business. The list of things to do is endless. There’s content writing, there’s ad writing, there’s web site design, there’s product creation, there’s advertising and on and on and on. Not everybody is going to be an expert in everything.

Now, if you’re first starting out, you probably don’t have a lot of money to outsource some of the things that you can’t do yourself. So what do you do? Well, this is where friendships are so important. By making friends online, you can reach out to your friends and ask them for help. Sure, you’re going to have to offer something in return, but it won’t have to be money. They’ll probably ask for something simple like sending an ad out to your list or if you don’t have one maybe just putting a link on your site to their site. There’s plenty of ways to return the favor. By doing this, you’ll be able to get things done that you’d have a hard time either doing yourself or paying somebody to do for you.

Another reason it’s good to make friends is that you never know when during the course of a friendship, especially if you’ve been doing things for your friends, one of these people are going to offer you a JV or something else that will greatly help your business. Certainly it doesn’t hurt you to make as many friends as you can.

So, how do you go about making friends?

The best way to make friends online is to participate in forums and let people get to know you. If you contribute valuable information and good content to the forum, you will see that people will begin to trust you. Eventually, you will make friends. It’s almost inevitable.

There is no question that making friends is very important in furthering your Internet marketing career.

My attitude had gone from bad to worse.

As a result, I was looking at everything with skepticism and disbelief. Anything I’d see I’d automatically think to myself “scam.” I just wasn’t going to believe anything anymore.

Then one day, I got an email that changed my life. I read it and even though I was quite skeptical, I replied to it and asked some questions. The answers I got were believable enough that I was ready to do some more digging. Well, I noticed that there was a phone number on the web site this email directed me to. So I called it. On the other end was the voice of what sounded like a very well spoken and educated gentleman.

We talked for a while. I was very up front with this person. I told him that I had been burned many times already and quite honestly didn’t believe that it was possible to make money online. He assured me it was and told me that if I tried his system I’d be pleased with the results, or my money back. Well, I’d heard that before but I was desperate. So, I gave it a shot.

To make a long story short, this system, which was basically an advertising system to promote your business, any business, worked like a charm. I have to admit, I was shocked. This system was the start of what led to my success that I enjoy today.
Now, let’s imagine that I continued with my negative attitude and I didn’t believe this person after I had spoken to him. What if I never tried his system? Would I have ever been successful? Well, maybe. Of course who knows how long it would have taken.

The point I am trying to make is this. Making a living on the Internet is hard enough. There is much to learn and even more to do. If you don’t go into it with a positive attitude and keep it as you go on, you’re most likely to give up. I have seen more than my share of people pack it in because they couldn’t keep a positive attitude.

Okay, how do you go about keeping a positive attitude? As with most things, this is easier said than done. Sometimes all good intentions go by the wayside because the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Well, here are a few things that you can do in order to keep that attitude of yours at the top of its game.

1. Make a schedule – If you jot things down on a piece of paper each day as far as what things you want to accomplish that day, you’ll get a feeling of accomplishment with each item on the list that you finish. Doing this will help keep that smile on your face. Trust me, even if the accomplishments are minor, such as writing your first article or your first email ad, you’ll feel great for doing it.

2. Reward Yourself – After you actually complete an item on your list, reward yourself for completing it. This can be done in a number of ways. What I do is take some time to play my guitar. You probably have other hobbies that you enjoy. Take some time to devote to those hobbies. You can do this for each task you complete.

3. Keep Records Of Progress – If you record each thing that you’ve accomplished, you’ll be able to look back at this record and realize just how much you’ve actually done. When we do things on a daily basis, we don’t always see the big picture. But if we make a note of what we’ve done and take a look at it all at once, we will begin to see just how much we’ve put behind us. This is a great way to keep a positive attitude.

4. Set Goals – Once you start earning an income, set goals for yourself. If you’ve made $100 your first month, set a goal for yourself of $200 for your second month. Keep increasing your goals each month. This will give you something to shoot for, which in turn will keep your attitude positive.

If you do these 4 simple things, you will find that keeping a positive attitude when running your business will be a lot easier than you can imagine.