Internet Marketer?.....Not!
I suck at Internet Marketing, which statement is the equivalent of a death knell for this blog. I shouldn't be too surprised, as I suck at Sales & Marketing in general. I'm one of those people who would donate items to a thrift store instead of holding a garage sale. I always hated to "ask for the check" when I was a loan officer, which is a sales position of sorts. I've never been any good at Network Marketing, despite having been involved in several different companies, thanks to my mother, who is a good Salesperson, even if she isn't a particularly good Marketer.
I got to a point when I was a loan officer (7+ years) when I realized that it didn't make a difference if I did the loan or someone else did the loan. The programs were all pretty much the same and there wouldn't be a disturbance in the Force if I were to stop selling loans. People would still have plenty of good loan options to choose from and my employer would likely fill my position with someone who enjoyed the competitive sales arena more than I did.
I understand Marketing just fine. What I lack is a bit of that "there's a sucker born every minute" mentality that drives much of sales and marketing. Yes, I can feel the indignation of the few sales types who have bothered to read this deeply (three paragraphs) into this post, but honestly, why do you think sales is the art of persuasion? You're persuading someone to do something they wouldn't likely do otherwise, and most of the time the key ingredient in the mix is lack of good market information. Marketing campaigns focus on highlighting strengths and diminishing weaknesses, which in a perfect market would aid the process of matching goods and services with buyers' specific needs, but in an imperfect (ie - normal) market instead is the manipulation of buyers' needs to match the strengths of what is being offered for sale.
What does all of this have to do with Internet Marketing? From what I have seen over the past almost 6 months is that there are bunches of ways to earn money online and only a few folks actually succeeding at it. Traffic to one's site, just like traffic to one's brick and mortar store, is an important element of success at Internet Marketing. Then, once they are at one's site (or store) the task remains to persuade them to purchase something from you and not from one of your many competitors. And I'm not very good at that.
I did enjoy signing up for the various affiliate ad programs and it was fun to choose ads to go on my various sites, even though none of them ever resulted in an earned commission. I'm not big into Google AdSense, and the $1.91 in my account isn't likely to make it to the payout minimum for another 30 years or so. I did earn a few bucks from SiteHoppin BeerStocks, but I think Max made an accounting error when he sent me the $6 or maybe it was a rebate of my donation to his beer fund. Bidvertiser sent me $25 for doing something, but I haven't figured out what and I actually did make about $20 from Project Wonderful in the course of a month. So, I guess as I think about it, that still sucks when considering how much time I put into my various blogs. The one dimly visible source of light and income in this sad, dark tale has been Entrecard.
From mid-January I have been harvesting Entrecard Credits (ECs) and hopefully when I finally sell off my inventory I will have cleared over $1000. That's still a pathetic return for the amount of time that I have put into my Entrecard efforts, but it's better than nothing. The problem is that credit farming or harvesting is not a favored Entrecard activity, although its negative status has developed over time and wasn't as clearly defined when I started my 20+ Entrecard accounts in January and February. I won't be continuing my EC harvesting activity and most of my accounts will be deleted in the near future. I've discovered that I don't really relish blogging and I'm not sufficiently motivated to do the things that build readership. I feel I've contributed to the Entrecard community more than I've taken from it and my remaining involvement will be motivated not by profit but by a desire to do what I can to help Graham Langdon succeed in his Entrecard venture.
As such, I expect that this will be one of the last entries in this blog, although should I stumble upon (such a fun phrase to use) some winning strategy I'll be sure to mention it here.
