A Day in the Life of an Internet Marketer

by: SBC Staff

So you’ve decided to build your retirement by marketing on the Internet!  Fire the boss, have time for the family, work in your pajamas, etc., etc., etc.  You’ve read all the ads, visited the web pages touting the latest and greatest MLM programs, and you’re convinced you’re going to spend an hour or so a day, make millions while you sleep, and have your ISP begging you not to get any more hits to your website.  Yeah, right!

Internet marketing, whether you’re selling your own products or services, or promoting someone else’s products, services or programs, is hard work.  It’s a business just like any other.  If you run a store that sells hardware, you wouldn’t expect to stroll in at noon, spend an hour making a few calls and ringing up sales and then go home.  Working on the Internet is no different.  Treat it like a business or forget about being successful.

There are programs that try to get you to believe they will do all the work for you.  You just sit back and count your money.  Think about it.  Why are they going to pay you for nothing?  Are they just in a benevolent mood?  Chances are they want some of your money to get you enrolled for your free fortune.  Period.  That’s what they’re after.  They will do all the work.  You’ll earn chump change.  They’ll make a fortune.  It’s as simple as that.

So what’s the bottom line?  Be prepared to work as hard as you would on any other job, and maybe harder!

The Getting Started Phase

Getting started can be more work than actually running the business.  You need to find lead sources.  Once you find them, you must enroll in some manner.  Maybe you’re getting several FFA pages of your own, joining a hundred or so newsgroups or lists, preparing classified ads and banners, getting your free email addresses to use for advertising, getting an autoresponder set up to provide information to those who request it and planning your daily activities.  Make no mistake about it, this is a lot of work and will take a lot of time!

As you sign up for the programs you’re interested in, you’ll need to prepare a “cheat sheet” listing all the pertinent details, such as user names, passwords, and URLs for your FFA pages and submission services.  You’ll also want to start formulating your ads.  Use Notepad, WordPad or Word to write your ads so you can copy and paste them when you’re ready to use them.

You’ll also need a method of tracking how well your ads perform.  We use ROIBOT, but there are several alternatives on the market that you should check out as well.  Using ROIBOT, we enter the URL we are promoting, give it a campaign number, and ROIBOT will automatically assign a new URL to the promotion and track the number of times that URL gets clicked.  For example, if we are advertising our free newsletters using four different lead sources, it would like this:

As you can see from the above, we are promoting the same URL, www.peakconsultinginc.com/newsletters , using all four lead sources.  But when we advertise, the ROIBOT URL is used so that we know which lead source generated the prospect.  Of course, all four ROIBOT URLs take the user to the same place.  ROIBOT then provides campaign reports that show the source of the clicks on your ads.

After you have your tracking system set up, using whatever service you choose, add these tracking URLs to your ad sheet so you can copy and paste them into your ads as you place or email them.

Moving Into Day-to-Day Operations

You’re all set up and ready to roll.  Now what do you do?  To a certain extent it depends on the lead programs you’ve joined.  Some FFA programs require you to log in to your administrative website and email your ads from the web.  Others allow you to download your leads and send them out yourself, usually within three to five days.  Some of the web-based mailers allow you to set a lag time for mailing.  This is very important.  If your FFA page requires you to mail out your ads immediately from the web, find another FFA program to join.  Your ad will go out with thousands of others and be lost in your targets’ junk email boxes.  If you can set the lag or if you download your leads and mail them yourself, your ad will likely have less competition when you send it out.

So for this type of leads, you won’t be doing anything except downloading your leads for the first few days so you can establish your lag time.  Use these first few days to set up your classified ads in your submission services and for your newsgroups and lists.  You can start posting these ads immediately.

Once you have established your lag, you are ready to start sending out your ads on a daily basis.  For the leads you download, start up your group mailer, load your leads, draft your message, test the mailer, then send your message to your first list.  You will have a separate mailing for each list from each FFA or other source.  Most lead sources do not allow you to mix the mailing lists.

While the group mailer is mailing your leads, you can go to your administrative pages to mail out leads from those sources that require you to mail from the web or perform other activities.  The mailings will take quite a while depending on how large your lists are.  You should expect to mail out about 10 to 20 ads per minute.  So beware of programs that tell you you’ll spend only two hours per day mailing to 20,000 leads per day.  True, you can do other things while the group mailer does its thing, but you’ll have to be available to manually set up the next list to mail when the previous one is done.  And you’ll probably find that other tasks, such as creating new ads, banners and classifieds, analyzing your ad campaigns, etc. will more than fill the time while your mailer is working.

You should also note that you will be limited as to how much you can do on your computer while the mailing is going on by the speed of your processor and the amount of RAM your computer has.  You will also be limited by the speed of your Internet connection.  If you’re serious about making your living on line, you may want to upgrade your computer and check out getting a DSL connection to the Internet.  It will cost you a bit up front, but prices are pretty low now and the time you’ll save will make it well worth it.

You’ll also be constantly looking for new lead sources.  You will find that you are advertising to a lot of the same people over time using your original sources.  This is not all bad since people generally need to see your ad seven times or more before they buy, but fresh sources of leads periodically can give your business a boost.

You will also need to begin attempting to build your own personal mail list.  This list will be composed of people who have specifically opted to receive offers from you.  Possibly you’ll start your own newsletter or ezine to collect addresses.  Both these endeavors will take a lot of your time, but you can’t buy customers that will be as loyal as those on your own opt-in list or subscribers to your newsletter or ezine.

You’ll also want to keep tabs on your competition.  It is important to know what they’re doing, what they’re selling and how they’re selling it.  This may sound crazy, but every once in while you need to read your junk mail.  Yes, that’s right; go through those thousands of ad responses you get back from the leads you mail to.  You’ll see what others are up to and maybe get some good ideas for your own ads.  As you scroll through the thousands of subject lines, see which ones reach out and grab you and make you want to read the message.  I guarantee you’ll learn something.

If you’re selling your own products, you will also have to be concerned with handling orders and shipping.  Since it is vitally important that you respond to customers immediately, these functions can become a full time job.  If you’re utilizing a drop-shipper, you won’t have to worry about shipping, but handling orders will still keep your hands full.

Of course, there are many tools that will help you automate many of your daily functions.  Always be on the lookout for them and try out trial versions or demos periodically to see how the product might benefit you.  We maintain a list of such products on this website and will update it as we find other products that you might like.

I’ve covered most of the basics of your Internet marketing day in this article, but you’re sure to find other tasks that need to be taken care of.  Just remember that it’s a full time job if you want to do it right.