Article by Charlie Wright

I’ve got a fantastic bit of advice for you today….
 
It’s from a guy who made a right royal mess of trying to turn his passion for guitar into an online business…
 
But who turned it around very quickly using some proven techniques that you can copy.

Take it away Rob….
 
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The 2 Most Important Secrets to Making Money Online
By Rob Cornish
 
I when I first tried to make money online it all went wrong.
 
Here’s what I did:
 
1. Set up a website about learning the electric guitar.
2. Wrote a few articles and posted them on my website.
3. Placed some adverts for guitar e-books and video courses on the front page of my website in order to generate a commission for myself.
4. Sat back and waited for the money to roll in!
 
Can you guess what happened?
 
That’s right, you’ve got it: Absolutely NOTHING!
 
You can imagine my disappointment, right? What did I do wrong? Why weren’t any people visiting my website? Why weren’t they buying? Was I just destined never to make money on the internet, ever?
 
Well, it took me several months to work it out and after much learning from other marketers here is essentially what I did wrong:
 
I tried to sell COLD.
 
In other words, I had built a website in the hope that people would somehow magically visit and buy my products.
 
Now, if you are on Ebay or Amazon then this approach works well because visitors already know who you are. The only trouble was that, apart from friends and family, no one knew who I was!
 
Okay, to cut a very long story short I’d like to share with you the benefit of my mistakes…
 
In fact, these are the two most important “secrets” to making money online:
 
1. Build Trust First and Sell Later

Who would you be more likely to buy from? Somebody that you’ve never met before or a person you’ve known for 10 years and has helped you out for free time-and-time again?
 
Of course, the answer is the second person.
 
This is one of the biggest mistakes most aspiring marketers make when they start out online: Basically, they try to get rich TOO quickly!
 
The lesson here is simple: Build a relationship and trust with your prospects before you try to sell anything.
 
Whilst this might sound like a lot of effort there is good news because it turns out this process is pretty straightforward. Also, it needn’t take months or even weeks: Many successful marketers have shown that it can be accomplished in just a few days!
 
But how EXACTLY do you build trust? This brings us to the second most important lesson in internet marketing…
 
2. Build A List Of E-Mail Subscribers

I’m guessing that you have probably visited websites in the past where there is a gift – perhaps a free newsletter, report or video – offered in return for you entering your name and e-mail address into a web form on the site?
 
If you imagine yourself as the website owner then you’ll see that this is incredibly powerful as it allows you to develop trust with your subscribers by e-mailing them on a regular basis with free content that will be of real value to them.
 
But this doesn’t have to be done manually as some website owners actually automate this process by setting up a set of pre-written e-mails in something called an autoresponder.
 
This is one reason why I said this can be easier than you might first think!
 
With these lessons learned and with the benefit of hindsight (a marvellous thing!), this is what I SHOULD have done with my learning electric guitar website:
 
1. Set up the website.
2. Add some interesting articles on learning the guitar.
3. Offer a free gift to encourage visitors to sign up for my e-mail list.
4. Give more free valuable content away (videos, guitar ebooks etc) to my e-mail subscribers.
5. Promote and sell to my subscribers.
 
If you are brand new to the wonderful world of internet marketing then chances are that a lot of the above steps might seem a little daunting.
 
In fact, all of this seemed VERY daunting to me 8 months ago!
 
However, it is amazing how straightforward this process is when you understand making money on the internet is not done through some “magic button” that you and I have yet to discover but actually by a step-by-step PROCESS that if you follow carefully will almost certainly lead to success.
 
Rob Cornish is author of the blog Gain Higher Ground.
 
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Thanks for that Rob.