2.3 How to Guarantee You Achieve Your Goals (AF)

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In this video I discuss:

  • Answering the question, “When will I make money?”
  • Answering the question, “How much money can I make?”
  • Setting money-based goals vs. setting task-based goals
  • What you can control and what you CAN’T control in your internet business
  • Creating goals that set you up for success
  • You can’t fail if you do this ONE thing

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

2.3 Transcript Below

Alright, here we go… the last lesson!

The last lesson always feels so good. Takes me hours to get to the last lesson every section, but finally like, “Alright, here we go!” So I hope it feels the same way for you. I hope you feel like you’re learning things, you’re accomplishing things.

There’s so much to learn. There’s so much to cover. But I hope you’re feeling that kind of – even here in the very beginning – you’re feeling that you’re being set up so much better for success than you probably have been anywhere else – especially giving free training.

Let alone personally I aim to make this substantially better than any paid product that’s out there. Some of you guys that have paid two grand for a product, I’m hoping you’re saying, “Hey, this is the best stuff I’ve ever seen.” So I hope you’re feeling that way.

I think I’m setting you up for success much better than anything I’ve ever seen and I hope you’re feeling the same way.

So the last thing I want to cover in mindset before we start moving in and we start talking about actual methods and strategies is I want to teach you how to guarantee you achieve your goals.

You may raise an eyebrow and go, “How can he guarantee that?” especially after I’ve been a naysayer about all this other stuff. It’s similar to, “Hey if you’ve never stopped working, you can’t fail. If you never stop trying, you can’t fail. You only fail when you give up.”

So it’s kind of along that same train of thought but I think even more actionable and even more workable and even more tangible.

So let’s talk about how to guarantee you achieve your goals that you’ve set in this industry. A lot of people ask, “When am I going to make money?” Really common question.

And I used to get really frustrated by it. But again, I have to see it from a lot of your perspective and from my perspective early on, too – when I was 16, 18 years old before I started making a really decent living in internet marketing.

I kind of thought, “When am I going to make money? When am I going to see results? How much can I make?”

So they’re not unreasonable questions, but they’re very difficult questions to answer. In fact, they’re pretty much impossible to answer with any degree of accuracy. Outside of the ballparks… some of the ballparks that I gave in the last video… the last lesson… it’s just impossible to answer these questions.

And it’s impossible to answer these questions because “How long it takes?” The first part of that question – “How long is it going to take? When will I make money?” – it’s really determined by a combination of your competition and how much effort you’re putting in.

So if you’re in a really low-competition niche, a person working 20 hours a week is going to get there a lot faster than a person working 10 hours a week. And how much competition is in your industry is based very much on what niche you’ll pick – which we’ll talk about in one of the upcoming sections.

So it’s impossible to say how long it’s going to take to succeed because there’s so many moving parts. The main ones are competition and the effort you’re putting in – but there’s so many other moving parts. The quality of work you’re putting in, too. How well you’re following the training.

You know, a lot of people skip around in these members’ areas and then they wonder why 10 months later, they feel like they’ve been busting their butt but they’re not getting results. It’s because they’re blatantly going against what was taught in the training.

If they just spent the extra hours – whatever it is 10, 20 hours – going through their training early on, they’d be successful if they’d put in that amount of time.

So there are a lot of moving parts. But when you’re going to make money – how long it’s going to take – is impossible to answer based on those moving parts.

And how much money you can make is determined by how large your audience is, how much of a buying audience you’re working with in your niche – which I will spend a lot of time very specifically talking about when you’re picking a niche. Because again, it’s something that people skip over a lot of the time and I think it’s like the most important aspect of picking a niche and how well offers pay in your industry. You know, if the average offer in your industry pays 20 bucks versus the average offer in your industry pays 100 bucks, that’s going to make a really big difference in how much money you can make.

If your audience is only a maximum of a hundred thousand people versus your audience being a hundred million people, your income cap is going to be a heck of a lot higher with a hundred million audience members than it is with a hundred thousand audience members or ten thousand audience members.

So, just know that. Just know if you’re looking for answers to these questions… hopefully you trust me at this point, I’m not trying to deceive you, I’m not trying to dance around the topic… there’s just no good way to answer them. There are too many moving parts to answer them accurately.

The best I can say is the kind of milestones and the kind of general ballparks that I shared in Video 2.2 – the video before this.

So knowing that this is true, right? Knowing that it’s impossible to predict for even the most experienced person. It’s impossible to predict when they’re going to start seeing traction. It’s impossible to predict how much money they’re going to be able to make in that niche.

You may have a good idea like going into a niche, “Yeah, this niche is highly profitable. I expect to be able to make a full-time income minimum from this.” But you’re not going to know if that’s going to tap out at $3000 a month or $5000 a month or $15000, $20000, $30000 a month. You just don’t know until you enter the niche and you built it up.

You can have a good idea – which again we’ll talk about that in the training when you’re picking a niche – but knowing that all of this is true, setting money-based goals doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t.

I know it’s what our tendency as human beings is. It makes sense that we do it.

On the surface it seems to make sense that we say, “Hey, I’m going to measure my progress by in a year am I making $1000 a month?” You can kind of have those loosely in your mind. They’re not wrong to have. Just don’t get too attached to them because at the end of the day – as I’m going to talk about in this lesson – a lot of that is out of your control.

Setting money-based goals is… you have so little control over how much money your efforts are going to result in that it just doesn’t make sense to set goals that way. And so I’ll dig into this a little bit.

So what does make sense? If I’m not setting goals based on money, what am I setting goals based on?

You need to set… you don’t need to, right? You can keep saying, “I want to make $10000 a month. And we talked about the reverse math to set you up for success best in Section 1… about reverse math and how to kind of reverse engineer those milestones.

So you can keep doing that. You’re just going to find yourself a lot more disappointed more often and you’re also probably… you’re more likely guaranteed – it’s not probably – you are guaranteed more likely to wash out of this industry.

Because if you say, “I’m going to hit $1000 a month within six months,” and you don’t hit it, it’s overwhelming. It’s defeating. It’s deflating. It’s depressing. It’s hard on you. And every time you go through that, you’re more and more likely to wash out of the industry.

So the thing I want to do is that I decrease the chance of that happening as much as possible for your own success. So set goals and milestones that you’re in control of achieving.

You control how high-quality your content is. You absolutely control that. People always ask… they think, “I post a 1500-word article – that means it’s high-quality.” Not necessarily.

Typically, longer content is high-quality. Most sites that are posting 500 to 700 words per article are going to be beat out by sites posting 1500 to 2000 words per article. At Stopping Scams – as I record this just the other day – we published a 14800-word article about how to get traffic and promote your blog. So that’s a high-quality post.

But even then, someone could write 14,800 words of gibberish and it’s not a high-quality post. So you have to keep those things in mind. But we’ll talk about specifically what quality is later in the training. You’ll have a very clear understanding of that. Don’t panic. But you control how high-quality your content is.

Word count? You control as well. That’s not exactly a good indicator, but again, we’ll talk about that later in the training – exactly how to create high-quality content and what that entails. You control that.

You control which keywords you’re targeting. You control how much keyword research you do, how thoroughly you dig in – we’ll talk about this in the training later, too.

But depending on what keywords you’re picking, depending on what keywords you are aiming to rank for, that you’re writing your articles about, you determine a huge amount of whether you’re going to succeed or fail. So we’ll talk about that very thoroughly when we get to the keyword research section. You control that. That is in your control.

You control how many times you post per week. You control how many hours you work per week. You control how efficient you are: how many posts you can get out in the number of hours you can put in in a week, how many quality posts you can post if you put in x amount of hours per week. So you’re in control of these things.

So it makes a lot more sense that you would set goals based on “I want to post x amount of high-quality articles per week. I want to improve my efficiency. I need to tune things but process them in place so that instead of posting one article in 20 hours of work, I want to be posting two or three articles. That is the same amount of quality, the same high-quality content, but I’m doing two or three times as much.” You control that efficiency.

So those are the goals that you should be setting. How many high-quality posts you’re putting out per week, how many posts you’re getting out per amount of hours – so in other words, on average how many hours is it taking you to put out a high-quality post.

Those are goals and kind of things that you’re in control that you can tweak. You can absolutely tweak those things and make a tremendous difference in your internet marketing business.

So we know that a lot of high-quality content with carefully-chosen keywords will bring traffic. That’s what I’m going to spend the next several sections teaching. Inside and out. Left to right. Just leaving no gaps, no questions about it.

We know this: high-quality content posted repeatedly over time as long as you stick with it will bring traffic. Traffic will bring money. End of story. If you’re in a buying niche, I should say.

If you’re not in a buying niche, too, technically speaking it’s just going to be a heck of a lot of easier on you and you’re going to need a lot less traffic which makes the goal so much more attainable if you were in a buying niche. And again, we will talk about that very explicitly when we get to the picking-a-niche section.

So how to set yourself up for success when you’re setting goals?

Focus… this kind of takes home what I was talking about earlier… Focus on task-oriented goals rather than money-oriented goals. That sets you up for success so much better because you’re in control of those tasks.

You have every right to get upset at yourself if you’re missing those task-based goals. If you’re saying, “I want to post three high-quality articles per week and I’m missing that,” you have every right to get upset at yourself.

If you said, “I want to be making $1000 per week by the end of six months,” or “I want to be making $1000 per month at the end of six months.” Even despite your best efforts, if you hit all of the other tasks that could have amounted to that, but for some reason it’s not happening, it’s just not connecting yet – you really shouldn’t be that mad at yourself.

You should be mad at yourself for setting an income-based goal – a money-based goal – and learn from that. But you shouldn’t be mad at yourself because so many things were out of your control. You did everything you could to achieve that – it just didn’t amount to it, right?

So you just kind of have to adjust and keep going. Again, you just have to keep plowing for it and you will succeed eventually.

You can control how perfectly and consistently you execute tasks. You can’t control what happens after that, right? You’re in total control of what tasks you aim for, how many hours you’re putting in for a week, and how perfectly you execute those. You can’t control what comes after that. You just kind of have to do the best you can.

At the end of the day, you’ve got to give it everything you’ve got. And if you don’t hit kind of the loosely-based goals – again, you don’t want to get too attached to those financial goals. It’s okay to have them in mind – just reverse engineer it to: “I want 50 high-quality posts and hopefully that’s going to bring me around to $1000 a month.” Or “I want a hundred high-quality posts within the next year.” `You can break that down into approximately two really high-quality posts every week.

And if you’re at the end of that year, and you’re not hitting that kind of income that you wanted to hit, then at least you have a really good idea of, “Okay, this is what I need to keep doing. These are the things that are working. If I keep hitting these little… these are my really highly-productive key performance indicators… my KPIs… if I keep hitting these, I’m going to be able to get to this goal.”

So just kind of adjust. Don’t get overwhelmed and give up and get down on yourself. Just learn from the mistake. Learn from the lesson. Give it everything you’ve got, leave it all out there, and then let the cards fall where they may.

Hitting a certain level of income may take more time than you originally envisioned. But eventually, you’re going to get there – guaranteed – if you just keep trying. The only way you’re going to miss that income goal ultimately in the long run is if you give up. Period.

So, that’s the end of Section 2. Again, confetti canons I wish I have! I should invest in those.

So end of Section 2. Mindset Training. I hope again that as you finish this section, you feel so much more empowered than you ever have going into this journey anywhere else.

And if it’s your first time, I’m hoping you feel empowered. You may not have anything to compare it to, to say, “Hey this was so much better than all of the other training I’ve seen,” but I humbly believe that this sets people up better in this industry better than anything else that’s out there. I really, really do.

And again, I say that from a point of humility. I’ve just been at this long enough – I’ve reviewed hundreds of products, I know what makes for a really good product… and over the years, I’ve kind of borrowed these different teaching methods, and learned so much from all of these other people, and learned from my personal mentors… most importantly, learned from my own mistakes in my business – that I know that starting here is the right thing to do and you’re set up so much more for success, so much better for success, if you kind of drill these things into you and you kind of take them into your heart, you embed them in your brain, and you know, “Okay, I’m ready for this ready journey ahead.”

And you are. You’re suited up. You’re ready for war now, right? So you can’t fail. Remember, you can’t fail if you never stop trying. There will be times of feeling overwhelmed. There will be times of feeling helpless. You just have to push through them and keep going.

If you get traffic in a buying niche – again, we want to focus on traffic in the early stages – everything else: be damned. If you get traffic in a buying niche, you can absolutely make money.

So follow the training closely. We’re finally going to start getting into strategies and methods and getting into screen sharing and all that kind of stuff where you’re looking over my shoulder and we’re using tools and learning specific strategies but just keep all of these in mind.

Stick to the training closely, set task-based goals – based on the training, you’ll have a really good idea what realistic goals are as we go through the training – and stick with it. If you do that, you’re going to succeed in internet marketing. It’s just a matter of time.

So that’s it for Section 2.

As always, if you have any questions, post them to the Facebook group. Again, totally free for registered members here. And hopefully, myself and other members will be able to come along and help you. Hopefully, we’re creating a really good community over there. It’s so early stage that I don’t know yet but I have a very specific vision in mind and I think we’re going to be able to do that together.

So pop your questions in there and other than that, if you know… I’ve already talked about questions so I don’t need to say, “If you have any questions…” So I’ll just see you in the next video.

Section 3, here we come!

2.2 What to Expect In the Coming Weeks/Months (AF)

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • What to expect in the coming weeks and months
  • Which track I’m focusing on teaching first here at FIMP
  • A clear explanation of how much time and money will be required during your first year
  • A 12-month example timeline of what traditional growth looks like in this business
  • Setting realistic goals that help ensure your success

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

2.2 Transcript Below

Alright, let’s keep this train a-movin’!

In this lesson I want to talk to you about what to expect in the coming weeks and months. I think this is really important to cover because (a) it’s asked a lot, and (b) it just makes it so much easier for you to plan, it makes easy for you to set realistic goals and the more realistic goals you set, the more likely you are to succeed.

Because every time you miss goals, every time you don’t achieve something that you expected to achieve within a certain period of time, it can be really demoralizing. And that’s a big reason as to why people ultimately give up and wash out of this industry and I don’t want that for you. I want to prevent that as much as possible.

So I want to talk about some kind of general rules of thumb — kind of what the milestones you can expect to see along this journey are and just kind of generally talk to you about what you can expect in the coming weeks and months.

So I’ve wanted to talk really quickly about what I’m teaching first here at the Free Internet Marketing Project.

I’m teaching the most universal track in this industry. It has the lowest startup cost – that is one thing that’s a huge advantage for internet marketing. These days, I wouldn’t say it’s possible to… and I’ll dig into this later in this video… but I wouldn’t say it’s possible to start a business with no money in today’s search engine climate.

It’s probably possible; the odds are just so much more against you when the odds are already stacked against you to start. But in internet marketing, unlike a brick and mortar business, you can keep your startup cost ridiculously low comparatively.

I am going to be teaching the track that is not only the most universal, it’s the thing that pretty much anyone can do. It’s also the track with the fewest moving parts. The more complex something gets, the more moving parts there are. The more moving parts there are, the more likely it is for one of those things to not line up and for your business to fail for that reason.

And you may not be able to identify what went wrong, you just know, “Hey, there were 25 things in play. Somewhere along the way one of the really important ones didn’t line up correctly, and crap, now I got to start over from scratch.” So this track definitely has the fewest moving parts.

It’s also one of the… I don’t have this on the bullets here… it’s also one of the most forgiving. There are tracks where if you don’t do everything right, you might lose five grand. You may lose three grand, five grand, ten grand. In marketing – in advertising – this track you don’t have to worry about that. It’s much more forgiving.

What I’m teaching here to start with is the most foolproof and approachable entry into internet marketing as long as you’re consistent – as we talked about in the last video – and you stick with it.

Now, I do know faster and more advanced ways to make money and kind of produce results faster in internet marketing. They require more startup capital so they require more money on the front end typically due to an advertising budget.

And also, when you’re spending upwards of 20, 30, 40 grand a month on Facebook, you want to have the best tools so you also need to budget a few hundred dollars for extra tools and stuff like that. So that gets much more advanced.

That’s really the only way you can kind of get results a lot faster in this industries basically if you have a lot of money you can throw at it. I’m going to teach those but I’m going to teach them later.

First, I want to teach the thing that is the cheapest, the friendliest – as far as if you make a mistake, the stakes aren’t just that high. You can just pick up and keep going. Learn from your mistakes. And it has the fewest moving parts. It is the most universal kind of… not even just beginner-friendly… just budget-friendly way into internet marketing and starting a profitable internet business.

So I want to talk really quickly about the time… what you can expect time-wise and money-wise – again very, very common questions and totally reasonable questions to ask – in the coming months.

So expect to give your business at least 10 hours of work per week. If you can’t give your business that – and I mean no offense by this, I really don’t – you don’t have any business building business right now… you need to re-prioritize your life.

I mean if you spent a little over an hour a day… I mean when I first started my internet business, I was working a full-time job, too. And I was also commuting to and from work when I was out of college. I was also commuting to and from work an hour from each direction, each day. So I had eleven hours of my day consumed by my job and I was tired all the time.

But what I did was I started taking a Park & Ride to work. So I would get on like a big charter bus – it wasn’t like a normal city bus – big charter bus in North Austin and I would ride it down into downtown Austin and that would give me an hour before work and an hour after work every single day to get my work done.

And then I also work three or four hours at least each day on the weekends. Sometimes I worked more in the evenings after I got home to kind of finish up what I started on the bus.

And I only had to do that for a few months. I only had to moonlight for a few months before I started to get traction and I was able to quit my job and turn it into my full-time job.

So find a way. You just have to find a way. Again, I don’t want to be the naysayer for all these stuff but if you can’t give your business 10 hours a week consistently, I want to tell you now. I want you to go pursue other things.

And again, we only have this one life. Spend those hours some other way that is going to be more beneficial to you because if you can only give your business three or five hours a week, you’re just wasting your time frankly. It’s very, very, very unlikely you’re going to see success.

So expect to give your business at least 10 hours per week.

Plan for this journey to take at least 6 to 12 months before you start to see really good results. And by results in this particular instance, I’m talking about money.

You can start seeing traffic a little bit earlier, you can start to see some traction. One of the most exciting things is when you start to see organic comments coming through your blog and your videos and stuff like that. Or you start seeing people share your stuff on social media instead of you going and sharing it yourself.

I remember one of the first times I had a video go viral on Reddit that I had not posted to Reddit myself. One of my followers posted for me and I started to get this flood of YouTube traffic to that video. That was really, really cool.

So you see some earlier signs and those are considered results, too. But what most people are most concerned with is, “How do I get results?” as in “How do I make money? When am I going to see those results?”

And that’s going to take at least 6 to 12 months usually. So, expect that. Expect that to take a while.

More hours means you’re going to see that money faster. So if you’re working 20, 30, 40 hours a week consistently and you’re doing high-quality work… it’s not just quantity over quality, it needs to be quality work… but if you’re working 20, 30, 40 hours a week, you’re going to see results two, three, four times as fast as someone that’s putting in the bare minimum of 10 hours a week.

Minimal hours also mean you should probably have less ambitious goals. If you can only work the bare minimum of 10 hours a week, instead of aiming for $2000 or $3000 within the first 12 months – or $2000 or $3000 a month by the end of that 12 months – you might only aim for $800 to $1000. Because again, you’re going to be seeing progress half or a quarter as quickly as someone that’s willing to work 20 or 40 hours a week on their business.

If you can only work 10 hours a week, it’s not like it’s worth doing, it just means that it’s going to take a little bit longer. And you need to have that in mind as you kind of set your goals and you anticipate the road ahead on this journey.

You absolutely need to have somewhere between $150 and $200 for startup capital for your first year. Just non-negotiable.

At a bare minimum, you’re going to need hosting. That’s where you keep the files for your website and everyone that visits your website – this is a little bit too technical – but whenever someone visits your website, it pulls those files to present on their computer from your server and your server is your hosting company.

You can get that for a reasonable price. You can get that for somewhere between $100 and $150 a year for really dependable high-quality hosting with really good support and stuff like that in case you get stuck. But you need it. It’s not negotiable.

If you’re trying to run an internet business, you need a website. You need a website. Period. End of story.

While I’m talking about it, you also need a computer.

And again, I mean no offense by these people who have the best intentions when they ask these questions, but people ask, “Can I build my internet business from my mobile phone?” No. No, you can’t. You need a laptop or a computer. I won’t even advice doing it from a tablet. You really need those tools. If you don’t have those tools and you don’t have the money to invest in them right now, I’m sorry.

And again, I don’t mean to be harsh, but if you can’t afford these bare minimum requirements… I mean you can go buy a really crappy computer from a second-hand store for $200 that will get done what you need done in internet marketing.

So you at least need a computer and you need $150 to $200 startup capital for your first year. As long as you have at least that, you’re golden.

You can invest in some extra things along the way that will make the journey easier – I’ll bring them up as we go. They’re not necessary because there are free tools as well, but sometimes, you can invest in some premium tools to save yourself a lot of time and money. And as they say, “Time is money.” So any chance I get to save time by investing in a tool if it’s reasonable, I do it.

So I personally have several hundred dollars a month in different subscription for tools. That’s not saying you need to, right? I didn’t start with that. I worked my way up to it. I started shoestring just like definition of bootstrapping of an internet business – and you can too.

Don’t get me wrong, it’ll take more hours at a bare minimum – I’m getting off-track here, I’m sorry I have a tendency to do that – at a bare minimum, you need $150 to $200 to invest in hosting and a $10 or $15 a year domain name. That’s it. For the first year. If you can do that, we’re good.

Let’s keep going.

The kind of milestones I want to kind of give you… kind of quarterly expectations if you are giving your business at least 10 hours a week… these milestones are probably more realistic if you’re giving your business at least 15, 20 hours a week.

But in the first three months, I want you to fully anticipate – as we touched on in the last video – there is going to be a lot of learning, there’s going to be a lot of trial and error, and you’re going to have to learn how to create high-quality content in your niche.

You’re going to spend a lot of time revisiting these videos, revisiting your notes, and kind of tinkering with things. Having to go into Google or search the Facebook group and see like, “How do I fix this thing?”, “How do I treat this thing on my website?”, “I don’t see this option. How do I–”, all of those things you’re going to have to work through them.

And some days it feels like they’re never-ending – it’s just a barrage of them. You have to have that independent mentality of… you can’t think, “I want someone who’s going to hold my hand through this.”

I’m going to do my best the best I can to show you every single step of the way and not leave any gaps. But at the end of the day, if you encounter an issue with WordPress or if you encounter an issue with your domain name, there are millions upon millions of WordPress users out there. There are millions of people that own websites. You can pretty quickly and easily Google those things. And probably after some digging – even if it takes you 30 minutes – find a solution.

So there’s going to be a lot of that in the early stages. You just got to have to keep learning. A lot of the technical stuff may be really frustrating for a lot of you. It’s just trial and error and learning kind of settle in to that groove.

Months 3-6: we’ll still have some of that but the good thing about learning is that a lot of these things you only have to learn once. And then the second time it’s easier; the third time it’s easier; fourth, fifth, sixth time it’s even easier; and then beyond that, it’s probably second nature at a point.

My wife was watching me… she’s building her first internet business right now… she was watching me build one of my sites. She was watching me build F.I.M.P. She was watching me work on the site and everything. She was watching the way I use my computer and how quickly I navigate WordPress and she just sat back, she said, “Oh my God, you’re so fast at all that stuff.” I hope so. It’s the 700th time I’ve done it!

You’re still going to experience some of those things in Months 3 through 6 but you’re going to have to stick with it and there are going to be times in this particular quarter – if you haven’t already experienced them in Months 1 through 3 – that you’re just wondering, “Am I doing everything right? I’m not seeing–” because a lot of time there’s no feedback, there’s nothing saying like, “You’re doing the right thing. You’re getting traffic.” It takes longer than that.

So there’s kind of this purgatory in the middle where you’re putting in all these hard work still and you’ve been putting in all these hard work and you’re still not seeing results.

And it takes a really strong will and kind of tough skin to stick this out – that’s why I warned you about it so hard – as we enter into the actual strategies and methods and technical training. You have to know this stuff is coming. If you anticipate it, you’re so much more likely to push through it and succeed and overcome it.

But there will be a lot of days that you’re wondering, “Am I doing anything right?” And one of the horrible things that people do is instead of continuing to write really high-quality content where they’ve been writing 1200, 1500, 2000-word posts of really, really high-quality content, doing really diligent keyword research and unpaid SEO, they’ll start to kind of feel wear and tear and they’ll go, “Ah. I’ll just post a video today with like a 200-word blurb.”

And then they’ll start doing that and then they’ll write me eight months later and they’ll be like, “Why am I not seeing results?” Well that’s because after two months, your quality went out the window and everything since then has been worthless.

So you really have to have tough skin and stick with it and keep putting out quality stuff even when you’re questioning whether you’re doing everything correctly.

If you’re doing everything according to the training here, if you’ve watched all the videos, you’re doing it correctly, okay? You just have to stick with it and learn from your mistakes and just keep on going even when you feel completely helpless.

Months 6-9: you’re still sticking with it, so kind of grinding it out. You’ve probably not seen a whole lot of results yet but you may be seeing early signs of traction. You may even in really, really rare cases – I don’t want this to be the expectation – in really rare cases, you might be seeing a fair amount of part-time income at this point. If you’re really working hard and grinding hard and putting out really high-quality content, you just landed in a really good niche.

But at the very least, at this point, you’re probably starting to see traffic, you’re probably starting to see some comments – especially if you’re doing other things like posting on social media or tweeting or doing video marketing (I’ll teach a lot of those here in this course as well) but you’re probably going to start seeing some traffic to any or all of those and comments and you’re going to start seeing some things that say, “Hey, those are the first signs of success!” And if you keep sticking with it, you’re on to something. You’re going to get there.

And then Months 9-12, you’re potentially starting to see a part-time income a lot of the time. Again, there are no guarantees. I’m not saying if you give this 12 months of your life, hard work, even the highest quality – it’s going to happen. But typically, this is what you’re going to see.

And there are people that are making a full-time income. They’ve quit their job by Month 12. It requires a lot of hard work. It requires a lot of dedication. Those are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met in my life, and frankly, they are harder working than I am – and I’m a pretty hardworking person.

So just keep these kind of benchmarks in mind. If you’re at Month 9 and you’re still not seeing signs of traffic, that doesn’t mean you’re totally screwed. It just could mean that you’re in a higher competition industry. And if you’re in a higher competition niche, you can probably add somewhere between six and eight months to a lot of these milestones.

So like health and fitness… pretty much any one of the evergreen niches – they’re called ‘evergreen’ because they’re always going to be full of buying audience members which is great because once you grind it out and you get there, you’re going to have some really good monetization opportunities. You’re probably going to be able to make a lot of money off of that traffic. But it takes longer to get there and break through unless you’re really creative and unique and you add value in a very different way than people have before.

Or like maybe you’re doing video and nobody… so few people do video… it’s a really easy way to cut through to even the highest competition industries to do videos consistently alongside your content – which we’ll talk about again as we go through the training.

But the three most evergreen niches are health and wellness, health and fitness; make money online, business opportunities, stuff like that, Forex, investing of any kind; and also relationships and dating. Those are in this industry like the coveted three niches. Beauty is in there with health and fitness and stuff like that, too. These niches that are always just going to make buku bucks if you can get the traffic.

But it takes longer to get that traffic because there’s a lot more competition, there are a lot more people vying for it.

The methods I’m teaching here will still work, you’re just going to have to grind a little bit longer and you’re going to question yourself a little bit longer before you start seeing those milestones.

So just because you’re not hitting these milestones doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something wrong, you just need to continue to stick with it, continue putting out really high-quality stuff.

If you are providing value to the world… Rule of thumb: if you’re providing really high-quality value to the world, you’re going to see it pay off at some point. It’s just a matter of sticking with it. There’s a very specific way to do that. You can’t just write about anything you want. You need to keep it consistent. And there are kind of some rules and stuff that I’ll teach you as we go through the sections in the rest of this training.

But just know, if you’re putting value into the world, you are going to reap financial reward at some point as long as you just stick with it.

So I want to set up for realistic goals. As I’ve already mentioned, expect to work at least 10 hours per week. So we’re going to talk about setting goals. Very specifically, it should be a very brief video but also very, very important. But as I’ve already covered, expect to work at least 10 hours per week. If you’re working for more, all the better. You’ll see results a lot faster.

Aim for traffic above everything else. I haven’t mentioned this yet, it’s super important. Traffic is the lifeblood of any internet business. There are varying degrees and varying quality of traffic. You can’t just go buy traffic from somewhere and say, “Oh, that’s traffic.”

Traffic has to be qualified. I have a lesson on that very specifically because it’s where a lot of people go wrong in this industry. They just think, “Oh, if I get traffic, I can start making money.” It’s a little bit more complex than that, but on a really simple scale, rule of thumb: traffic is the most important thing as you’re trying to get started.

So don’t worry about making a ton of money from the start. That will come. Focus on getting traffic. Traffic can be turned into a part-time income. Part-time income can be built into a full-time income. I’m going to teach you how to do that in these training videos in one of the sections later.

So just plan for this journey, again, to take at least 6 to 12 months. Give it 6 to 12 months of really diligent effort and follow the training very, very closely.

Plan for some of those months to feel like you’re doing everything wrong. It’s the nature of this business. It’s going to happen. You have to push through them.

So these are the things that I really want you to take away from this video: Expect to work 10 hours a week, aim for traffic… make traffic your priority above everything else… the way your website looks, how much money it’s making, how you’re integrating your affiliate offers or advertising or anything like that is all secondary to traffic in the beginning. Once you get traffic, hey that’s the secret ingredient to making money online, okay? So focus on traffic and everything else will follow.

And you’ll start off… you’re not going to go from making zero dollars to making $5000 a month… you’ll start making a couple hundred dollars a month and then it’s kind of amazing how quickly they can kind of snowball once you start to see those early signs.

Then it can be kind of an exponential kind of growth curve where you go from, “Hey I spent the first eight months making zero dollars. Month 9, I made 200 bucks. Month 10, I made 1200 bucks. Month 11, I’m making 2300 bucks,” because it really does. There can be… it’s not always like that… but there can be some really accelerated growth once you do grind it out and you start to see those early signs.

So just know, if you took eight months to make $200 a month, it’s not going to take you another eight months to make $400 a month. That is when it frequently… again non-linear… it’s not going to go slow up and up and up. It may have a big swoop and there may be a month where your traffic drops because you lost some rankings. Just expect these things.

It’s a very unpredictable thing but if you stay… tried and true the method here is… if you stay on course and you keep pushing, you will succeed eventually and you can make a very, very, very profitable internet marketing business in time.

So that’s Lesson 1.2. We’re done here. Alright?

Moving on Lesson 1.3. Before I really start teaching you strategies and getting you on the right track to making money – all these stuff that we’ve been talking about – I want to set some goals, I want to talk about the right way to set goals because there’s a right way and there’s a very, very wrong way and most people are doing it the wrong way. So that’s what we’re going to talk about in the last video of this section, Video 1.3.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group – again, free for registered members. And that’s how… well hopefully, we’re all helping each other, right? Hopefully it’s not all falling on me. But of course, I’m in there every day, too.

So best of luck on the journey ahead and I will see you in Lesson 2.3.

2.3 How to Guarantee You Achieve Your Goals

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

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In this video I discuss:

  • Answering the question, “When will I make money?”
  • Answering the question, “How much money can I make?”
  • Setting money-based goals vs. setting task-based goals
  • What you can control and what you CAN’T control in your internet business
  • Creating goals that set you up for success
  • You can’t fail if you do this ONE thing

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

2.3 Transcript Below

Alright, here we go… the last lesson!

The last lesson always feels so good. Takes me hours to get to the last lesson every section, but finally like, “Alright, here we go!” So I hope it feels the same way for you. I hope you feel like you’re learning things, you’re accomplishing things.

There’s so much to learn. There’s so much to cover. But I hope you’re feeling that kind of – even here in the very beginning – you’re feeling that you’re being set up so much better for success than you probably have been anywhere else – especially giving free training.

Let alone personally I aim to make this substantially better than any paid product that’s out there. Some of you guys that have paid two grand for a product, I’m hoping you’re saying, “Hey, this is the best stuff I’ve ever seen.” So I hope you’re feeling that way.

I think I’m setting you up for success much better than anything I’ve ever seen and I hope you’re feeling the same way.

So the last thing I want to cover in mindset before we start moving in and we start talking about actual methods and strategies is I want to teach you how to guarantee you achieve your goals.

You may raise an eyebrow and go, “How can he guarantee that?” especially after I’ve been a naysayer about all this other stuff. It’s similar to, “Hey if you’ve never stopped working, you can’t fail. If you never stop trying, you can’t fail. You only fail when you give up.”

So it’s kind of along that same train of thought but I think even more actionable and even more workable and even more tangible.

So let’s talk about how to guarantee you achieve your goals that you’ve set in this industry. A lot of people ask, “When am I going to make money?” Really common question.

And I used to get really frustrated by it. But again, I have to see it from a lot of your perspective and from my perspective early on, too – when I was 16, 18 years old before I started making a really decent living in internet marketing.

I kind of thought, “When am I going to make money? When am I going to see results? How much can I make?”

So they’re not unreasonable questions, but they’re very difficult questions to answer. In fact, they’re pretty much impossible to answer with any degree of accuracy. Outside of the ballparks… some of the ballparks that I gave in the last video… the last lesson… it’s just impossible to answer these questions.

And it’s impossible to answer these questions because “How long it takes?” The first part of that question – “How long is it going to take? When will I make money?” – it’s really determined by a combination of your competition and how much effort you’re putting in.

So if you’re in a really low-competition niche, a person working 20 hours a week is going to get there a lot faster than a person working 10 hours a week. And how much competition is in your industry is based very much on what niche you’ll pick – which we’ll talk about in one of the upcoming sections.

So it’s impossible to say how long it’s going to take to succeed because there’s so many moving parts. The main ones are competition and the effort you’re putting in – but there’s so many other moving parts. The quality of work you’re putting in, too. How well you’re following the training.

You know, a lot of people skip around in these members’ areas and then they wonder why 10 months later, they feel like they’ve been busting their butt but they’re not getting results. It’s because they’re blatantly going against what was taught in the training.

If they just spent the extra hours – whatever it is 10, 20 hours – going through their training early on, they’d be successful if they’d put in that amount of time.

So there are a lot of moving parts. But when you’re going to make money – how long it’s going to take – is impossible to answer based on those moving parts.

And how much money you can make is determined by how large your audience is, how much of a buying audience you’re working with in your niche – which I will spend a lot of time very specifically talking about when you’re picking a niche. Because again, it’s something that people skip over a lot of the time and I think it’s like the most important aspect of picking a niche and how well offers pay in your industry. You know, if the average offer in your industry pays 20 bucks versus the average offer in your industry pays 100 bucks, that’s going to make a really big difference in how much money you can make.

If your audience is only a maximum of a hundred thousand people versus your audience being a hundred million people, your income cap is going to be a heck of a lot higher with a hundred million audience members than it is with a hundred thousand audience members or ten thousand audience members.

So, just know that. Just know if you’re looking for answers to these questions… hopefully you trust me at this point, I’m not trying to deceive you, I’m not trying to dance around the topic… there’s just no good way to answer them. There are too many moving parts to answer them accurately.

The best I can say is the kind of milestones and the kind of general ballparks that I shared in Video 2.2 – the video before this.

So knowing that this is true, right? Knowing that it’s impossible to predict for even the most experienced person. It’s impossible to predict when they’re going to start seeing traction. It’s impossible to predict how much money they’re going to be able to make in that niche.

You may have a good idea like going into a niche, “Yeah, this niche is highly profitable. I expect to be able to make a full-time income minimum from this.” But you’re not going to know if that’s going to tap out at $3000 a month or $5000 a month or $15000, $20000, $30000 a month. You just don’t know until you enter the niche and you built it up.

You can have a good idea – which again we’ll talk about that in the training when you’re picking a niche – but knowing that all of this is true, setting money-based goals doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t.

I know it’s what our tendency as human beings is. It makes sense that we do it.

On the surface it seems to make sense that we say, “Hey, I’m going to measure my progress by in a year am I making $1000 a month?” You can kind of have those loosely in your mind. They’re not wrong to have. Just don’t get too attached to them because at the end of the day – as I’m going to talk about in this lesson – a lot of that is out of your control.

Setting money-based goals is… you have so little control over how much money your efforts are going to result in that it just doesn’t make sense to set goals that way. And so I’ll dig into this a little bit.

So what does make sense? If I’m not setting goals based on money, what am I setting goals based on?

You need to set… you don’t need to, right? You can keep saying, “I want to make $10000 a month. And we talked about the reverse math to set you up for success best in Section 1… about reverse math and how to kind of reverse engineer those milestones.

So you can keep doing that. You’re just going to find yourself a lot more disappointed more often and you’re also probably… you’re more likely guaranteed – it’s not probably – you are guaranteed more likely to wash out of this industry.

Because if you say, “I’m going to hit $1000 a month within six months,” and you don’t hit it, it’s overwhelming. It’s defeating. It’s deflating. It’s depressing. It’s hard on you. And every time you go through that, you’re more and more likely to wash out of the industry.

So the thing I want to do is that I decrease the chance of that happening as much as possible for your own success. So set goals and milestones that you’re in control of achieving.

You control how high-quality your content is. You absolutely control that. People always ask… they think, “I post a 1500-word article – that means it’s high-quality.” Not necessarily.

Typically, longer content is high-quality. Most sites that are posting 500 to 700 words per article are going to be beat out by sites posting 1500 to 2000 words per article. At Stopping Scams – as I record this just the other day – we published a 14800-word article about how to get traffic and promote your blog. So that’s a high-quality post.

But even then, someone could write 14,800 words of gibberish and it’s not a high-quality post. So you have to keep those things in mind. But we’ll talk about specifically what quality is later in the training. You’ll have a very clear understanding of that. Don’t panic. But you control how high-quality your content is.

Word count? You control as well. That’s not exactly a good indicator, but again, we’ll talk about that later in the training – exactly how to create high-quality content and what that entails. You control that.

You control which keywords you’re targeting. You control how much keyword research you do, how thoroughly you dig in – we’ll talk about this in the training later, too.

But depending on what keywords you’re picking, depending on what keywords you are aiming to rank for, that you’re writing your articles about, you determine a huge amount of whether you’re going to succeed or fail. So we’ll talk about that very thoroughly when we get to the keyword research section. You control that. That is in your control.

You control how many times you post per week. You control how many hours you work per week. You control how efficient you are: how many posts you can get out in the number of hours you can put in in a week, how many quality posts you can post if you put in x amount of hours per week. So you’re in control of these things.

So it makes a lot more sense that you would set goals based on “I want to post x amount of high-quality articles per week. I want to improve my efficiency. I need to tune things but process them in place so that instead of posting one article in 20 hours of work, I want to be posting two or three articles. That is the same amount of quality, the same high-quality content, but I’m doing two or three times as much.” You control that efficiency.

So those are the goals that you should be setting. How many high-quality posts you’re putting out per week, how many posts you’re getting out per amount of hours – so in other words, on average how many hours is it taking you to put out a high-quality post.

Those are goals and kind of things that you’re in control that you can tweak. You can absolutely tweak those things and make a tremendous difference in your internet marketing business.

So we know that a lot of high-quality content with carefully-chosen keywords will bring traffic. That’s what I’m going to spend the next several sections teaching. Inside and out. Left to right. Just leaving no gaps, no questions about it.

We know this: high-quality content posted repeatedly over time as long as you stick with it will bring traffic. Traffic will bring money. End of story. If you’re in a buying niche, I should say.

If you’re not in a buying niche, too, technically speaking it’s just going to be a heck of a lot of easier on you and you’re going to need a lot less traffic which makes the goal so much more attainable if you were in a buying niche. And again, we will talk about that very explicitly when we get to the picking-a-niche section.

So how to set yourself up for success when you’re setting goals?

Focus… this kind of takes home what I was talking about earlier… Focus on task-oriented goals rather than money-oriented goals. That sets you up for success so much better because you’re in control of those tasks.

You have every right to get upset at yourself if you’re missing those task-based goals. If you’re saying, “I want to post three high-quality articles per week and I’m missing that,” you have every right to get upset at yourself.

If you said, “I want to be making $1000 per week by the end of six months,” or “I want to be making $1000 per month at the end of six months.” Even despite your best efforts, if you hit all of the other tasks that could have amounted to that, but for some reason it’s not happening, it’s just not connecting yet – you really shouldn’t be that mad at yourself.

You should be mad at yourself for setting an income-based goal – a money-based goal – and learn from that. But you shouldn’t be mad at yourself because so many things were out of your control. You did everything you could to achieve that – it just didn’t amount to it, right?

So you just kind of have to adjust and keep going. Again, you just have to keep plowing for it and you will succeed eventually.

You can control how perfectly and consistently you execute tasks. You can’t control what happens after that, right? You’re in total control of what tasks you aim for, how many hours you’re putting in for a week, and how perfectly you execute those. You can’t control what comes after that. You just kind of have to do the best you can.

At the end of the day, you’ve got to give it everything you’ve got. And if you don’t hit kind of the loosely-based goals – again, you don’t want to get too attached to those financial goals. It’s okay to have them in mind – just reverse engineer it to: “I want 50 high-quality posts and hopefully that’s going to bring me around to $1000 a month.” Or “I want a hundred high-quality posts within the next year.” `You can break that down into approximately two really high-quality posts every week.

And if you’re at the end of that year, and you’re not hitting that kind of income that you wanted to hit, then at least you have a really good idea of, “Okay, this is what I need to keep doing. These are the things that are working. If I keep hitting these little… these are my really highly-productive key performance indicators… my KPIs… if I keep hitting these, I’m going to be able to get to this goal.”

So just kind of adjust. Don’t get overwhelmed and give up and get down on yourself. Just learn from the mistake. Learn from the lesson. Give it everything you’ve got, leave it all out there, and then let the cards fall where they may.

Hitting a certain level of income may take more time than you originally envisioned. But eventually, you’re going to get there – guaranteed – if you just keep trying. The only way you’re going to miss that income goal ultimately in the long run is if you give up. Period.

So, that’s the end of Section 2. Again, confetti canons I wish I have! I should invest in those.

So end of Section 2. Mindset Training. I hope again that as you finish this section, you feel so much more empowered than you ever have going into this journey anywhere else.

And if it’s your first time, I’m hoping you feel empowered. You may not have anything to compare it to, to say, “Hey this was so much better than all of the other training I’ve seen,” but I humbly believe that this sets people up better in this industry better than anything else that’s out there. I really, really do.

And again, I say that from a point of humility. I’ve just been at this long enough – I’ve reviewed hundreds of products, I know what makes for a really good product… and over the years, I’ve kind of borrowed these different teaching methods, and learned so much from all of these other people, and learned from my personal mentors… most importantly, learned from my own mistakes in my business – that I know that starting here is the right thing to do and you’re set up so much more for success, so much better for success, if you kind of drill these things into you and you kind of take them into your heart, you embed them in your brain, and you know, “Okay, I’m ready for this ready journey ahead.”

And you are. You’re suited up. You’re ready for war now, right? So you can’t fail. Remember, you can’t fail if you never stop trying. There will be times of feeling overwhelmed. There will be times of feeling helpless. You just have to push through them and keep going.

If you get traffic in a buying niche – again, we want to focus on traffic in the early stages – everything else: be damned. If you get traffic in a buying niche, you can absolutely make money.

So follow the training closely. We’re finally going to start getting into strategies and methods and getting into screen sharing and all that kind of stuff where you’re looking over my shoulder and we’re using tools and learning specific strategies but just keep all of these in mind.

Stick to the training closely, set task-based goals – based on the training, you’ll have a really good idea what realistic goals are as we go through the training – and stick with it. If you do that, you’re going to succeed in internet marketing. It’s just a matter of time.

So that’s it for Section 2.

As always, if you have any questions, post them to the Facebook group. Again, totally free for registered members here. And hopefully, myself and other members will be able to come along and help you. Hopefully, we’re creating a really good community over there. It’s so early stage that I don’t know yet but I have a very specific vision in mind and I think we’re going to be able to do that together.

So pop your questions in there and other than that, if you know… I’ve already talked about questions so I don’t need to say, “If you have any questions…” So I’ll just see you in the next video.

Section 3, here we come!

2.2 What to Expect In the Coming Weeks/Months

Thanks for stopping by and checking us out! If you like what you see, make sure to create a free account so that you can:

  • Track all of your progress and easily pick up exactly where you left off
  • Get support from me and other members whenever you get stuck using our members-only Facebook group
  • Secure your spot in a followup accountability course designed to assure you’re making progress

Or simply log in if you already have one.

=====

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2509″ ifallowed=”hide”]Unlock more training for growing your online income — with the business tools you’ll need in the process.
PLUS, get:

  • Time-tested methods to get traffic fast with NO risk of getting Google-slapped.
  • The most profitable ways to make money—and exactly how and when to monetize.
  • Access to Ian’s expertise so that you can ask him questions every time you need to.

Unlock it all by getting the tools your business needs to grow.

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

[mepr-show if=”loggedin”][mepr-active memberships=”2338,2342″ ifallowed=”hide”]Twice the results. Half the time. Would you be interested?
Be on the top 5% of online business owners who know how to maximize their online profits. Get new, actionable, and advanced training every month. Focused on more profits. 2X Faster.

WARNING: Goo-roo’s ain’t gonna like this

=====[/mepr-active] [/mepr-show]

In this video I discuss:

  • What to expect in the coming weeks and months
  • Which track I’m focusing on teaching first here at FIMP
  • A clear explanation of how much time and money will be required during your first year
  • A 12-month example timeline of what traditional growth looks like in this business
  • Setting realistic goals that help ensure your success

Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).

2.2 Transcript Below

Alright, let’s keep this train a-movin’!

In this lesson I want to talk to you about what to expect in the coming weeks and months. I think this is really important to cover because (a) it’s asked a lot, and (b) it just makes it so much easier for you to plan, it makes easy for you to set realistic goals and the more realistic goals you set, the more likely you are to succeed.

Because every time you miss goals, every time you don’t achieve something that you expected to achieve within a certain period of time, it can be really demoralizing. And that’s a big reason as to why people ultimately give up and wash out of this industry and I don’t want that for you. I want to prevent that as much as possible.

So I want to talk about some kind of general rules of thumb — kind of what the milestones you can expect to see along this journey are and just kind of generally talk to you about what you can expect in the coming weeks and months.

So I’ve wanted to talk really quickly about what I’m teaching first here at the Free Internet Marketing Project.

I’m teaching the most universal track in this industry. It has the lowest startup cost – that is one thing that’s a huge advantage for internet marketing. These days, I wouldn’t say it’s possible to… and I’ll dig into this later in this video… but I wouldn’t say it’s possible to start a business with no money in today’s search engine climate.

It’s probably possible; the odds are just so much more against you when the odds are already stacked against you to start. But in internet marketing, unlike a brick and mortar business, you can keep your startup cost ridiculously low comparatively.

I am going to be teaching the track that is not only the most universal, it’s the thing that pretty much anyone can do. It’s also the track with the fewest moving parts. The more complex something gets, the more moving parts there are. The more moving parts there are, the more likely it is for one of those things to not line up and for your business to fail for that reason.

And you may not be able to identify what went wrong, you just know, “Hey, there were 25 things in play. Somewhere along the way one of the really important ones didn’t line up correctly, and crap, now I got to start over from scratch.” So this track definitely has the fewest moving parts.

It’s also one of the… I don’t have this on the bullets here… it’s also one of the most forgiving. There are tracks where if you don’t do everything right, you might lose five grand. You may lose three grand, five grand, ten grand. In marketing – in advertising – this track you don’t have to worry about that. It’s much more forgiving.

What I’m teaching here to start with is the most foolproof and approachable entry into internet marketing as long as you’re consistent – as we talked about in the last video – and you stick with it.

Now, I do know faster and more advanced ways to make money and kind of produce results faster in internet marketing. They require more startup capital so they require more money on the front end typically due to an advertising budget.

And also, when you’re spending upwards of 20, 30, 40 grand a month on Facebook, you want to have the best tools so you also need to budget a few hundred dollars for extra tools and stuff like that. So that gets much more advanced.

That’s really the only way you can kind of get results a lot faster in this industries basically if you have a lot of money you can throw at it. I’m going to teach those but I’m going to teach them later.

First, I want to teach the thing that is the cheapest, the friendliest – as far as if you make a mistake, the stakes aren’t just that high. You can just pick up and keep going. Learn from your mistakes. And it has the fewest moving parts. It is the most universal kind of… not even just beginner-friendly… just budget-friendly way into internet marketing and starting a profitable internet business.

So I want to talk really quickly about the time… what you can expect time-wise and money-wise – again very, very common questions and totally reasonable questions to ask – in the coming months.

So expect to give your business at least 10 hours of work per week. If you can’t give your business that – and I mean no offense by this, I really don’t – you don’t have any business building business right now… you need to re-prioritize your life.

I mean if you spent a little over an hour a day… I mean when I first started my internet business, I was working a full-time job, too. And I was also commuting to and from work when I was out of college. I was also commuting to and from work an hour from each direction, each day. So I had eleven hours of my day consumed by my job and I was tired all the time.

But what I did was I started taking a Park & Ride to work. So I would get on like a big charter bus – it wasn’t like a normal city bus – big charter bus in North Austin and I would ride it down into downtown Austin and that would give me an hour before work and an hour after work every single day to get my work done.

And then I also work three or four hours at least each day on the weekends. Sometimes I worked more in the evenings after I got home to kind of finish up what I started on the bus.

And I only had to do that for a few months. I only had to moonlight for a few months before I started to get traction and I was able to quit my job and turn it into my full-time job.

So find a way. You just have to find a way. Again, I don’t want to be the naysayer for all these stuff but if you can’t give your business 10 hours a week consistently, I want to tell you now. I want you to go pursue other things.

And again, we only have this one life. Spend those hours some other way that is going to be more beneficial to you because if you can only give your business three or five hours a week, you’re just wasting your time frankly. It’s very, very, very unlikely you’re going to see success.

So expect to give your business at least 10 hours per week.

Plan for this journey to take at least 6 to 12 months before you start to see really good results. And by results in this particular instance, I’m talking about money.

You can start seeing traffic a little bit earlier, you can start to see some traction. One of the most exciting things is when you start to see organic comments coming through your blog and your videos and stuff like that. Or you start seeing people share your stuff on social media instead of you going and sharing it yourself.

I remember one of the first times I had a video go viral on Reddit that I had not posted to Reddit myself. One of my followers posted for me and I started to get this flood of YouTube traffic to that video. That was really, really cool.

So you see some earlier signs and those are considered results, too. But what most people are most concerned with is, “How do I get results?” as in “How do I make money? When am I going to see those results?”

And that’s going to take at least 6 to 12 months usually. So, expect that. Expect that to take a while.

More hours means you’re going to see that money faster. So if you’re working 20, 30, 40 hours a week consistently and you’re doing high-quality work… it’s not just quantity over quality, it needs to be quality work… but if you’re working 20, 30, 40 hours a week, you’re going to see results two, three, four times as fast as someone that’s putting in the bare minimum of 10 hours a week.

Minimal hours also mean you should probably have less ambitious goals. If you can only work the bare minimum of 10 hours a week, instead of aiming for $2000 or $3000 within the first 12 months – or $2000 or $3000 a month by the end of that 12 months – you might only aim for $800 to $1000. Because again, you’re going to be seeing progress half or a quarter as quickly as someone that’s willing to work 20 or 40 hours a week on their business.

If you can only work 10 hours a week, it’s not like it’s worth doing, it just means that it’s going to take a little bit longer. And you need to have that in mind as you kind of set your goals and you anticipate the road ahead on this journey.

You absolutely need to have somewhere between $150 and $200 for startup capital for your first year. Just non-negotiable.

At a bare minimum, you’re going to need hosting. That’s where you keep the files for your website and everyone that visits your website – this is a little bit too technical – but whenever someone visits your website, it pulls those files to present on their computer from your server and your server is your hosting company.

You can get that for a reasonable price. You can get that for somewhere between $100 and $150 a year for really dependable high-quality hosting with really good support and stuff like that in case you get stuck. But you need it. It’s not negotiable.

If you’re trying to run an internet business, you need a website. You need a website. Period. End of story.

While I’m talking about it, you also need a computer.

And again, I mean no offense by these people who have the best intentions when they ask these questions, but people ask, “Can I build my internet business from my mobile phone?” No. No, you can’t. You need a laptop or a computer. I won’t even advice doing it from a tablet. You really need those tools. If you don’t have those tools and you don’t have the money to invest in them right now, I’m sorry.

And again, I don’t mean to be harsh, but if you can’t afford these bare minimum requirements… I mean you can go buy a really crappy computer from a second-hand store for $200 that will get done what you need done in internet marketing.

So you at least need a computer and you need $150 to $200 startup capital for your first year. As long as you have at least that, you’re golden.

You can invest in some extra things along the way that will make the journey easier – I’ll bring them up as we go. They’re not necessary because there are free tools as well, but sometimes, you can invest in some premium tools to save yourself a lot of time and money. And as they say, “Time is money.” So any chance I get to save time by investing in a tool if it’s reasonable, I do it.

So I personally have several hundred dollars a month in different subscription for tools. That’s not saying you need to, right? I didn’t start with that. I worked my way up to it. I started shoestring just like definition of bootstrapping of an internet business – and you can too.

Don’t get me wrong, it’ll take more hours at a bare minimum – I’m getting off-track here, I’m sorry I have a tendency to do that – at a bare minimum, you need $150 to $200 to invest in hosting and a $10 or $15 a year domain name. That’s it. For the first year. If you can do that, we’re good.

Let’s keep going.

The kind of milestones I want to kind of give you… kind of quarterly expectations if you are giving your business at least 10 hours a week… these milestones are probably more realistic if you’re giving your business at least 15, 20 hours a week.

But in the first three months, I want you to fully anticipate – as we touched on in the last video – there is going to be a lot of learning, there’s going to be a lot of trial and error, and you’re going to have to learn how to create high-quality content in your niche.

You’re going to spend a lot of time revisiting these videos, revisiting your notes, and kind of tinkering with things. Having to go into Google or search the Facebook group and see like, “How do I fix this thing?”, “How do I treat this thing on my website?”, “I don’t see this option. How do I–”, all of those things you’re going to have to work through them.

And some days it feels like they’re never-ending – it’s just a barrage of them. You have to have that independent mentality of… you can’t think, “I want someone who’s going to hold my hand through this.”

I’m going to do my best the best I can to show you every single step of the way and not leave any gaps. But at the end of the day, if you encounter an issue with WordPress or if you encounter an issue with your domain name, there are millions upon millions of WordPress users out there. There are millions of people that own websites. You can pretty quickly and easily Google those things. And probably after some digging – even if it takes you 30 minutes – find a solution.

So there’s going to be a lot of that in the early stages. You just got to have to keep learning. A lot of the technical stuff may be really frustrating for a lot of you. It’s just trial and error and learning kind of settle in to that groove.

Months 3-6: we’ll still have some of that but the good thing about learning is that a lot of these things you only have to learn once. And then the second time it’s easier; the third time it’s easier; fourth, fifth, sixth time it’s even easier; and then beyond that, it’s probably second nature at a point.

My wife was watching me… she’s building her first internet business right now… she was watching me build one of my sites. She was watching me build F.I.M.P. She was watching me work on the site and everything. She was watching the way I use my computer and how quickly I navigate WordPress and she just sat back, she said, “Oh my God, you’re so fast at all that stuff.” I hope so. It’s the 700th time I’ve done it!

You’re still going to experience some of those things in Months 3 through 6 but you’re going to have to stick with it and there are going to be times in this particular quarter – if you haven’t already experienced them in Months 1 through 3 – that you’re just wondering, “Am I doing everything right? I’m not seeing–” because a lot of time there’s no feedback, there’s nothing saying like, “You’re doing the right thing. You’re getting traffic.” It takes longer than that.

So there’s kind of this purgatory in the middle where you’re putting in all these hard work still and you’ve been putting in all these hard work and you’re still not seeing results.

And it takes a really strong will and kind of tough skin to stick this out – that’s why I warned you about it so hard – as we enter into the actual strategies and methods and technical training. You have to know this stuff is coming. If you anticipate it, you’re so much more likely to push through it and succeed and overcome it.

But there will be a lot of days that you’re wondering, “Am I doing anything right?” And one of the horrible things that people do is instead of continuing to write really high-quality content where they’ve been writing 1200, 1500, 2000-word posts of really, really high-quality content, doing really diligent keyword research and unpaid SEO, they’ll start to kind of feel wear and tear and they’ll go, “Ah. I’ll just post a video today with like a 200-word blurb.”

And then they’ll start doing that and then they’ll write me eight months later and they’ll be like, “Why am I not seeing results?” Well that’s because after two months, your quality went out the window and everything since then has been worthless.

So you really have to have tough skin and stick with it and keep putting out quality stuff even when you’re questioning whether you’re doing everything correctly.

If you’re doing everything according to the training here, if you’ve watched all the videos, you’re doing it correctly, okay? You just have to stick with it and learn from your mistakes and just keep on going even when you feel completely helpless.

Months 6-9: you’re still sticking with it, so kind of grinding it out. You’ve probably not seen a whole lot of results yet but you may be seeing early signs of traction. You may even in really, really rare cases – I don’t want this to be the expectation – in really rare cases, you might be seeing a fair amount of part-time income at this point. If you’re really working hard and grinding hard and putting out really high-quality content, you just landed in a really good niche.

But at the very least, at this point, you’re probably starting to see traffic, you’re probably starting to see some comments – especially if you’re doing other things like posting on social media or tweeting or doing video marketing (I’ll teach a lot of those here in this course as well) but you’re probably going to start seeing some traffic to any or all of those and comments and you’re going to start seeing some things that say, “Hey, those are the first signs of success!” And if you keep sticking with it, you’re on to something. You’re going to get there.

And then Months 9-12, you’re potentially starting to see a part-time income a lot of the time. Again, there are no guarantees. I’m not saying if you give this 12 months of your life, hard work, even the highest quality – it’s going to happen. But typically, this is what you’re going to see.

And there are people that are making a full-time income. They’ve quit their job by Month 12. It requires a lot of hard work. It requires a lot of dedication. Those are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met in my life, and frankly, they are harder working than I am – and I’m a pretty hardworking person.

So just keep these kind of benchmarks in mind. If you’re at Month 9 and you’re still not seeing signs of traffic, that doesn’t mean you’re totally screwed. It just could mean that you’re in a higher competition industry. And if you’re in a higher competition niche, you can probably add somewhere between six and eight months to a lot of these milestones.

So like health and fitness… pretty much any one of the evergreen niches – they’re called ‘evergreen’ because they’re always going to be full of buying audience members which is great because once you grind it out and you get there, you’re going to have some really good monetization opportunities. You’re probably going to be able to make a lot of money off of that traffic. But it takes longer to get there and break through unless you’re really creative and unique and you add value in a very different way than people have before.

Or like maybe you’re doing video and nobody… so few people do video… it’s a really easy way to cut through to even the highest competition industries to do videos consistently alongside your content – which we’ll talk about again as we go through the training.

But the three most evergreen niches are health and wellness, health and fitness; make money online, business opportunities, stuff like that, Forex, investing of any kind; and also relationships and dating. Those are in this industry like the coveted three niches. Beauty is in there with health and fitness and stuff like that, too. These niches that are always just going to make buku bucks if you can get the traffic.

But it takes longer to get that traffic because there’s a lot more competition, there are a lot more people vying for it.

The methods I’m teaching here will still work, you’re just going to have to grind a little bit longer and you’re going to question yourself a little bit longer before you start seeing those milestones.

So just because you’re not hitting these milestones doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something wrong, you just need to continue to stick with it, continue putting out really high-quality stuff.

If you are providing value to the world… Rule of thumb: if you’re providing really high-quality value to the world, you’re going to see it pay off at some point. It’s just a matter of sticking with it. There’s a very specific way to do that. You can’t just write about anything you want. You need to keep it consistent. And there are kind of some rules and stuff that I’ll teach you as we go through the sections in the rest of this training.

But just know, if you’re putting value into the world, you are going to reap financial reward at some point as long as you just stick with it.

So I want to set up for realistic goals. As I’ve already mentioned, expect to work at least 10 hours per week. So we’re going to talk about setting goals. Very specifically, it should be a very brief video but also very, very important. But as I’ve already covered, expect to work at least 10 hours per week. If you’re working for more, all the better. You’ll see results a lot faster.

Aim for traffic above everything else. I haven’t mentioned this yet, it’s super important. Traffic is the lifeblood of any internet business. There are varying degrees and varying quality of traffic. You can’t just go buy traffic from somewhere and say, “Oh, that’s traffic.”

Traffic has to be qualified. I have a lesson on that very specifically because it’s where a lot of people go wrong in this industry. They just think, “Oh, if I get traffic, I can start making money.” It’s a little bit more complex than that, but on a really simple scale, rule of thumb: traffic is the most important thing as you’re trying to get started.

So don’t worry about making a ton of money from the start. That will come. Focus on getting traffic. Traffic can be turned into a part-time income. Part-time income can be built into a full-time income. I’m going to teach you how to do that in these training videos in one of the sections later.

So just plan for this journey, again, to take at least 6 to 12 months. Give it 6 to 12 months of really diligent effort and follow the training very, very closely.

Plan for some of those months to feel like you’re doing everything wrong. It’s the nature of this business. It’s going to happen. You have to push through them.

So these are the things that I really want you to take away from this video: Expect to work 10 hours a week, aim for traffic… make traffic your priority above everything else… the way your website looks, how much money it’s making, how you’re integrating your affiliate offers or advertising or anything like that is all secondary to traffic in the beginning. Once you get traffic, hey that’s the secret ingredient to making money online, okay? So focus on traffic and everything else will follow.

And you’ll start off… you’re not going to go from making zero dollars to making $5000 a month… you’ll start making a couple hundred dollars a month and then it’s kind of amazing how quickly they can kind of snowball once you start to see those early signs.

Then it can be kind of an exponential kind of growth curve where you go from, “Hey I spent the first eight months making zero dollars. Month 9, I made 200 bucks. Month 10, I made 1200 bucks. Month 11, I’m making 2300 bucks,” because it really does. There can be… it’s not always like that… but there can be some really accelerated growth once you do grind it out and you start to see those early signs.

So just know, if you took eight months to make $200 a month, it’s not going to take you another eight months to make $400 a month. That is when it frequently… again non-linear… it’s not going to go slow up and up and up. It may have a big swoop and there may be a month where your traffic drops because you lost some rankings. Just expect these things.

It’s a very unpredictable thing but if you stay… tried and true the method here is… if you stay on course and you keep pushing, you will succeed eventually and you can make a very, very, very profitable internet marketing business in time.

So that’s Lesson 1.2. We’re done here. Alright?

Moving on Lesson 1.3. Before I really start teaching you strategies and getting you on the right track to making money – all these stuff that we’ve been talking about – I want to set some goals, I want to talk about the right way to set goals because there’s a right way and there’s a very, very wrong way and most people are doing it the wrong way. So that’s what we’re going to talk about in the last video of this section, Video 1.3.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the Facebook group – again, free for registered members. And that’s how… well hopefully, we’re all helping each other, right? Hopefully it’s not all falling on me. But of course, I’m in there every day, too.

So best of luck on the journey ahead and I will see you in Lesson 2.3.

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