Jorge Bento – Journey to Success on Internet Marketing. Resources, tools and strategies for starting own business online.

If you want to start your own business online you should do it following a proven set of rules in order to avoid the mistakes done by the majority of new internet entrepreneurs. This set of rules is not a magical formula that will make you millionaire overnight or become fabulous rich in a few months.

It is, however, a set of rules that allows you to setup an online business that will create value for you and for your customers and will let you create a stable and long term source of income.

Before I give you the five rules that allow you to start a journey to a successful online business, there is something I want you to understand: starting a business online is simple but it is not easy. [...]

Hello everybody.

I’ve just watched this video from Stephen Pierce and I believe he offers a great piece of  information that will help us to keep motivation high:

Thanks for watching.

Cheers

Jorge

Although an Online Business may require fewer and cheaper resources that a traditional business, there are some resources you will need to achieve your goals with success. These resources fall in three main categories: technical resources, educational resources and financial resources. Additionally, you will need other resources category. They are inherent to yourself and usually you do not know you need to acquire them or that you already have them.

The resources that fall in three main categories identified above are resources you can identify effortless and that you can acquire or learn with more or less difficulty. The resources you need that fall in the additional category are difficult to identify and, if you do not already have them, may be hard to acquire. [...]

If you fail to plan, then you are planning to fail. This is a well-known quotation and it could not be truer when you are starting your own business on the internet.

With so many strategies, techniques, and media available to you and so many people claiming that you must do this or that, that you must follow this “secret” or apply this latest technology, it can become very difficult to follow the right direction to make your business grow. It can become difficult to follow any direction at all! [...]

If you plan to start your own business online you must find a market, preferably with hungry buyers, and offer what that market wants to buy. One of the biggest mistakes new entrepreneurs do is to offer what they would like that people buy instead of what people want to buy.

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When starting your own business online you possibly feel tempted to dive in the operational aspect of your business. You are excited about the website or blog building, how to create a good looking site, and you may spend hours or days testing and tweaking graphics and sales copy in order to make your site as nice as possible.

Then you jump to the task of driving traffic to your newly built website. You work hard applying all the techniques you have been studying or the strategies you bought from the experts and after some weeks or a couple of month your website rank in the first page of search engines and you get a few hundreds visitors each day.

However, to your surprise there are few or zero sales. You even notice that you have an acceptable bounce rate and that your website visitors spend some time in the website. Why they do not buy your product or service, or the affiliate products you positioned strategically in your site? [...]

Starting an internet business seems to attract more and more people every day. If you visit forums related with online business, the number of new players increases every day and the most popular topics are “How to start a business online?” or “How to make money on the internet?”

There is a buzz in the online community that setting up an online business is the touchstone to instant riches, overnight success, and the easy way to achieve a dream life, with little or no work. The truth is that only a few have experienced any kind of success and fewer were able to start living only from their online businesses. [...]

As I referred in one of my previous posts (check it here) Giveaway events can be one very effective strategy to drive traffic to our blog and thus create a list.

Having that said, I wanted to enter in Giveaways Events not only to test the strategy but also to see the reactions to these events. So I’m not in dozens of giveaways simultaneously, I’m in one giveaway that I selected according the following criteria: [...]

It seems that a long time has passed since my first blog post here, called The Journey Begins, posted on May, 12. But only 1 month has gone, and if I still have a long, long way in front of me, when I look back I feel really amazed at how far I am now from the beginning of my journey.

When I started I was skeptical and excited at the same time. Skeptical because I’ve tried several strategies and techniques to make money online and none proved to work, at least for me. It’s clear that hoping around without a plan and always looking for the next new thing, trying several marketing strategies without a focus on a defined goal, was leading me to a situation where I spent money and time without results. Would I be starting just another one of those lead-to-nowhere courses?

Excited because I realized that I needed a mentor in order to help me find my way and keep on track and finding Alex Jeffreys was one of my ah-ah moments that I was sure would change my life and the way I face Internet Marketing.

And until this moment Alex’s training is over delivering what was promised and met all my expectations by far. I remember the first live coaching session when Alex told us that we must not follow the money but let the money follow us, that we must change from prospect to marketer.

Those words came directly to the core of my positioning has a marketer-to-be and are engraved in the foundation of my plans being the base of my business development.

Because of Alex coaching, all of us, Alex’s students, started our own blogs where we’re documenting our own journeys toward the success in Internet Marketing. Also we developed 90 days plans, that we broke in 3 monthly plans, which gave birth to weekly and daily plans.

In my plan for the first month in this Journey I had established several goals to meet until June, 10, and I’m so happy that I met all of those goals:

• Setup my Profit Pulling Platform,which I did and his already receiving visitors and also get some subscribers;
• Setup my Personal Blog, which is this one and following I’m going to show you the results so far in terms of traffic;
• Publish 5 articles regarding Traffic Generation which I did and published them in eZine Articles;
• Study different traffic strategies which I did and you can read about them in various posts in this blog (just select category Traffic Strategies);
• I’m participating in two giveaways, but is too soon to see any results from them;
• Implement different traffic strategies which I did: blog comments, forum comments, twitter, social bookmarking, article bookmarking, even one try in video marketing.

Regarding what I have accomplished with my blog in terms of traffic, here is the dashboard from Google Analytics with those results:

During this period I’ve got 396 visits from 198 unique visitors. The main source of traffic came from Marketing With Alex Forum (34,6%), Direct Traffic (21,21%), 8,33% from Warrior Forum and a lot of traffic from referring sites, like blogs, social directories, twitter and articles.

I created 10 posts and received 100+ comments from visitors. Surprisingly, or not, one of the pages with more visitors is the page About Me. The bounce rate is bellow 50% and visitors, in average, read 2 or more posts, staying around for more then 5 minutes.

I believe those are very nice statistics, at least I’m very proud and I believe the majority of my visitors like to read the content I’m posting.

Looking at Alexa’s information about my blog, there is still a lot of information missing, but the overall numbers are also very nice in my opinion:

Almost reach the rank 500,000, which will be one of my goals for the next month.

Overall, I think this has been a very rewarding journey, I’ve been learning a lot, and although I’m not pushing to hard to get more traffic, I’m quite happy with the results.

It is clear that the traffic generation methods I’ve been using are clearly hard work dependent, because as soon as you lower or stop you activities in blog and forum commenting the numbers immediately go down; I must find some way to have a flood of traffic that is constant and independent of my daily activities.

For the next month, although my plan is already laid out, there is a lot of space for improvement and to change focus a little bit from this to that, so this weekend is a period for analyzing, thinking, planning and focusing on my next goals.

Next Monday I’ll publish my second month plan with new challenges and goals to accomplish.

To Alex Jeffreys, all my fellow students (and there are a lot of them which I would like to name for their help, support, comments and good humor; because I’m afraid I may forget someone, I hug all of them) , my subscribers and all visitors, thank you very much for helping me to build my internet business and for letting me share my results with you.

To our success

Jorge

Yesterday we had a coaching session with Alex Jeffreys about List Building and I can tell you: WOW! That  coaching session was really an eye opener regarding some aspects of List Building and what it take to build a responsive list with tens of thousands of subscribers.

One of the aspects I most admire in Alex coaching sessions is the passion he has for the business, how he lives it and how he pass that passion to you, in such a way that you believe that all is possible. And the fact is that all is possible, like Alex just show us using his own history as an example.

Alex is one of those rare persons with the ability to tell you in simple words how you can overcome tasks that you would imagine like impossible or extremely difficult  to accomplish. He turns everything so simple that you think to yourself “Damn, why I didn’t do this before?” [...]