How many eBooks and courses have you signed up to?

If you want to buy an ebook, don’t fall for the trick of buying the first book on blogging or internet marketing that promises to make you rich, or turn on autopilot riches. Choose books carefully and try to avoid the hype otherwise you might just be wasting your money.

If you still want to buy into the make money online scheme, read my other post about the top 10 Internet marketing myths.

1. You can make lots of money quickly and easily

There are very few ways to make money easily and internet marketing (IM) is certainly not one of them. If you aren’t ready for some serious hard work and a fairly steep learning curve I suggest you get back in the queue for a lottery ticket. To make money online you will need at the very least good products, good promotional skills, some technical ability and lots of time. If you choose IM as a job you are not in for an easy ride.

How do you avoid the trap of starting out on the IM road and not making any money? Put some research and planning in place to give yourself some targets to reach. Have you ever heard the expression Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance - it’s no different for internet marketers.

2. Google AdSense is a sure fire way to make money

When I included AdSense on my first blog I was sure within a matter of weeks I’d be sitting on a sun lounger, sipping a cocktail, watching the dollars roll in. After all it was very easy to put AdSense on my blog. Unfortunately that just wasn’t the case and I would imagine the majority of other bloggers / website owners are in the same position.

When you include AdSense on your site, first of all be realistic, don’t expect to retire overnight. Consider these tactics to increase your AdSense revenues:

- consider testing different ad formats and placements and use the statistics to analyse performance changes,
- ensure the ads match the content on your site / blog by writing on consistent topics with consistent keywords,
- work on driving traffic to your site / blog as this will increase the likelihood of receiving clicks,
- read and understand Google’s terms and conditions - you don’t want to get banned by clicking on your own ads for example,
- read a book written by an AdSense expert.

3. The first thing to do is set up your blog

It’s easy to believe all the hype about making money online and specifically through blogging, after all, it is very easy to setup a blog. Don’t jump in with both feet though until you’ve sat down with a pen and paper and written a proper plan of action. If you want to make money online you will need to take a planned and structured approach.

Consider writing a marketing plan. You should consider the following steps:

- situation - where is my business currently at?
- objectives - what do I want to achieve with my internet business?
- strategy - how will I go about achieving these objectives?
- tactics - what specifically will I do to make this strategy work?
- action - who is going to make these tactics happen and when?
- control - how will I know when I’ve reached my goals i.e. what measures will I use?

4. You can work for 4 hours a week writing a blog and make money

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen this in the sales hype of some internet marketing guru’s squeeze page. I have never heard of anyone who works this little and reaps massive rewards, it just doesn’t happen. If someone offered you an office job working just 4 hours a week which earned millions of dollars, would you trust them?

Be realistic in your objectives and plan how much time you will spend on your business. There is simply no substitute for hard work when it comes to internet marketing.

5. You don’t need any technical knowledge e.g. HTML, PHP etc

It’s true that you can achieve a lot on the internet with very little technical knowledge these days. There are lots of freeware options available for those that need help writing copy in HTML. Having said that, some basic skills will increase your confidence and help you to continually improve your site, blog and other online materials without incurring extra expenses. You should also become familiar with new software such as FTP, WinZip etc which are all essential for running an online business.

My advice here is to spend some time hitting the books and learning some basics. For more advanced programming challenges you might be better off finding an expert and I suggest you head over to Rentacoder.

6. You don’t need to be good at writing

This is another golden nugget that is more fallacy than fact. People like to read well researched, well written content, whether it’s on a blog, an ebook, an article or even your website. If you are selling your content rather than giving it away this is especially important. Ask yourself if you’d be happy paying for a magazine that’s full of grammatical errors, typos and misspelled words.

Again, take some time to learn the basics from a grammar book. Alternatively you could hire a professional to edit your text and provide guidance on how to make improvements. You could also hire a professional to write the content for you and there are lots of options available online for finding copywriters.

7. You can make money on the internet writing about anything

In actual fact much of the advice you’ll read online about internet marketing is how to make money selling internet marketing products. Bear that in mind before you consider internet marketing for your particular niche. A great piece of advice I read recently comes from CapForge.com that suggests to make money online you need to prove a solution that people are having a problem with. For example:

Your house is on fire, and I am selling buckets of water. The problem is clear, concrete and immediate, the solution is available, complete and demonstrably effective

8. High traffic = high profits

Not necessarily true, in actual fact you need well targeted traffic, good products and a well functioning website or blog to capture sales. It’s not all about getting traffic, although of course this is important.

So how do you get highly targeted traffic? See above.

9. The money is in the list

This is every Internet Marketing gurus mantra and it’s easy to buy into this. Surely the more people you promote your product to, the greater the number of sales you will get? Talk to any direct marketing professional and they will assure you this is not the case, the money is actually in the quality of the list.

Think carefully before you buy lists, participate in joint ventures or other list building schemes. It will be far more profitable in the long run to grow your own list by offering quality and well targeted content and products.

10. It’s free to run a business online.

It’s easy to sell the idea that making money online is free, but it’s simply not true. As with any business you will incur start-up and ongoing expenses including, but not limited to, buying your domain name, web hosting, broadband internet connection, PC / laptop, books / literature on IM (believe me, you will buy some!), software (FTP, WinZip, Photoshop, others that aren’t standard), AdSense advertising and more.

Be realistic about your internet marketing business. This links back to the planning stage, think carefully about what you will need to spend to get your business rolling and then add a contingency fund on top. Granted the costs are lower than if you opened a shop on the high street, but don’t consider this to be a free exercise.

If you have read my blog before, it’s likely you’ll know I participate in the Reddit community as a way to promote the occasional post on my blog (and also to ensure I read the best of the web). Unfortunately Redditers tend not to get so excited about internet marketing topics or blog posts, it’s really much more about political stories, the war in Iraq and amusing pictures of bad driving etc. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I think Reddit is great, but for promoting your blog stories, expect to put some hard hours in building your karma score and to receive some pretty negative comments.

You could say I was quite pleased this morning then to come across PlugIM which is:

PlugIM is a user driven internet marketing community. Submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote your favourites to the front page.

Great, a community specifically for internet marketers and by the looks of things bloggers. Even better is the WordPress plugin - which you’ll note I’ve just added to my blog - which allows you to vote for posts, much as you would with Reddit, Dig, delicious etc etc.

I’d like therefore to congratulate PlugIM on what looks like a really interesting product and secondly Michelle Macpherson for writing the plugin. I hope it proves to be of value, especially now that I have a zero score next to all but one of my posts - which I shamelessly plugged myself.

Please everyone, feel free to Plug any posts you enjoy reading.

Did you know you can do your bit for the environment when searching online?

A new search engine called Jabago aims to cut energy use by displaying information on a black background, rather than the standard Google white background. According to Heap Media:

a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen

In fact over at ecoIron, Mark Ontkush suggests that:

an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts

Don’t worry, you will continue to receive quality search results as it’s powered by Google. The only argument then is if you can stand reading white text on a black background. If you can then set Jabago as your new homepage and feel good everytime you hit the search button.

Otherwise you could just head to Blackle or even just BlackGoogle.com