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

In this short video, I explain exactly what the big difference is, to me:

Here’s a recap of the main points (also: search engine fodder):

Commitment

People who are looking for ways to “make money online” are the favourite prospects of most online marketing product-creators and even affiliates. Why? Because they are most likely opportunity seekers. They can be sold on the big dream of finding that magical button that will just make the Internet spew out unlimited amounts of money, no work required.

Just take a quick look at some IM forums and at about 90% of IM-related sales-pages. There’s no shortage of people who are looking for a shortcut.

Most people don’t want to build and run a business. Building a business is something that most people associate with hard work, taking risks, management, support and customer relationship management, more complicated tax forms and other boring, un-sexy stuff. Want to build a business and be “the boss”? No thanks!
How about making some money online? Yes, sign me up for that!

Making money online is non-committal and this is reflected in the sales-messages of many products. Just install some software, push some buttons and watch the money roll in. Get automatic traffic. Never mind that those are actual human beings visiting your website. Never mind that the money you make comes out of other people’s pockets.

The most popular themes in online marketing require no commitment on your part: build a mini-site, fill it with auto-generated content, slap some ads or promotions on it and move on.

Investment Management

So, am I telling you that you should forget about mini-sites and affiliate marketing and either get a job or build a “real”, public business with branding and customer service and all that?

No.

I do recommend getting out of the “make money” mindset and consider the following: start thinking of “making smart investments” as your primary goal. That is, in many ways, what business is about.

Maybe you’re just starting out and the only thing you have to invest is your time. That’s fine. It’s also about making smart investments concerning your time. The question should be: how and where can you invest this time, so that you can start making some income fairly quickly? And then, more importantly: how can you invest that income to scale up your operations?

What’s your take on this? Do you think of what you do as building a business or making money? Are you committed for the long-term or is it something you want to get over with so you can go to the beach (in your expensive car)? As always, I’d love to hear your take on this topic.

Cheers,

Anyway, on to the actual topic. About once a month, something or other happens, that gets a lot of people all worried about the “end of online marketing”! Be it a new feature Google introduces (personalized search, anybody?), some rules changing (e.g. new Facebook advertisement rules), marketer’s accounts getting banned (AdWords, Blogger,…) or anything else along those lines. Whenever something like that happens, you can count on a lot of wailing about how the days of making easy money online are finally counted etc. etc.

Well, here’s an interesting counter-argument:

Is this thing accurate? I don’t know.

Is it a good illustration of the fact that the Internet is simply far too vast for the human mind to comprehend and that opportunities for businesses and growth are mind-bogglingly numerous? Hell yes!

Cheers,

Automation software for Internet marketing purposes: It’s all the rage right now, and has been for quite a while. There are numerous offers for programs that will automate all kinds of tasks from distributing articles, videos or bookmarks to completely creating or re-writing content (shudder). Look at a few discussion threads about automation software in a forum and you’ll quickly realize that bots are at the centre of many a heated debate. Some say that automation is all rubbish and never really works like it should and others swear by it.

In this article, I introduce three concepts that are essential to understanding the use and misuse of automation bots.

Disclaimer

1. I am an automation software user.
   I just want to make that clear since it might mean that I’m biased towards bots. I have to also mention that I only use bots for a couple of tasks; others I do manually. More on this in the article.
   –
2. Redundancy warning.
   I decided to try making a video and written post. The written post says the same as the videos do. If you prefer watching, check out the videos. If you prefer reading, read the article below the videos.

Videos:

Text:

Here are the three things you need to know about automation software:

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There Is Always a Failure Rate

This is just something you need to be aware of, when you are using automatic submission software.

I bring this up because every so often, you’ll encounter someone in a forum complaining that the software “doesn’t work half the time” or something along those lines.

One part of the equation is how well you set the automation software up, one part is how well it’s programmed and another part is simply how many of the sites the bot goes to have changed.

Every time a website changes something in their layout or login/submission process or whatever, there’s a significant chance that the bot will get stuck on that site, somewhere. If you’re using a well-supported program, the next update will fix the problem… until the site changes something again.

This doesn’t mean that the software “isn’t working”. Automation isn’t about hitting it right 100% of the time. It’s about hitting way more and way more often than you could manually.

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Value Output versus Effort Input

The value you get back from any kind of SEO or website promotion always needs to be looked at in relation to the effort you have to put into it.

If you can get a backlink from a really high-PR authority site in your niche, then that’s great. But if it takes you hours upon hours of work, spread out over several days or even weeks to get that one backlink, it might not be worth it at all.

The question is: What else could you have accomplished in that time? Maybe you could have added value to your website, built a free giveaway product to start building a list, done some personal branding or obtained half a dozen slightly lower-quality links in that same time?

On the other hand, you could spend days submitting an article to all of the hundreds of article directories out there, logging into twenty different social bookmarking sites and submitting your bookmarks, going to link-directories and submitting your URL etc. etc.
Here, the situation is reversed: You’re spending all this time for something that has very little value (e.g. nofollow links from a PR1 bookmarking site). If you could spend that same time to get just one really good link…

You get the idea.

Automation software can be used to shift this balance between the value of your promotional work and the effort you put into in your favour.

A bot can do low- to mid-value website promotion in bulk, running in the background. This way, obtaining 100 low-value backlinks from directories takes the same amount of time as obtaining just one such link (fill the forms once, then start the bot).

If used correctly, what automation software does is leverage your time. You take a certain amount of time to set everything up initially. Then you take a bit of time to get things started and once the bot is up and running, you can get exponential returns on that initial time spent.

–

You’re Still the One With the Brain

The more automatic a software tool is, the more easily and moronically it can be abused. Despite what countless sales-pages would have you believe, automatic software is not the solution to all your Internet marketing problems and it most certainly doesn’t do all the work for you.

These programs are simply tools that make your job easier. The quality you get out of them depends greatly on how you wield these tools.

If I give you a chainsaw, you won’t suddenly have lots of firewood readily available and trees won’t fall as soon as you approach them. But turning a tree into usable firewood will be a lot easier with the chainsaw than if you had only your bare hands or an axe to use. You still have to know what you’re doing with that chainsaw to get results, though.

Admittedly, the ridiculous overpromises littering sales-pages for automation software are at least partially to blame for the fact that in the online marketing landscape, there are quite a few people standing next to trees, complaining that they aren’t falling by themselves even though they have all those shiny new chainsaws at home.

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Reviews!

As you can imagine, I have some reviews of automation software coming up in the near future. I’ve been experimenting with several programs for quite a while now and I’ve been seeing some very interesting results (and non-results).

Stay tuned!

Affiliate marketing is an attractive business model, although the real reasons for this are rarely stated. They tend to get drowned out by all the hype. Contrary to what your average sales-pitch would have you believe, affiliate marketing isn’t super-easy and it very rarely, if ever, makes anyone rich over night. It also involves actual work, actual investments and actual effort. Just like a “real” business. Go figure. In spite of all this, there are still many reasons to love affiliate marketing. The foremost can be summarized in just one word: Scalability.

Why Scalability and What’s With the Awful Graphic?

With scalability I specifically mean how your return of profits scales against your investment of time. And yes, there is an actual reason why I chose the most clichéd, worn-out, caricature of a graph representing success. When you see that graph, you assume that the upwards trend pictured is a monetary one, right? Time advancing from left to right, we see that more and more cash is rolling in and that’s what us greedy bastards are all ultimately after.

So far, so good. What’s more important than the information given, though, is the information omitted. A very important question to ask is: How much am I investing to get this increase in profit? And I don’t mean the investment of money. As long as the returns are climbing at a higher rate than your investments, it’s all good. It’s your investment of time and energy that will have the greatest impact on your quality of life.

If your investment of time and energy scales 1:1 with your profit, that’s bad news. This is the predicament you often find yourself in when working 9-5: You can make more money, but only if you work longer hours. As long as the money you make is directly linked to the time you invest, there is always a cap on how much you can make. Much worse, the more you make, the less time you have to live, so unless what you do for a living is already your favourite thing in the world, it means you have to trade in life-quality for money. And that sucks.

Enter Affiliate Marketing

Let’s just look at affiliate marketing as a pure numbers game, for a minute. You are selling a product and you have a certain conversion rate. Let’s say you have a 1% conversion rate after refunds. In other words, you make exactly one sale for every 100 visitors to your website. Obviously, in this situation, there is still a link between time invested and profits made. But here, you can be clever about how you invest your time. While you do have to set up a site worth visiting, provide some content worth seeing, perhaps spend some money on advertising and much more, the number of visitors your site has is largely still independent of the time you spend. For one thing, people can be visiting your site and buying products whether you are present or not. More importantly, if you find the right angle, if you target the right keywords and if you invest in the right advertising, your site’s visitors can potentially sky-rocket. You can get ten times as many visitors (and therefore ten times as many sales) as last week, if you invest an hour or two cleverly.

To achieve this, you need a lot of experience and/or a good deal of luck. We often forget that overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work. But working in a highly scalable business such as affiliate marketing, you know that the time invested can eventually yield exponential results.

That, for me, is the Nr. 1 reason to get into affiliate marketing.
That, and the fact that I have a natural talent for writing scammy, overblown sales-hype.