Some Inspiration for Beginners in IM

I am a college student, currently in my last semester sitting here thinking, I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I say this because I just really don't know what I want to do, but I know one thing and that is Internet Marketing. I know this is a very broad term but it is something that I understand and something I can relate to.

I started messing around with trying to make money online when I was about 14 or so. All the other kids were busy socializing and having a good time, while I was sitting inside creating terrible websites and brainstorming that next million dollar idea. I felt like I was inches away from creating the next big thing, whether that was a product or a viral website.

After all those years that have passed, I failed miserably trying just about everything you could imagine from starting an email list, affiliate marketing, creating a blog, to starting my own membership website. I got caught up in some pyramid schemes, get rich schemes, and even ebooks or systems that promised I would make 10k a day.

I am now 22 and nothing really worked for me no matter how many hours I put into it, I always seemed to get nothing back. I tried affiliate marketing for over 2 years and made under $100. I almost gave up until I met someone that created their own business from scratch, a service-based business. We had a long talk about my skills and what I enjoyed doing. He even introduced me to the freelancer world to get started. I told him I was great with Craigslist and that I could post over 50 ads per day no problem.

He showed me the ropes of the service industry and explained that I can always scale up a business once I have a good marketing plan in place. I took his advice and I started looking for my first few clients to take on all of their marketing needs. It took me a few weeks but I finally landed a client and sold him on a monthly package of mine. I worked my butt off making sure he was completely satisfied month after month. I began to take my earnings and spend it on more advertising.

I bought solo ads, forum advertising, Facebook, Google Adwords, you name it. I played around with a lot of different marketing methods and saw which ones brought the best and most leads to my email. After about 2 months, I had too many clients and couldn't handle all of them, i was working 50-60 hour weeks as it was on top of my college classes.

I remembered what that guy told me, and that was to outsource and scale my business as big as i could. I did some research mainly on forums and continued with my usual marketing campaigns. Clients poured in from everywhere and I just couldn't handle them. After plenty of hours of research, I found a very good company that could outsource 50-100% of my work, and we could turn this into a commission based system or even a partnership. I of course would handle what I could, and dish the rest of the work off to this large company that could handle 100s of clients.

To this day, we are now partnered up, I have my own team of designers, marketers, programmers, and salesmen and we continue to grow every month. Through simple networking, I was able to find someone that could help me while I could still earn a good amount of profit off each client. At the time, It was great residual income as long as my clients were satisfied.

I guess the moral of the story is, don't give up. If Internet Marketing isn't working out for you, find something that you are good at, whether that be design, programming, writing, or even marketing. Start your own business, 1 client and grow from there. Make a nice professional website and continue to use free marketing tools until you have a flow of money coming in, and at that point you can start to play around with paid marketing methods.

It took me a while to get the hang of it but I did it after years of failure. I am only 22 and now the world of Internet Marketing isn't so confusing. I found my outlet and I only can grow from here. Once I have enough capitol, I plan on expanding into different markets or even invest into other people's business ideas.

Keep reading on forums, learn as much as you can and then implement that into a business. That is the best advice I can give you. There is no better information out there than what you can find here, or any other marketing forum. Stick to it, and you will see results, just hopefully faster than what I saw .

Yeeeahhhhh!!! Love hearing stories like this! This is the one image that has kept me motivated and excited for the future. Such a good one!



Paul

That was a fantastic story! I too had troubles in the beginning so started a service business and now I make a full time living at it. I have friends and family that want someone to spoon feed them everything because they are to lazy to study for themselves. Occasionally I will help a family member or friend to a certain point but I also point them to places where they can learn for themselves. Helping people is great but doing it all for them is not really doing them a favor or your will spend all your time hand holding.

I still spend many hours every week learning new things and seeing if they will work into my current business or if I want to try something new along with my business. Never, Never stop learning!