2.2 What to Expect In the Coming Weeks/Months

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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.