Growth and Marketing

Let’s call it (Self) Growth and (Internet) Marketing

I’ve had an allergy to having a “real job” for a very long time. Now, don’t get me wrong, a “real job” is nice. You get a regular paycheck, benefits, predicable hours and vacations and so on.  It’s even better if you have a government job. More money, more benefits, and the future of that job is more guaranteed.

I’ve always wanted to do my own thing. I like the freedom and the ability to call my own shots and do it on my time and in my own way. I’ve done the door to door thing, and had a bit of success, and done the 60 hour work week thing, as well (not at all a high-paying job, but it had certain other benefits.) These days I’m working on the “make a living off the web” thing. I’m far from Guru status, but it pays the bills.

This site is about marketing on the web and the personal growth that it takes to actually do that effectively. It takes a certain amount of discipline, and maybe a tough skin, to weather the times when things are a bit slow or people are telling you to get a “real job.”

Who’s the Boss?

So I’m the boss and I’m my own best and worst employee. If I take some time off to play video games, when I should be “working,” I can hardly call in with some excuse. The same is true if I care to put in an 80 hour week. Should I call myself and tell myself off, regarding what a slave-driver I am?

Growth, for the purposes of this site, is the growth in the focus and discipline it takes to do “this job.” For most of us that’s quite the leap from the imposed discipline of the boss and the job. I’ll be discussing that to some degree, from the point of view of stuff that gets my butt in gear. Maybe you will find that to be useful, too. Among other things this will include technique to go about achieving your goals.

Marketing refers to doing all the things necessary to connect visitors with products that might help them out. Most likely I’ll be getting a commission from said product, but not necessarily. Marketing also refers to a whole lot of things beyond the hype. If you’ve ever had a discussion with someone where something significant was solved and you both were happy, that’s marketing.

When you boil everything down there are only a couple of ways to bring in an income off the net.

• You sell someone else’s products/services, or…
• You sell your own.
• Allowing ads on a site that is otherwise purely informational could be a third option, but I think it also falls into the “selling the other guy’s stuff” category. Especially since posting/allowing an ad implies some degree of approval/recommendation of the ad content.

Affiliate Marketing

What I do is mainly the first one. Affiliate marketing is all about selling the other guy’s stuff. My wife does have a couple of products up on Clickbank (both cookbooks,) but that’s not our primary business.

What I focus on these days is putting up sites, putting up some good content, and then linking that to appropriate affiliate programs. Then I try to get some traffic coming to those sites. That’s the marketing that I’ll be writing about. I’ll also be writing for the person who isn’t so familiar with all of this stuff. Perhaps at some point I’ll be expert enough to put up my own product, but there’s already a whole lot of marketing & personal growth related stuff out there. As far as the details of this site and “growth and marketing,” I’ll go into:

Domain names – How and why to get a domain name one and how to hook it up to your website.

Websites – A website is your own personal space on the web that you have control over. It can cover anything from your Facebook page to your online catalog to Amazon.com. While putting up the latter is way over my head I can certainly help with the personal site stuff. You can build a real website for free, and have it look very nice, or you can go the paid route and get a lot more flexibility for a little more work.

Basic Marketing – You’ll want to get people to visit your site, especially if you want to earn anything from it, so I’ll talk about getting links, tips to get into the search engines, and so on.

Goal Setting – Mindset, personal growth, all those good things. Without them most of us will just wander aimlessly about. SO I’ll talk about my growth and maybe it’ll help you.

Techniques – things to do to accomplish any of the above.

Any of the above is fair game to appear here and I’ll likely add a few topics from time to time, and may even go into the occasional “off topic” post.You are certainly welcome to chime in with your own thoughts and remarks.