When I started my process in the Internet business a few years ago, I came in with a certain amount of marketing wisdom. So I wasn't shocked that I didn't become an instant millionaire in the first month. I wasn't horrified that everybody on the internet didn't know who I was immediately. I wasn't surprised that I didn't hold the trust of all internet surfers relative to my service. This is said with tongue in cheek.

Over the past few years I have spent a few hours a week trying different marketing methods on the internet. Some were well received, and some were frowned upon. I wanted to test the response and feeling that I got from each program.

I started each advertising program knowing that it would take time and effort building the trust and friendship of the people viewing my materials. I knew that every person would be different, with different needs and different buying cycles.
Example 1. They needed my service right away, but didn't necessarily know me or trust me.
Example 2. They needed my service and they trusted me, but it was going to take a while for them to purchase because of another circumstance.
Example 3. People just want to wait and see. They want to see that you'll be in business for a period of time before they'll trust you enough to place an order with you. I've seen this many times.

We built our first few websites and promoted them, constantly using the new techniques we learned. My personal philosophy comes from TOM PETERS, Author of "In Search of Excellence", who said it best - "READY, FIRE, AIM!" This means, use a combination of your gut instincts with a reasonable amount of research on what you're trying to do. Generally when I try out a new marketing program, I do a quick try, to get a quick feel for it. Based on my experience with something I'll spend different amounts of time on it.

This may seem like alot of work, and it is/was. Especially at first. I did an enormous amount of ready, fire, aim!. But the more I did of that, I started to see patterns of what worked and what didn't. I was able to evaluate things faster and get them working for me in shorter periods of time. My results started increasing.

I compare my marketing results with my niece and nephew whom I haven't seen in years. The first thing I said to them was the over-clichéd "My how you've grown". Their parents have seem them each day of their life for the last few years. They've seen all the inches grown each day. With my websites, I saw the counter steadily going upwards, but it seemed agonizingly painful to get there. I would say, "Wow, we got 10 extra visitors from that effort this week." It doesn't seem like a lot, but when you combine 15 new types of promotions with 10 extra visitors from each promotion, the numbers start to add up. And then, as you become experienced at each of these 15 types of promotions your results will multiply even more. These are the small results that come over time.

GETTING BACK ON TOPIC:
The more we developed relationships with different websites and prospects and customers and search engines, the more people visited out site. The more we learned about helping people in the internet community , the more traffic we got. All of a sudden the traffic comes from "who knows where". We have traffic coming to us from sites that we signed up on a few years ago. It may be only one or two visitors once in a while from those sites, but it was sure worth the two minutes that I invested to do that.

WE'VE LEARNED FROM OUR EXPERIENCE
Just recently we published a site that we had been planning for a long time. We immediately applied all of the things we had learned over the last few years (along with more hard work). Because of the hard work we put in on the first site, our traffic has started off to be much greater in a relatively short period of time than our first site was after a year or so of working at it. We got really lucky with lots of visitors to start off with on our second site.

That's why I'm convinced that: "THE HARDER I WORK, THE LUCKIER I GET"

copyright 2006 Monty Loree
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