14 Online Marketing Lessons in 2011 From a 6 Figure Marketer

2011 has been quite a eventful year for me as I’ve tested many different things throughout the year. Some of the things I’ve gone through are extremely powerful and help to explode my business while other things are just simply a waste of time which you could probably avoid.

This will be laid in chronological order so it’ll be easier for you to follow and learn from it as well.

Lessons #1 Lack of Focus (January)

Back in January 2011, I had this dream to do a start-up thinking that it could be very lucrative, something like an Amazon.com or a gmarket.com kind of website. So I went around networking, looking for programmers. And at that same time, I was thinking of going into the offline market to help the offline business.

At the same time, I also went and joined a networking breakfast group. This was because I was planning to do some offline consulting in SEO and internet marketing. Basically, every week there is a meet up in the morning at 7:30 am – 9:30 am. Seriously it is a lot of hard work and I guess I’m one of the rare internet marketers who was so hardworking to wake up every week for this networking event.

In terms of business diversification, doing a start up and as well as going into offline consulting are totally different businesses. It requires a lot of time and effort to make it work. And doing these 2 at the same time would simple suck away all my time for my online business which is really my core business that generates a huge chunk of income.

A lesson I’ve learned here is that when you have something that works, keep on repeating the same thing over and over again instead of starting everything out from scratch again.

Lesson #2 – Always test from small (February)

In the month of February, I embarked on a project to create a platform membership kind of stuffs for our dieting site. This project cost more than thousands of dollars. And besides the money, it also involves a lot of time to work with the programming team, communicating the idea of what I need and want.

To cut a story short, this project was completed around June, and this was one of the largest investments I’ve made throughout my entire Internet Marketing business. By the time it was completed in June, I was very exhausted with all the traveling and as well as building the platform up.

But here’s the problem, when it was completed, I didn’t start anything on the marketing side. (Oh s***) I thought as I was pretty drained at that point in time in June.

What happened was I added a short code in the sales copy, allowing users to choose the option of adding the membership in, and thinking that would do the job, but it didn’t really convert well with a written copy. Hence, the thousands of dollars were stuck in this project for quite a couple of months. Even now at the time of writing, yes I gotten a number of members in the membership, but I’ve still have not recouped the investment.

What I learned here is I could have test from a smaller game instead – like a video program, interviews with different experts, or even test out as an affiliate first instead of jumping into creating the product right from the beginning.

Marketing is more important than the product itself.

Lesson #3 – Potter 5 Forces Traffic Power (February)

There was another lesson from February. I called it the Traffic Power which originates from the Potter 5 forces.

Back in January and February, it’s one of my best traffic ever as all my sites were at the #1 position of many different keywords. Just from search engine optimization, I can get a total of 250-400 leads a day.

If you were doing SEO, you’ll know that there was a Google Panda slap in the month of February and many of my sites drop position from #1 to #2, #3, or #4 or even lower. Some of my friends were completed wiped out in this Panda slap.

Luckily I’ve built my sites legitimately with quality content on my sites that saved me from getting hit seriously. But a drop from #1 to #2, #3 or #4 is really a painful one with losses of thousands of dollars of revenues.

From this experience, I understood one important fact – My business was heavily dependent on Google. Should there be any changes to the algorithms, my business would suffer.

In another words, Google has a lot of traffic bargaining power. And I continue to let Google determine my business growth, the business would be shaky and dangerous.

I didn’t really do much to diversify in the month of February, but it was a spark to one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in 2011.

Lesson #4 – The Power of Market Intelligence (April)

In April, I went for a seminar called ‘Money and You’ recommended by a good friend who has achieved a lot of results even he was only 23. I’ve met him for a few months from Facebook and he was very different from other Internet Marketing friends. At that time when I first knew him, he wasn’t really doing very impressive.

But within a few months, he achieved a lot of results in his business and he attributed his successes to ‘Money and You’ seminar. That was the reason that got me into the seminar and was quite an eye opener for me when I went through the program. It’s been 5 years since I last attended any self-improvement seminar as I’ve always thought ‘taking action the key to success’.

And after going through the 4.5 days program, one of the best lessons I’ve take away is the power of Market Intelligence. The thing is that many times I thought that to win in the market, you need to be innovative and think out of the box.

Yes, I can do that sometimes, but to do that every time and making sure that the innovative idea works is tiring and may not work all the time.

After playing the simulation games, and also networking with millionaires and successful entrepreneurs, what I’ve learned is that you don’t need to do that every time, you just need to do market research and competitive intelligence. Look at other market players – find out what they are doing, look at the results they are producing, and copying the things that work for them.

After the seminar, I’ve began doing a lot of extensive research on all the top players in internet marketing and that was the start of an explosive growth.

It was through this seminar, I realize that I was getting too complacent in my business and stopped learning for quite some time. That was one of the biggest mistakes and I started to become a learner again after April.

Little did I know that this would pay off later parts of the months.

Lesson #5 – What The Market Wants (May)

After the initial ‘Money & You’ program, I went for another followup course which they provided many simulation games of the real business world. And there was this game that I learned a lot of valuable lessons from it.

One of the valuable lessons I learned is about knowing what the market wants. And to do that, the thing you need to do is to test it. If you are a product creator, it means quickly get an ‘Ok’ product ready and sell it to the market.

Only the market knows what it wants and you cannot dictate what the market wants. Forget about creating a demand of the market because you need to be an extremely good marketer for it to be a success.

And this was when the hard truth of the platform I created slapped into my face. I haven’t tested whether if the market wants the product and yet I’ve invested so much into it!

But this serves as a good lessons I’ve learned – Quickly beta test a product to sell it in the market and test the demand before spending time to perfect the product.

Lesson #6 – Essential Ingredients to Build a Team (May)

Through the followup course I’ve went through, we were supposed to start a business within our team. There were around 5 persons in a team and whoever made the most money at the end of 6 weeks win the cash prizes each of the team contributed.

This is one of the first time when I worked in such a big team (5 persons) in a business. I was given the leadership role as well in the team.

And through this one time experience in 6 weeks, I’ve gained some of the most important lessons in having a team to build a business (especially at the start of a business).

The no. #1 lesson in building a business with a big team is that – you don’t need a big team to start a business. The bigger the team, the harder to manage the team.

You see, most people has a misconception about starting a business, they think that they need a lot of people in order to build the business. For example, they think that you need a person for finance and accounting, a person to do the IT, a person to handling products, so on and so forth…

But the real thing that matters when you start a business that keeps the company from going red is by finding a sustainable way to acquire new customers over and over again.

If you can’t find a sustainable way to do so, your company would just die off very soon. Simply because there are no new customers to maintain the cashflow.

That is the most important element to start a profitable business and growing it.

And the question is ‘Do you need a big team to do this?’

Absolutely not.

The bigger the team, you are going to face with a lot of opinions on how things are going to be run, and with all these non-essential stuffs.

What do I mean by sustainable way in getting customers?

A simple example is that assuming that you are a plumber and every time you advertise your plumber business in the newspaper, you get 5-10 customers.

If you need money, all you need to do is to advertise on the newspaper and you get customers. This will be known as sustainable way of acquiring new customers.

Does that mean that having a big team will fail?

The only way that having a big team wouldn’t fail is by having everyone to do sales and marketing, and they are compensated by the results they bring in.

That way, you won’t have a cashflow problem and there will be enough money for the team players.

However, in reality, things might not happen this way because when having more people in the team, there are bound to have plenty of people problems around, like different people have their individual goals, dreams and directions.

My group didn’t win the game in the end and even though it may seem like it’s a big ‘failure’ kind of thing, but from this learning experience, I’ve understand many things about building a team that creates a big empire.

Lesson #7 – Test Your System From The Visitor’s Perspective (June)

I was using Aweber’s white label profollow for around a year now and suddenly Aweber announces that they were going to reclaim profollow. In case you have no idea what is profollow, it is an email autoresponder.

So what happened was that we need to change our autoresponder code from profollow back to Aweber. Initially everything was ok, but then all of a sudden, they changed their code again.

This caused my autoresponder not working and the number of leads gained a day drop tremendously.

It was a painful lesson and one of the things I’ve learned that is shared by Desmond Ong is to test your system from the visitor’s perspective. And even to the extend of hiring an assistant just to do that.

Lesson #8 – It’s All About Conversion (July)

June was quite a sad month because of the drop in leads.

But I was learning a lot via a lot of courses and looking at what are the successful marketers are doing. I was doing a lot of research and that’s when I heard a marketer who is in similar industry to me making $25,000 from implementing some key strategies.

With my experiences in internet marketing, and after the seminars and courses I went through, I became extremely result orientated and when I heard about his experiences, I knew he had done something right.

Hence I began to implement the strategies which he shared and guess what?

I’ve crossed over my $1,000 a day mark.

It was one of my biggest breakthrough as that was the most I’ve made in a single day after my entire internet marketing business.

Here’s what I learned here – You just need to know what converts well and implement the conversion strategy to your system, then you’ll be able to get the same results.

It is all about knowing how to convert the traffic into customers.

And that was when I started to bang on conversion. I looked at my traffic, how many visitors were turned into leads, how many leads were turned into customers.

Yes, I knew all of these earlier on but I wasn’t really obsessed with it.

But this time round, I knew this could explode my online business, after all this is what helped me to cross over $1,000 a day mark.

High conversion means everything.

Lesson #9 – Authority (July)

In the month of July, I was also invited to speak at an event. This year, it was around my 3rd-5th time speaking, but this time round, I was “invited” to speak.

After going through the ups and downs of 2011, I initially don’t want to speak for this event because I wanted to concentrate on my business, but the thing is…

When you speak in front of a crowd, you gained Authority. This means you will be perceived as more credible in front of the crowd.

Even though I’m new to speaking, I understand one thing, speaking is the best opportunity for leverage and credibility building. And true enough, many people start to approach me to inquire for my coaching program.

And if I were to network around as an audience, they probably have no idea of how good I am.

Hence after this, I began to start implementing strategies that put me in an authoritative position that positions myself as an expert. For example, having webinars session for my subscribers – you can register for this webinar session too at Autopilot Selling Machine Webinar.

Lesson #10 – Power of Mastermind (August)

Have I told you before I have a bunch of good internet marketing friends which we constantly mastermind with?

In internet marketing, information is extremely important. You can grow extremely fast when you mastermind, especially when your mastermind group is opened to information exchanged.

What happened is that I’ve also masterminded with a very close friend who started with me at around the same time every single day on skype. He is one hell of a real accountable friend that keeps on pushing me to achieve greater heights. And my business couldn’t be successful if not for him.

So you really want to find some good friends that you can really mastermind with because they can keep you on track to more growth in your business or other areas of your life.

This is also the month where I started implementing key changes to one of our products we published that skyrocket conversion rates – Used to be 0.9% conversion rate for a product.

But after implementing this change, conversion shot up to 2-3%, which is a 200-300% increase!

Now, for all the traffic I’ve lost due to the Google algorithm change, I’m back with a vengeance! =)

Lesson #11 – My Ideal Business Partner (September)

September is the first month my business partner first joined me in my business. She is none other than my girlfriend, Isabelle Ngin.

I know some people would say that having your significant other in your business is bad but in my opinion, it’s one of the best choices ever.

Number #1 Reason – When both of you are in the same business, it’s easier to have the same goals, directions, and dreams compared to other partners. Both party will work hard in the business for the family. There are no other agendas and motives in the business.

I’ve seen cases where partners fall out because of commitment issues, ‘compensation’ issues, greed issues and it can be really bad for the parties involved. And that usually happens when there are no alignment in the goals, directions and dreams.

But couples are different.

If both have the same alignment, it can bring the relationship to a closer level because both understand what the business requires and being in the same business provides more topics to talk about.

There are cases that business don’t work out or difficult to work out for couples.

That is usually when they are starting a business from scratch.

And they can’t see through the business till it makes money. In another words, without sufficient money in the business, couples fall out.

In my case it’s different, I’m already making 6 figures income when she joined me. So when she joined in, she is basically helping me to scale the business to a 7 figures business.

And that’s the lesson I want to share with you here – You need a team to build systems upon the initial foundation you have built.

This means that if you have set up a shop #1 and it’s profitable and you want to expand it to have a number of shops, then you need a team to help you build a system to rinse and repeat the process of expanding your shops.

Lesson #12 – Control in Your Business (October)

This is another time when I experienced how is it like to work in a bigger team. This time round, we did a mini launch of some video courses. This was a small project that literally started from scratch but it was really a tiring project on the whole.

In just a few days, we raked in more than 5 figures of revenues for the entire marketplace.

But there was an incident that I didn’t feel good about.

To cut the story short, there was a bit of extremely last minute changes and a big investment on the very last day. But I was strongly against the last minute changes as it didn’t seem quite right to change so much near the launch. And we also ain’t sure about the returns we were going to get.

(It was against the same principle that I learned – Test the market first before perfecting the product)

But in the end, the team still went along with the idea.

Regardless of the results, what I felt was whenever you are confident with yourself and how your business should go, you should be 100% in control.

And at that point in time, I wasn’t in control and I didn’t like the process and the results of it. I’m confident on building business my own way and scaling my business but if I don’t have enough control, it makes it energy draining and time consuming to do it.

That brings back to the point where a couple team could be the best team because the team is small, and this makes it easier to have 100% control of how the business should go.

Lesson #13 – Power of Tracking in Paid Traffic (November)

After I’ve made sure that my conversion is high enough, I started to test paid traffic. A couple of years back, I’ve done some paid traffic to promote affiliate products. I was very new in internet marketing back in those days and now I started to see how powerful paid traffic is when comes to internet marketing.

But the real difference between years ago and now is that I’m now doing paid traffic for my own line of products other than promoting other vendors’ products.

This mean that I have more control, higher profit margin and also more tracking tools to play with.

And when you are able to see clearly which paid traffic is doing very well and which are losing money traffic. Still playing with PPC traffic currently and there will be a lot more exciting stuffs coming for paid traffic especially January approaches.

Lesson #14 – Long Term Customer Value (November)

November is also the month where we launched our Forex product collaborated with a reputable Forex Trainer in Asia. It was a simple product recorded from a LIVE seminar that costs $888.

It is of value because we received numerous customer feedback and as well as how easily it can help these people to make money from Forex. We have one customer making 300+ pips within a week of implementing the strategies!

No, I’m not trying to boast but the ability to create positive results for the customers means that there are long term customer value between the business and their customer. The customer would trust him or her more in the long run.

And after all these years of marketing online, this is the single most important thing that sets a strong foundation for a multimillion business – It’s about helping the customers to achieve the results they want so that they would come back to you for more.

Unlike newbies who think that internet marketing is a get rich scheme, but the truth is it is about helping the customers to achieve more given the money they have exchanged for your products or services.

There is nothing wrong with selling over and over again to your customers as long as whatever you provide, they feel that it’s worth the money.

In case if you are thinking of making money from Forex, you can watch the introductory video at www.mirrortradingsystem.com.

Going forward, we are doing very well in what we are doing – building a long term customer value automatically with our autoresponder sequence. And hence we’ll repeat and rinse the same process over and over again.

Now, I’ve shared what I’ve learned for the year 2011, what about you?

What are the biggest lesson(s) you have learned for the year 2011? Share with us!

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Tags: conversion, internet marketing, online marketing, paid traffic, web analytics