Why do 95% of Internet Marketers fail?

The Gurus often claim that 95% of Internet Marketers fail to make any money, or even end up making a loss.

I suspect this is true, but I can't help feeling that the reason why they keep telling us is to convince us to buy their latest product which will surely keep you within the successful 5%.

Personal experience has shown that it IS difficult to get started in IM. It took me a while before I started earning any significant money. In fact when my first payment of $50 arrived, I was over the moon, but it took a while before the next one came!

Perhaps the reason why so many fail is that they give up too soon. Everyone is looking for the "magic pill" - the system that you set up, start running, and forget it, just banking all the proceeds.
There is no magic pill of course, and no business succeeds without putting some effort into it.

Which brings me to what I think is the real reason why so many people fail. They are either too lazy, too gullible (they believe that the Gurus are selling them the magic pill), or they just don't have any intelligence.

What brings me to this conclusion is something I read on a forum. The writer said that he had been given affiliate links which consisted of HTML links that you would paste into your web pages or HTML emails. However, he wanted to send the links in plain text emails, and of course, they didn't work. His question was "how to I convert the link to the right format?".

In a plain text email, all he would need is the URL, which is embedded in the HTML link code. If he was serious about becoming an Internet Marketer, he should have made the effort to learn at least the basics of HTML.
I know there are many excellent website tools that hide all the HTML from you, but my experience is that they never do exactly what you want, so I end up modifying the HTML by hand.
And anyone who is getting into Affiliate Marketing really needs to understand exactly what his affiliate link codes are, and how to use them.

That's my message for today - if you're going to start a new business, take the time to learn about the basic tools you'll need.

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I figured that if there's one person out there who can't extract a URL from an HTML link, then there must be thousands, so I wrote a program to do it. urlExtractor is free to download for anyone who wants it.

Hiding your email address from SpamBots

Stemming the flow of spam is a bit like King Cnut (AKA Canute) ordering the advancing tide to return.
However, one of the main sources of email addresses must be from web pages. The Address Harvesters or SpamBots, crawl the net just as the search engines do. However, they only look for email addresses.
The SpamBots know that if an email address appears on a website then it's almost 100% likely to be a valid, active address.
So I've just created emailMangler to hide addresses on my websites from passing SpamBots.
I'll be putting emailMangler on my website as a free download.
Within the next day or two, you should be able to get it from here.

Managing a content site

Due to prolonged heavy rain over the weekend, I was able to spend a lot of time at my computer, programming my latest application.
It's a content/article site creator and manager. Once finished, it will let me build a content site without having to wrestle with HTML. All I will need to do is type in (or paste in) an article, give it a title, and then the program will generate all the required web pages for me. At the moment, it generates the home page, complete with Google AdSense ad units, and a Recommended Books section that links to Amazon with my Amazon Affiliate ID. It works with either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, and I might add support for other locales later.

The sites generated by this program will categorise the articles for easier navigation, so the home page links to all the Category pages. These will in turn list the article summaries in a similar way to those on the home page of this site.

The design of the generated sites are based on templates, so that the entire site looks consistent. It also means that if I need to change the appearance or layout of the site, I simply choose another template and regenerate all the pages.

Today, I'll be adding the code to generate the Category pages.

Niche Site Manager

Having put a computing article site together (Here), I've realised that it's going to be quite a bit of hard work maintaining it, which kind of goes against the grain for me.

The reason being that when I want to add a new article, I want to put it at the top of the list on the front page. This means shuffling all the other articles down the lists, pushing them back to other pages. That means I have to edit every index page just to add one article. Not good.

I'm also not 100% happy with the layout. I think there ought to be some editorial, especially on the front page.
I've also realised that the index page selectors at the bottom of the page are all hyperlinks, but the one for the current page shouldn't be. And as the number of pages increases, I'll have to come up with a way of reducing the the space used by the selectors.

Finally, I think it would really help my readers if I categorised the articles and made the site more hierarchical. That way, it would be a lot easier for them to find what they're looking for.

To this end, I'm going to write a program to create and maintain article sites, so that all I have to do is type in (or paste in) the new article and categorise it. Then the program will generate all the pages for me, including a Google sitemap. That will give me more time to research and write more articles.

If anyone is interested in having such a program, let me know. What features would you expect it to have?

New look

I thought the old template made my blog look a bit grim, so I've brightened it up a bit. It's amazing what a difference it makes.

Content sites

Everyone's talking about niche sites and content-rich sites as I described in my previous post. Having investigated it a bit more, I've found that you can write the articles yourself, or use some pre-written ones by extracting them from the numerous article sites.
The deal is that you can use the articles if you leave in the links that the authors have added at the end. I guess it's a kind of viral marketing system.
Sounds fair to me.

To keep people coming back (to click on more Ads), the idea is to keep the site updated regularly. Even if it's just adding one article a week, it should keep people interested.

So I've decided to try it out. I've put together a computer niche site here.
Ok, not much of a niche, but I happened to have that domain lying around unused, so it had to be a computer-based site.

I've added Amazon links to my site, as well as Google AdSense ones. Another possible stream of income.

I'm told it can take a while for people to start finding the site and reading it, and clicking on ads. I'll be promoting the site in the usual ways; forums, this blog, viral marketing in free reports etc.

I'll post the results back here every month, just so you can get some idea of how much a site like that can really earn from AdSense and Amazon.

One of my other sites that contains Google Ads managed to score me the incredible sum of $1.93 last month, but the site's not finished, so I haven't been promoting it yet, so earning some revenue from it was a bit of a surprise.

Maybe I'll start posting graphs of how much I earn from the various income streams that I'me trying to set up, just so that you can see what (if anything) works for the outright amateur.