THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY POSTED SOME TIME AGO IN ANOTHER BLOG THAT I OWN. I JUST RE-POSTED IT HERE FOR ALL OF YOU WHO ARE JUST STARTING OUT THEIR ONLINE ADVENTURE. THIS IS JUST MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND IT DOESN`T MEAN YOU WILL HAVE IT THE SAME.
This is not a story you want to hear if you believe that making money on internet is fast and easy. Yes, maybe there are couple of lucky ppl who pulled it off, but for an average person making money online is much more a nightmare then a dream come true.
After almost 2 years of researching the internet marketing world, I have to say that I wasted a lot of money online. And it all happened because of my personal belief that there is money to be made there. And even though I still believe in it, I can`t say that I found the right formula. Yet. What I can say is that I am finally on the right track…
So I am willing to share my experience in order to maybe help some of you who are just starting or thinking about it. Once again, this is only my personal experience (and I know at least another 100 who had it the same, but they are ashamed to talk about it).
I first started to think about making money online in 2004. I saw a Google Ad about “easy cash on demand” and I was curious so I clicked. After reading the sales page (landing page) I was convinced that all I had to do is to purchase the product and money will start flying in without me doing anything (talk about great sales letter,lol). Of course, after I bought it, I realized that it is not nearly as simple. And I returned to my life without any further work. But the seed was planted.
In 2007 my boyfriend (who is from USA) moved to my country (in Europe) in order for us to be together. Since a working permit is not so easy to get and it takes forever, I started to think about making money online once again. We thought that we could make an extra income from “the comfort of our app”.
First thing we joined was GDI (Spider Web). We used Google ads in order to drive traffic and pretty soon we saw that we are spending way too much money on ads while not making ANY sales. Yes, we had leads, but none of them was converting. Then we concluded that we have no knowledge about internet marketing and that we should educate ourselves prior to buying any more products. So we canceled Spider web (fyi, canceling took us number of e-mails, and couple of phone calls with a very rude person on the other side). We were very pissed to find out that joining was easy as push of a button but canceling was almost impossible.
Then we started our own research. We found some e-books, lots of articles, searched the forums….when we felt ready we decided to find a perfect product. And it was perfect, let me tell you. PUSH BUTTON EXTREME , The Headline was: Just Get In Line And Get Paid (how convenient for naive suckers like me).
OK. I admit it – I wanted fast money, a shortcut. And yes NOW I know that it is not possible. So to cut long story short I joined and cycled once in 25 days, “made” $27. I can`t really remember how much was it to join but I know for sure it was more than $27 + you had to pay monthly payments in order to stay a member. The thing was that you had to recruit others to join in order to make money. At the time, I still had no clue how to recruit, and honestly I didn`t want to recruit for a BS program like PBX. So it was another waste of my money.
Next thing I joined was 2×2 Prosperity Formula. On their landing page, it said that they have LIVE trainings every day for NEWBIES (and that I was for sure), plus you get 1000 “fresh, hot” leads every month .LOL,LOL,LOL. I finally thought this is it, I will have live trainings, real person, successful online marketers who will teach me everything I need to know, and once I learn I will be on my way to success.
Oh boy, was I wrong. I started to attend the booth camp every day for couple of hours. It was held by known internet marketer, who had very good motivational skills, she made us feel very special, almost like chosen to achieve our dreams. We felt connected and for the first time we felt like none of us is alone any more – anything seemed possible at the time.
After a month of those trainings none of us still did not make any money. (Alarm was ringing in my head but I WANTED TO LEARN AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE SO I KEPT QUIET). And I have to be honest, I did learn a lot there….when I look back I see it as a beginning of a long, long learning curve.
Anyways, we believed our teacher and followed her steps; we advertised our guts out, safelists, ads, solos, banners, e-mail marketing, follow ups…but nothing was happening, not a single sign up. Zero, Zilch, Nada. And I am not talking 2 hours/day, I am talking at least 8 hours/day, Saturdays, Sundays… 8 hours/day and NO RESULT.
But it only got worse from there. Since I am a graphic designer and my boyfriend knows a little programming, our teacher asked us would we be willing to contribute to the team by creating unique landing pages. She said, if we all have unique landing pages, we would get more sign ups (logical). And of course, we did. (yes, it was her autoresponder and the whole team was actually building her lists…).
Along with us, she picked the person with the best organizing skills, the best copy writer, the best writer… She was creating LIVE cash machine for herself. A team that ended up working for her 10-15 hours/day , without a penny. Since none of us still didn`t make a dime, she blamed it all on a program, she said that the program is bad and that we have to find something else.
The “next BIG thing” was MY MUSIC TICKET. For all of you who are online for some time, you know how “big” it was. What a joke. It was suppose to launch in couple of weeks and she got the whole team advertising to get as many sign ups as possible. We made couple of landing pages, banners… she was pumping us with ideas of HUGE earnings, she “knew” the owners, she said we all have the best positions (it is all about positions in matrixes)…Naturally, in the meantime, we all joined bunch of programs UNDER HER , each time thinking we will earn something. Anything.
I will name some of them: 4X1 FORTUNE, EZ2X2, EXTREME BOMBSHELL, 50k BANNERS, NCD RICHES, Little Ticket To Wealth, AdvGlobal, ApInstant,AdVentures, Magic Surfs, WNP, Mega10 Success, SurfsUp, 7-11Club, Silver Lodge, I can`t even remember all. And like I said, all of us joined under her in each of those programs. We maybe “earned” $100 from the programs through all that time. And God only knows how much we spent.
MMT (MY MUSIC TICKET) launch was a disaster. The whole thing went down a drain, leaving us all with broken dreams. So, after who knows how many programs, couple of us decided to leave the “team” and go our separate ways. But before we left, we decided to do some investigating about our “teacher” (so often called “guru” and “leader”) earnings. All in all we found out that she has been earning $16 000/ month since the boot camp. Yes. $16000/month. It is not a typo. LOL.
So here is what I concluded: There is NO MONEY to be made in Matrixes if you are a newbie or if your name is not Rachel Long, Paul Darby, Jane Mark…or other names you heard of. The owners of all the matrixes call those “leaders” before they launch it. They lay out the matrix TOGETHER according to the number of ppl on the mailing lists (each of those leaders has a huge mailing lists that they have been building for years). The leader with the biggest list goes on the top and cycles the most, next one is the one with a little smaller list…and so on and so on…. Plus, all of the “leaders” get their links early, so by the time any of us joins and get our links, they already recruited everybody . None of the matrixes last long – and that is the reason, the leaders make HUGE MONEY and they move on. All the others? They don`t even stand a chance.
Learning curve
After we spent summer working offline (I do have an offline business), we returned to internet once again. We said that we will not purchase another product until we learn everything there is (I know that is not possible,lol) to internet marketing. I will list only part of the courses and e-books that we used:
1. AdWords Black Book Course – Full Set with DVD Training
2. Adwords Manifesto
3. Adwords Profits 2
4. Affiliate Assasin
5. Affiliate Rockstar Status
6. BlackHat is Back 2
7. CB Quantum
8. Commission Blueprint 2.0
9. CPA Wealth
10. Ewen Chia’s Courses
11. Explosive Niche Marketer
12. Google Cash 4 Home
13. Google Cash Detective
14. Google Snatch
15. Guru Assasin
16. HubPage Traffic Series
17. Launch Tree
18. Marketing Explosion
19. Maverick Money Makers
20. Niche Profit Classroom Different
21. PPC Classroom
22. Super Affiliate Traffic Class
23. The Elevate Blueprint
24. Traffic Secrets Audio Set
25. Ultimate Traffic Secret
26. Zero Friction Marketing
27. 20-30 books and courses about Twitter
28. Adwords-black-book
29. Clickbank Code
30. Affiliate Blackbook
Like I said, this is only part. We divided the courses among 2 of us and compared the notes afterwords. I will post HONEST reviews about each and every course/book as soon as I have some extra time.
Pretty soon we had a lot of notes laying around, some important urls in our favorites, some on our desktop: working like that was impossible. We decided to organize and we made a list of traffic sources from all of the books and courses that we purchased. Needles to say it took a loot of time to do it, but, OMG, it simplified our marketing soooooooo much. We just pick which traffic source we `ll use for a day and that is it, - point, click and generate traffic. Not to mention the leverage of time…
We made it for our personal use but we started to get more and more questions about traffic sources from the people on our list that we decided to share it with couple of randomly picked people. The results were great and that is why we decided to make Online Traffic Bible….
We never expected such a success, it is overwhelming. We thank you for that.
