The Drunkard’s Walk and Internet Marketing
Over the weekend I finished reading The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow. It’s a great, very readable book about how probability (randomness and chance) runs so many aspects of our lives. I highly recommend you read it, it’s a bit of an eye-opener in many ways.
The last chapter of “The Drunkard’s Walk” is both depressing and uplifting. Depressing because it makes you realize how much a person’s success is dependent on chance, on being in the right spot at the right time, not just on their ability. How many times have you seen this, that someone who’s extremely capable just can’t seem to succeed? Put them in just the right circumstances, however, and they would be a star in their field. As Mlodinow puts it, “it is a tragedy when beliefs in the judgment of experts or the marketplace rather than a belief in ourselves causes us to give up.”
Here’s the uplifting part, though: since chance is so central to success, you need to try things over and over again until you succeed. Again, to quote Mlodinow:
“What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. For even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success. Or as the IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, ‘If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.’”
Keep Trying!
So how does this apply to you and I? It means we have to KEEP AT IT in order to succeed at Internet marketing. Try different things, different approaches. But really TRY, don’t just dabble. Chance plays a part, absolutely, but you have to be ready to seize opportunity when it presents itself. If AdSense isn’t your game, try article marketing. Or try PPC-based CPA promotion. Or build yourself a mailing list and market to them. There are dozens of ways to build yourself an online business. And while there’s a chance you’ll be an overnight success, it’s pretty low. But if you keep trying and are well-prepared, you’ll eventually succeed. This is the biggest lesson I’ve learned about this stuff, and what I read in “The Drunkard’s Walk” only confirms it.
PLRSiteBuilder Summer Special
There are many ways of preparing yourself to seize opportunities. One way is have some good tools. If you want to build sites quickly and yet with a good amount of control over how they look and behave, I’m running a Summer Special on my PLRSiteBuilder software. Until this Thursday (moving day for me!) I’m letting you have the PLRSiteBuilder Gold Edition for only $50 instead of the usual $97. For that price you get PLRSiteBuilder and a pile of extra stuff, including Uncommon AdSense and EzineDominator. You can see what’s included from this page:
But to get the Summer Special use this link to place your order:
Remember, this deal only lasts until this Thursday!
Auto Cash Method
Alternatively, you can learn and copy someone else’s proven business model. Ben Shaffer is running a weekly seminar series starting tomorrow called “Auto Cash Method” where he presents a detailed approach to creating money-making sites that you can use to generate small recurring income or sell for
immediate profits. Learn more by watching his video:
It’s long, though, over 30 minutes, so you’ll need a cup of coffee or something to tide you over while you watch it.
InstaCash Keywords
Or, what if it’s the IDEAS that are hard to come by? You know what to do, you have the right tools, but you just don’t know where to focus your efforts. Travis Sago, aka “The Bum Marketer”, has a service available called “InstaCash Keywords” where he’ll send you niche ideas, complete with low-competition ideas, on a daily basis. You can try it yourself for only $5:
This is a service I use myself, and I’ve gotten some interesting topic ideas from it.
If At First You Don’t Succeed…
Chance plays a big part in success, but you can tilt things your way by being prepared and by trying different things. And REALLY trying those things, by the way. Be persistent, put in the time and effort, but also be ready to cut your losses and move on. As the songs goes, you gotta know when to fold ‘em…
Pick up “The Drunkard’s Walk” today, it’s quite fascinating!
Whitehat VRE Empire: Deploying the First Site
After you’ve created the content for the first site in your virtual real estate empire, it’s time to deploy the site for others to find, especially the search engine crawlers. Here are the basic steps.
- Activate the site. By this I mean make sure that all the pages are up and that the site is working. You may have been creating your pages locally on your computer, so make sure everything’s uploaded. Also make sure that there are no broken links and that you can navigate around the site quite easily. Don’t forget to look at your site using a couple of different web browsers to make sure it looks good (or at least OK) for all visitors.
- Register the sitemap. Your site should have an XML sitemap and you should register it with Google and Yahoo!. For Google, do it from Google Webmaster Tools, for Yahoo! do it from Yahoo! Site Explorer. Both are free. Remember, there’s no reason not to use these valuable tools when you’re building a completely whitehat network of sites — they provide lots of useful information.
- Register the RSS feed. If your site has an RSS feed, register it with as many RSS directories and aggregators as possible. This can be time consuming, and there are free tools out there that will help with the process.
- Register with Google Analytics. Add your site to your Google Analytics account, see my Google AdSense and Google Analytics Integration Guide for the details. Or install some other tracking mechanism. You want to be able to see when people are coming to the site and where they’re coming from — especially which keywords or referring pages are giving you traffic.
These few simple steps will get the site “out there”, but they won’t get you much traffic. For that you need to publicize the site, which we’ll get to next time.