My Personal 100% True Internet Marketing Story

First of all, who am I? At the time of writing this, that is April 2011, I am a full time student still in graduate school. Grad school is probably the worst places of all if you are going to start an internet marketing business. Not only do you have to take course work, but you also need to be doing a ton of research. Laboratory work can be more fun than course work, however lab work almost never goes on according to your original time table. Sometimes you aim to finish things by 6 pm, but it doesn't end till 2 am. Sometimes you make a silly mistake and you have to redo things all over. Sometimes, you are in the field collecting samples and you don't get to go home for days. In short what I'm trying to say is that in spite of this busy schedule, I was able to

1. Start an internet marketing business with zero capital,
2. Grow it gradually until I could earn 6 figures in 2010

Did I tell you that I also have two toddlers?

A Spam Email Promoting an Internet Marketing Product

It all started from one of those earn money from Google spam emails. I had seen similar emails and commercials earlier, but never gave them any respect. This was the first time I opened such an email and read the whole thing. I don't remember the details of the email, but somehow it got me to do some research on the topic of internet marketing. This was December of 2007. I remember reading good reviews about a product called 'Profit lance'. I wanted to buy it but I was determined not to purchase it until the final exams were over (something like December 15th) because I knew it will be a distraction.

To make a long story short, I built my first website in February of 2008, made my first sale in April of 2008, went on to earn a total of $1500 in 2008, improved it to ~ $20,000 in 2009 and made 6 figures in 2010.

Take home message from my internet marketing story

What I want you to understand is that I achieved all this in spite of being in grad school, in spite of having two kids and with only a few hours a week to spend on internet marketing. On a good day I managed 4 hours on IM while on other days it would have been 1 hour or less. If I could achieve this kind of success in online marketing with that kind of limitations, anybody CAN DO IT!

I hope to share my knowledge, skills and attitudes through this internet marketing blog. Hope you will put these free internet marketing tips to good use and make some real $$$ with it!

In case you were wondering what on earth the image of test tubes doing on an internet marketing blog… well that's the kind of work I was doing at the time of starting all this. Actually, it's still the kind of work that I'm doing every week… makes up about 50 hours of work every week. And yes… I still find time to do my little internet marketing and even to give away some free internet marketing tips

I was looking for Free Internet Marketing Tips

Yep that's right! I was looking for free tips and tricks to build my internet marketing business. At that time, this website on free internet marketing tips of mine (obviously) didn't exist so I had a very hard time finding any valuable information. Gasoline prices in the USA had come down and my first niche website wasn't making me money anymore (after October 2008 or so).

During (and before) this time period, I was looking for free internet marketing tips on places like the Warrior Forum and I saw everybody HIGHLY recommending use of WordPress as a platform to build your niche websites. So whenever I had time I learned a little bit of this and that and I had a couple of niche blogs running. People also talked about monetizing their niche blogs using Ebay those and I promptly applied for an account at Ebay. Since I was not getting any significant traffic and because my sites were nothing more than thin affiliate sites, Ebay turned me down.

Fortunately, I didn't give up on my internet marketing dream and I applied for the Amazon Associates program. To my surprise, my websites were approved and Amazon has been a life changer for me to say the least.

I was still not building any backlinks to my sites. The only method of backlink building I knew of was article submission. I may have done 10 submissions all of 2008. I remember being on like page 5 (for this Nintendo blog) for most of 2008. I did not buy any/many WSOs or other products on search engine optimization. I wanted to learn everything for free. As a result, the progress I made with my internet marketing business was extremely slow in 2008.

I basically had two brief successes in 2008 which earned me a cumulative total of about $2000. The first was from my 'increase gas mileage' related website that I mentioned earlier about my first internet marketing website; the second success was where I got like 1000 visitors to my Nintendo related blog on Black Friday of 2008 where I made about $35 with AdSense earnings. I will talk about this second experience with my next post. That turned out to be a big game plan changer ultimately.

The take home message from this post is that my 'stinginess', my quest for free internet marketing tips and free SEO tips severely slowed down my progress. However, I was still able to experience at least a few successes because I took action. If somebody that wants to get into internet marketing asks me the route he/she should take regarding free internet marketing tips and strategies vs paid products, this is what I would say.

• If you have more money than time, then by all means take the paid route. That will definitely speed up your progress. However, it's important that you pick the right products/mentors.
• If you have more time than money and/or you're on a tight budget, don't worry about it! You can still do it with the abundantly available free tips on internet marketing and SEO available today. You just need to take the right action and persist. Then once the money starts trickling in, you should reinvest that money in the business to speed things up.

With this internet marketing blog of mine, I intend to teach both methods. If you don't want to spend money initially, that is totally fine. That's how I did it, and that's how you will do it. Simple as that.

If you have the resources for and would rather take the paid route, I will tell you exactly which tools you need to invest on.

P.S. In case you were wondering why on earth did I pick an image of a snail for this post on free internet marketing tips, well…. that was the kind of pace I was progressing at because I took the free route in 2008. However, note that it has reached the top even at snail pace

My Internet Marketing Journey – The First Niche Website

During this internet marketing journey of mine, I've made a few bold decisions. Now when I look back, I'm sometimes surprised I made those decisions. I don't have anyone doing business in my family (well… I take that back: no one in my immediate family are in business! My dad is an academic, 2 of my uncles are engineers, another one is a judge, all my aunts just like my mom were stay at home moms. Yeah I know 'too much information', but I'm just trying to say I had no background in business whatsoever); never had read a book on business (let alone a formal education in marketing); I knew nothing about marketing online; I knew nothing about making a website; and the only thing that I had bought online was a notebook from the official DELL website.

My first internet marketing website

Yet here I am believing everything I read on an email in my spam folder and excited about internet marketing! Fortunately, it didn't stop there…. I went on to purchase a basic hosting plan from Host Gator for which I had to pay $9.95/month and picked a product from ClickBank marketplace which had a very high gravity. Then I bought a productname-suffix.com domain name and built an extremely colorful and funny looking one-page (it's still a one-page site after all these years) static website using the free WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor 'Kompozer'. I knew very little or knew noting about most things, but I went on to make that first niche website of mine!

What I did right knowing nothing about making money online

First of all, I picked up one hell of a niche to market to. It was around this time in 2007-08 that the gas prices were sky rocketing. For the first time ever, gasoline hit the $4/gallon in the USA and people were looking for ways to increase their gas mileage. I knew absolutely jack about market research or niche selection or whatever you want to call it (as you can see, I still don't know the proper words to use) yet I picked the right market at the time.

Second of all, I picked one hell of a product to promote from ClickBank. It was a controversial product and the only reason why I picked it was because I could understand and explain the Science behind it thanks to my background in science. I didn't think the official website did a good job explaining the Science behind the product.

Thirdly, I knew nothing about linking out to relevant sites, but I linked to research from the MIT and other research institutes that talked about this controversial technology. I didn't know it was a good SEO practice, but I had done it because I did want to do a good job simplifying and explaining this 'science' to my readers.

I did all the wrong things when it came to on page SEO: I made a one page site; I stuffed keywords and inserted keywords in white font all over the site just to name a few. I didn't even know that a component called 'off page SEO' existed. However, I learned about Craigslist and DIGG from the Warrior Forum and spammed the hell out of those two places with spammy comments like "wow this guy increased his MPG 200% – check it out".

On DIGG, they basically republish stuff that was already published elsewhere and through DIGG, I found out about these 'news like' sites and commented on those blogs as well. Sure I was spamming, but I guess I was sharing some of my scientific knowledge as well. Without knowing what I was doing, I was gradually building backlinks to my site and I was even attracting visitors through these spammy comments. And then, these people would have spent quite a lot of time on my site trying to understand the scientific concepts that I was trying to explain on my site. As a result, I was also making sales. I started building this site in February 2008 and I had made my first sale in April… not too bad.

I guess Google bot saw the backlinks; that they were increasing by the day; that authority sites were linking to me (Craigslist, DIGG, news sites); the people coming to my site and that they were hanging in there for a while and thought my site had good useful information. One day, I made 2 sales and I checked my Google rankings to see what the hell happened. I was ranking #5 on first page for the keyword 'product name suffix' which happened to be my 'exact match domain name'. I was delighted, but little did I know that this search phrase had a massive search volume of 5 searches per day. I might have ranked for other keywords also, but I wouldn't know; I knew nothing about Google analytics or any other kind of tracking.

What mattered is that I DID it

I went on to make $700+ in August of 2008 and over 2K total sales in 2008. If I remember right, the gas prices came down in September 2008 and sales gradually died away.

What ultimately mattered was the fact that I just did it. I knew nothing about internet marketing, I knew nothing about market research or product selection, I knew nothing about on page or off page SEO. But I did a few things, some of them were the right things to do; others were not. Everyday I read on forums etc. that there X many people that have been reading/buying products about internet marketing for Y many months/years who are yet to embark on their first internet marketing project because they think their knowledge is still not sufficient/perfect to start an online business. If any of those guys happen to read this, the only message I want you to take home is 'Just do it – it doesn't need to be perfect; noting will teach you the rights and wrongs than just doing it'.