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Everybody loves buying things, but most of us hate being sold to. Sales and advertising have negative connotations for many people and that’s because it makes them think of products being pushed on them. This is in no way unique to online marketing or the Internet marketing niche. Far from it. Pushy sales-people and -tactics have been around since long before the Internet came along.

In fact, online marketing is the perfect remedy against high-pressure selling, because it offers better alternatives.

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I already reported on Google’s most recent “slap” against spammy sites an content farms in my previous post. Shortly afterwards, we saw what is probably the biggest real-life difference this slap has made, in two different ways:

A few months ago, I sent out surveys to several groups of online marketers. My goal was to find out what the biggest problems and “sticking points” for online marketers were and part of the reason for that was that I wanted to find out if I could detect demand for a product or service I could provide. Quite surprisingly, the results showed that the number one biggest problem for most online marketers had nothing to do with online marketing.

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The IM Impact/SwissMadeMarketing affiliate program is now officially launched! Why SwissMadeMarketing? You’ll see in the video below. This is the affiliate program where you can promote all of my products and all joint products I have with business partners and earn tons of money for it. And I mean that. This program was built with one goal in mind: Make it ridiculously lucrative for my affiliates. Because what’s good for my affiliates is good for me.

Check out the video below to see the recording of the launch webinar, where I explain all the details:

The year has come to a close and what a year it has been! In this post, let me share part of my journey as well as lessons learnt in 2010.

1) Marketing Matters

At the beginning of this year, I was already an entrepreneur and (almost) completely self-employed. In fact, I had already been entrepreneurial for several years and it had been a long time since I’d had a job. However, while I was doing ok, I certainly wasn’t doing great. I sometimes worried about having to pay the bills, is what I’m saying.

I had always been a content creator and a product creator, but never much of a marketer. Sometime in 2008, I began taking marketing a little more seriously and pulled something of a personal branding stunt that landed me an interesting contract. But still, I was mainly a content creator. I believed that people would see the value of what I offered by themselves and I thought of marketing as somehow wrong and manipulative.

It wasn’t until late 2009 that I got serious about marketing and started really digging in and learning about it. And I quickly realized that marketing was much more significant than I’d ever imagined. Not only is it a hugely important driving force for any business, it’s also an almost fundamental human skill. Marketing is about the ability to get a messag across in an effective and powerful way. And marketing is also about listening and relating to people, because unless you offer something that someone needs, the best campaign in the world will do no good.

Without marketing, there is no business. And marketing is fundamentally about effective communication (although few internet marketers make it seem so).

2) Systems Are Important

Let me repeat that: Systems are important. And what I mean by systems is anything that handles a recurring process in your business. Signing up new contacts, receiving payments, refunding payments, labelling packages, shipping packages, following up with customers, gettin the paperwork right,… anything recurring.

Here’s how I learnt this: Above, I mentioned an “interesting contract”. Without boring you with too many details, I basically got an exclusive drop-shipping contract with a large retailer of a niche-product in Europe. I got this thanks to some personal branding (and a lot of hard work) that I’d been doing in the niche. Consequently, I was in charge of an online store for the past two years. In many ways, the store was a huge success. Mainly thanks to a need in the market, combined with the brand I had built around myself, business took off quickly and kept growing at a steady pace.

There were two problems: The first problem was that while revenue was very high, profits were minimal. There were too many costs associated with shipping and handling and all that. The far greater problem, as I soon discovered, was that the systems this store was built on (e-commerce system, warehouse-management and shipping etc.) were rubbish. They were poorly implemented and lacked flexibility. When working on the orders, I had to have up to five different windows with different programs, spreadsheets and applications open and do a lot of manual processing, even for the simplest tasks.

This meant I was spending hours a day, every day, doing what a few good automation systems could have handled in seconds. And it also meant that there were more problems and support tickets than necessary (lots of human labour = lots of human error).

Bottom line: the business was run sub-optimally, wasted my time, didn’t make enough money and didn’t leave enough time in the day to do the thing that would have increased profits: Marketing.

Automation systems were the difference between this business being a stellar success and me quitting after two years, having given up hope.

3) Some Things Are Worth the Wait

After a very good run with my first free products offered in the IM space as well as my first paid product, Backlink Battleplan, I got stuck. And I remained stuck for months on end. If you’ve been following along, you probably noticed this: There are several products that I talked about, but still haven’t released and I’ve been mentioning “technical difficulties” more often than I like to admit.

You maybe also noticed the epic post about membership site software and know that my own solution for memberships, product delivery and affiliate management has been pending for months.

Let me be clear: All of this has been very, very frustrating. But it’s also been necessary. Due to my previous experience with shoddy systems I will not settle for anything less than the best. I want the best product delivery system, the best autoresponder and the best affiliate program. No compromise. I’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money on my search for this perfect solution. And while, as of this writing, it’s still not 100% finished, it’s getting there and it will be worth it.

When I create a product, I take longer than most product creators. Because I don’t settle for “ok”. And it pays off, for me and for you.

I’m building an affiliate and product delivery system that will pay off. Big time. For me, but mainly for you.

4) Business Partner Heaven/Hell

In the past, I’ve worked on joint projects with other people and been bitterly disappointed. I can’t even remember how many joint ventures failed because some of the partners involved didn’t pull their weight. And yes, sometimes I was one of the ones not pulling their own weight, too.

Being involved in a partner-project where things aren’t working can be hell. It can be very frustrating and cost a lot of time and money.

On the other hand, if you have a business partner where the cooperation is smooth and dynamic and all partners are equally ambitious and excited about the project, it’s pure bliss. If you can work in a team where everyone can contribute with their greatest strengths while others do the tasks they’d be overwhelmed with, it’s amazing how much progress you can make.

I’ve been extremely fortunate this year, to find several business partners that amaze me with their levels of excellence and ambition and where we have a great dynamic of complementing each other. And needless to say, as a result of this, some very exciting things are under way!

Taking time to find the right business partners is another thing that can be very much worth the wait.

5) Finding My Voice

This is something that’s difficult to put into words. Gradually, over the course of the year, I’ve found my voice in this market. I am slowly but surely becoming more authentic and more confident in my content. It’s not that I ever tried to be anything but authentic, it’s just that it didn’t work right from the start. This is something that content creation of any kind is great for: The more you write, create and record, the more you find your own voice.

It’s very liberating to speak in your own voice and be heard. And if you’re not there yet, just keep creating content and keep digging until your find your own voice.

6) The Human Learning Machine

The human brain is amazing. It’s as amazing as the education system I went through is flawed.

Just over a year ago, I did not know how to build a website myself (I always had to hire people to do it for me), I had limited knowledge of marketing and I knew absolutely nothing about all the systems and technology that drive online marketing. Fast forward to now and I have a portfolio of over 30 sites I built myself, I have a reasonably good practical and theoretical understanding of marketing and I know the technology behind it all as well as any non-programmer can know it.

I was always a barely-good-enough-to-pass student. My grades were never great and I had difficulties learning. Yet, in the past year, I have soaked up more information and gained more practical experience than in all my years in school. So it seems, at least.

The human brain is a learning machine. Get into the trenches and learn-by-doing on a topic that you are truly interested in and amazing things can happen. No matter what your grades looked like.

Gratitude

If I had to narrow all of my journey in 2010 down to one thing, it would be gratitude. Of course, it’s fantastic to have income streams that take care of all the bills and then some. And I’m grateful for that. Much more than that, I’m grateful for the people I’ve connected with, grateful for the experiences I’ve gained and grateful for the opportunity to work with and help people in their marketing efforts.

In other words: Thank you (yes, You).

A “Unique Selling Proposition” is your message about what sets you, your business, your brand apart from all the others. USPs are something of a marketing fundamental, but knowing about them and actually implementing them in your business are two entirely different things. And if you’re a blogger, a marketer or a product creator, is branding even one of the things on your mind?

Well, if you’d like to get a better response from people in your market, if you’d like to make more sales and if you’d like to get more comments on your blog, then your USP might have more to contribute to your goals than you suspected. And instead of talking fluff around the subject or giving you a vapid 10-point list, I decided to give you a very practical example of how to apply a USP, that you can test right away. And don’t worry about branding your entire business just yet. You can use this method for any single piece of content you create.

Watch the video below to see what I mean:

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Are you working on “making money online” or on building a business? You may wonder if there’s even a difference – after all, isn’t the purpose of a business to make money? Of course, much of it comes down to how you want to define each expression, but let me illustrate a big difference in mindset that I believe is reflected in these two option

Watch the video and see the rest of this article to see how you can make sure you’re on the right track.

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