Watching how easy the gurus and super stars of the internet marketing industry make it seem a newbie might at first think online wealth is easy to attain. But after a short while they will realize that it isn’t so. Everybody, including the current gurus and super affiliates lose money at first. Sadly the newbies that can’t figure out why they are losing money will give up and quit. But success as an internet marketer, like anything else in life, is a process. Before success can be attained the process must be completed.
So the obvious question is what is the “process”? What has been stated so far about becoming successful in internet marketing is obvious because the same thing applies to any business. The basic business concept is fairly simple. Produce more income than you had to spend to make the income. There are start up costs, operating costs, and expansion costs. But navigating each phase of money management for internet marketing is a topic for a future article. Let’s proceed with the subject of incompetence.
Incompetence of course is not a desirable goal or achievement. The real key, is to not remain incompetent. If you are new to internet marketing and you want to become a super affiliate there is a harsh reality that must be recognized. At first you will be incompetent. But there are stages to incompetence. To become successful before going broke you must recognize the two stages of incompetence and correct them in order to move into the two stages of competence. This will take great effort. Not necessarily great time and/or expense, but definitely great effort.
There are four competency phases you will have to navigate through. They are unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. See if the assessment of each phase stated below causes a light to come on for you.
Phase One – Unconsciously Incompetent
In this phase you are unsuccessful and you don’t know why. Everything you try seems to fail. There is something to this internet marketing business that you just keep missing. The answer to getting out of this phase isn’t spending more money. It’s education, knowledge, information. To get out of this phase you must recognize that you are in it. Realize you don’t know everything you need to know in order to be a successful internet marketer.
Phase Two – Consciously incompetent
You are not yet successful. You still lose more money than you can make running any campaign. But in this phase you are starting to identify what you are not good at yet in running an internet marketing campaign. You know the basic elements that make up a campaign – traffic, an offer, and conversions. You start to see the gaps missing in your understanding or technique in the areas of traffic, offers, and tracking conversions. Now you seek knowledge either from trial and error, self education from the plethora of information sources on the internet (i.e. this site), or from a guru – paid or unpaid.
Phase Three – Consciously competent
You actually figure out how to make money in this phase. Because you realize there are things you need to learn you seek out the information you need, and begin putting into practice the things you learn. You can now find a reliable traffic source (Popups, Facebook advertising platform, Google, Bing, Yahoo) and you learn which techniques to use to drive and integrate that traffic into an audience for your offers (FB fan pages, websites or blogs). You learn how to do niche research to find a suitable, as well as profitable, niche. And you learn which offers within the niche are truly worthwhile for you. By putting this all together you can track the money you spend and know when to quickly give up on a non-performing ad so as not to lose more money. After the right tweaks you create a successful ad campaign and make some money. At this point though you may still wonder if you can do it again. But you are on your way to the final phase of internet marketing success.
Phase Four – Unconsciously Competent
In this phase you make money and scale it into massive profits. You now know how to choose appealing offers, you’ve mastered being able to generate massive interest (ads that get clicked, emails that get opened) from your chosen traffic source(s) for your targeted audience, and you know how to create landing pages that convert. Because you become so good at doing this over and over for multiple offers and campaigns – the rinse-and-repeat scenario – it seems to others like you have the golden touch. Everything you choose to market turns into a profit for you. At this point you understand all the things that make your campaigns successful and you understand it so well that it’s not tedious at all to put successful campaigns together, so you rinse-and-repeat at will. This is the phase that all internet marketers strive to achieve.
The Bottom Line
Success is a journey. The length of the journey may vary from person to person. The four phases briefly discussed here are just an overview of them. The key is to recognize where you are in your journey, and learn what you need to learn in order to move on to the next phase. Continue on this journey of becoming a successful internet marketer and once you complete it your life and that of your entire family tree will be changed forever.
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