AnthonyMurphyBlog.com Straight Up Internet Marketing. My Journey.

I wanted to figure it out on my own without spending money on mentors and coaching courses. I thought that if money can be made online, it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out how it’s done. I spent a year trying to figure it out, and got nowhere.

In order to achieve anything online you’ve got to have focus, in fact scrub that, in order to succeed in anything you’ve got to have focus. When I started an events catering business with my wife, it was easy. We figured out what we needed, costed it, laid out a business plan, secured the finance, got the necessary equipment together, and followed the business plan. We did OK, it paid the bills for fourteen months, and we sold the assets for a reasonable profit in preparation for the arrival of our first child. So why can’t the same process be followed with an online business? Well it can, but when you’re on your own it’s just not that simple.

The trouble with trying to make money online, is that inevitably, you get sucked into the hype. Then before you know it you’re getting ten to fifty e-mails a day promoting every possible tool, strategy, technique and you don’t know where one system ends and another begins.

The reality is that a good proportion of the systems out there do work. Granted you need to be careful, because there’s also a lot of cr@p out there. If you’re anything like me, you may have unwittingly been trying to implement different parts of different systems, in no particular order, with no focus on one proven strategy. When you’re starting a traditional brick and mortar business, like my catering business, it stands to reason that you’re not suddenly going to change direction, half way through and try to sell washing machines from a catering business. But thats exactly what we try to do when we’re blindly trying to make money online.

I came across Alex Jeffreys having signed up to a list, and as time went on, his name kept appearing, mainly in Internet Marketing blogs, and as I’ve said in previous posts, these blogs belonged to normal people, not guru’s. Anyway cut a long story short, I Googled him did a little research, and signed up to his latest coaching program.

Alex has given us focus. Having a mentor that teaches one system, keeps you focussed on making that system work. He started out discussing business principals, getting yourself and your workspace organised, time management, productivity and setting goals, which are skills that are easily taken for granted. Then we moved on to an introduction to the system we’ll be learning, which is based around blogging in the internet marketing niche. Module 4 last week was about becoming a part of the IM community to gain feedback for our blogs, and this week, it’s all about traffic.

Alex’s focus and attention to his students is unparalleled, staying on after his webinars to do Q&A sessions late into the night until everyone has had an opportunity to ask questions. His enthusiasm is infectious and I’m looking forward to meeting him in person. The fact is, if I had found Alex a year ago, I would have cleared my debt by now, and Sure as heck wouldn’t be going to job interviews.

So am I glad I’ve finally invested in a mentor. Absolutely! Now I know everything I’ve done up to now wasn’t in vain. I have the backing and support of someone who is already achieving what I aspire to, and that’s what mentoring is all about.

Thanks Alex.

Now I know this may sound a little crazy given that a job should be the last thing on my mind right now, so let me explain.

I don’t know where this came from but someone said to me a while back that sometimes you’ve got to do what you have to, to do what you want to. I want to replace my income online, and having been unemployed since January, money is becoming an issue, so I have to secure an income while I build my business.

Since January I’ve been plugging away on my own with no success. I sold a catering business back in January, and the proceeds would keep us afloat until July, but despite that, I couldn’t help being acutely aware of the need for an income by then, and what if it didn’t happen in time? I know it goes against everything we learn about the law of attraction and positive thought, but it was a massive distraction that I’ve struggled to overcome.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t start an online business if you have no other income, I know some do, and I know it’s possible with enough determination and focus. Matt Wolfe is a great example of this and has been a huge inspiration for me and his WordPress Classroom helped me get my blog off the ground.

Anyway, I decided the best thing for me to do is to get a job. A job to pay the bills and support my family nothing more. Don’t get me wrong, I have no intention of short changing my employer. I will work hard and be the best I can be while I’m at work, but I’m not looking for a career. This will remove the anxiety and stress of not having an income, which will allow me to focus entirely on my online business, and put value before money.

So back to the interview, it went great, and I just had a call asking me to come back for a second interview next week. This is a huge weight off my shoulders and I don’t want to count my chickens, but once I’ve secured an income, I’ll build my online business one step at a time, building a list of subscribers like you, offering real value, inspiring and teaching you the skills that I will learn and implement over the coming months under Alex’s Guidance, so that you too can achieve financial freedom.

Come with me on this journey, because now, I’m focussed on YOU, and together, we are stronger.

If at first you don’t succeed….

This is, my fourth blog technically, having stripped all the content from my last blog that I’ve been working on really hard for the last three weeks. Seriously I was eating, sleeping and drinking that blog, and I loved it! It was sexy, and funky, I had about 10 posts that I’d written almost daily from the start, and it looked awesome. So why have I gone back to the drawing board?

Well I managed to get about 45 visitors in eight days, together with traffic from the other students from Alex Jeffreys forum. Now there’s no real scale to this traffic so the results couldn’t really be analysed constructively, but coupled with some feedback I managed to gain from Alex’s forum, and more research on some other blogs I needed to make a very hard decision.

The results:
Average Time On Site : Consistently went down. Surely that should have gone up as I posted more content, apparently not. (head scratching)
Pages Per visit : Consistently went down. Hmmmmmm?
Bounce Rate : Ahhhh, now this went up, yaaaay. But here’s the thing. Thats NOT GOOD. It means my visitors are bouncing AWAY from my site without clicking on another page, or following a link.
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I got some feedback from some of the forum users, who in a very nice way (and I respect them for it) said it was too fancy, and sales oriented, (they were more constructive than that, but I’m not going to beat about the bush). The cumulative result of the google analytics, lack of comments and feedback was resounding. I either tried to fix what I had, or start again and this time i realised I had to KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID!

I cannot tell you how close I was to giving up at this point, but I had been through so much up to now, if I gave up I’ve wasted nearly a whole year of my life, so you know what, I’m going to keep going until I succeed. Which I will, even if it kills me!

I trust Alex Jeffreys, and his ability to coach his students. In the latest webinar Alex has covered getting organised, he’s shown us the full picture, and our profit pulling platform, and now blogging. So what was I doing wrong?

I was trying to be a smart ass, and get ahead without the correct knowledge, and as painful as it is to admit, I was heading down the wrong road. I had a moment like my wife and I often have in the car, when one of us has to decide whether to turn around or keep going, in the hope we’ll eventually get to our destination! There’s usually a lot of shouting involved.

It’s now May 2010, I’ve been unemployed since January, and trying to create an income online since June 2009. I’m still applying for jobs and I have two interviews next week. When I do get a job to pay the bills, I want to be out of it by Christmas, in fact screw it I WILL be out of it by Christmas. But I need that job because if I focus on the money now, I’ll be blinded by it and unable to offer any real value to my blog readers.

I’m not going to give up, I have a beautiful baby girl who was born in Feb, and I’m determined that her life will not be limited by financial circumstance.

I want to hear about your pain too, weather you’re massively successful, or just starting out, share your early experiences, so people like me and other newbies can see that you really can break through. Tell us why and for how long you struggled, and how it felt when you made your first sale.

Inspire us with your comments below.