A Newbie’s First Experiences With Internet Marketing

Before I started tinkering with the more technical skills, I needed the inspiration, the idea that this was even possible. I had to have fire in the furnace so to speak, and I’ll tell you where I got that from.

Steve Pavlina Enters My Life For The First Time

Before you go, “Who the is Steve Pavlina!?” I heard the name “Steve Pavlina” from a friend while we were talking about personal development and what we wanted to do with our lives. He was a little more enlightened than me and urged me to check out this guy’s website. My friend told me something that struck a chord with me. He told me that Steve Pavlina was personal development writer who was one of the first bloggers to monetize his website and make massive amounts of money online.

I was incredibly curious about who this Steve guy was. I’m a strong believer in personal development. So I connected with that immediately. I think that if you aren’t actively challenging yourself to become better, smarter, and more efficient, then you’re getting dumber by the day.

Anyways, I went home that day and looked him up right away. I didn’t even know how to spell his last name correctly. I think I spelled it “Steve Pavla.” Thank god for google, it pointed me into the right direction.

So then I saw his website for the first time. My first impression was, “Wow… very plain.” There were zero graphics and the website had a theme that looked like it was created in 1999, which actually made me even more curious about who this guy was. At the time, in my more ignorant state of mind, I couldn’t help but think, “How could such a lame looking website be supposedly so successful?” I wanted to know what he wrote about, so I skimmed his “Best of..” list and found something incredible.

The Most Important Article I’ve Ever Read

10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job, by Steve Pavlina, opened my eyes and would be one of the most important articles I’ve ever read. It outlined the ludicrous nature of trading dollars for hours. It described how smart people build systems that generate income 24/7, especially passive income. Ultimately he taught me that you have to focus on providing value, not time. He outlined how he managed to make a living online and how he now lives a the kind of lifestyle that I now strive to achieve.

His website is full of great articles like that. I strongly desire to achieve at least a portion of the kind of success that he has achieved. It’s truly phenomenal and inspiring.

But enough about Steve Pavlina. His  website is great for inspiration and learning fundamental principles, but if you actually want practical advice on where to start, you have to learn it on your own. He got the engine running for me, now I had to accelerate and steer the car.

Getting Lost In The Worst Forum On Earth

Hands down, the biggest internet marketing forum that exists on the internet, is the warrior forum. At the same time, it is the absolute worst forum on earth. One of the things that I learned, not just about internet marketing or making any money online, but also life, is that anything worth getting is going to be challenging to get. So the problem with the forum is that it feeds off of a human weakness, laziness. It’s the get rich quick syndrome, the desire to want a big result with very minimal effort. And they insidiously cultivate this very negative behavior.

On any given day you can hop onto the forum, and see thousands of posts with some sort of variation of, “Make $5,000 in 3 Days of Trying This Method/Product!” It’s a huge competition of who can promise the biggest results with the smallest effort in the smallest amount of time. The warrior forum is a cesspool of scam artists trying to make money off of you, by making ridiculously misleading promises and taking advantage of human laziness.

So stay away from the warrior forum, it will distract you, waste your time, and potentially a lot of your money as well. I started being much more productive once I left that madness.

Taking My First Steps… And Sucking At It

Up until now, I’ve learned that fundamentally, whatever it is I do, has to provide value to people. With that in mind, I started to learn about creating niche websites. The idea behind niche sites, is to find a smaller market within a larger market to provide value to. The point of that is to avoid massive competition. So for example, if I were to make a website about cooking, that would be too massive and broad of a market to tackle.

If you went to google and typed in “cooking,” you would get 163,000,000 results…. right now. And if you looked on the first page, you would see HUGE websites that have completely dominated this cooking market.

However, if you were to be more specific and create a niche website on “how to cook fast fat-free meals on a $20 a week budget,” then you would be getting somewhere. You want to tackle a more specific, smaller market, and provide exactly what they need. This is the way you can dominate a smaller market.

Of course, this is also an exhaustive trial and error process. It will take practice to find a good niche to provide value for. Finding a good niche and successfully creating a valuable website that provides value to this niche is exactly what I am tinkering with right now. In fact, I started a website… but I made a big mistake, especially considering my current level of experience.

But before I get into the nitty-gritty details of what I did to put this niche site up, and why it potentially sucks, I’m going to cut this post off. All the steps, tools I used, and things I had to learn to use them, would take another 2000+ words, if not more. I’d rather break this up into multiple posts so it’s easier to digest and learn from.

So in closing, I’d like to hear your feedback. How was this post interesting to you? Did it suck? Was it awesome? I’d appreciate any input, thanks.

Other than that, I hope there aren’t any warrior forum fanatics reading this.