Viral Marketing Lessons

One of the challenges that may come your way as an Internet marketer is being consistent with your marketing efforts.  This can be especially true when you are starting out, working on Internet marketing part-time to build it up while maintaining a “day job.”  Things that come up and go on around the home may distract you from doing things consistently.

That’s even more likely when it comes to things you don’t particular enjoy doing in Internet marketing.  For example, if you want to use article marketing to build traffic to your website, but struggle to write content, you may find it easier to go wash the dishes or mow the lawn!  You can justify it to yourself by saying those are things you needed to do anyway, but often it may be nothing more than an excuse to avoid Internet marketing tasks you’re just not feeling up to doing.

Another easy way to avoid consistency is by focusing on time spent rather than the results achieved.  For example, you might spend four hours online a night, and feel that you’ve put in a lot of time for your Internet marketing business.  But, at the end of those four hours, what have you accomplished?

If all you’ve done is browsed marketing websites and participated in Internet marketing forums, you may try to justify your time spent as “learning,” but really all you’ve done is kept yourself distracted from the things that need doing!

Learning is important, and, in the beginning, you may be doing more learning than doing, but you still have to do things in order to have any hope of success with Internet marketing.  Following our earlier example, if you spend four hours a night online, consider spending one hour learning (that is, browsing marketing websites and posting in Internet marketing forums) and three hours doing actual work on your projects.

At the end of the night, you should have something to show for the time you’ve spent on the computer.  If you can’t point to anything you’ve actually done in that time, you need to better analyze how you are spending your time.

Certain tasks may be tiresome for you, but you’ve got to do them.  However, once you’ve built up your Internet marketing business and start making some money, you can begin to outsource those tasks you don’t enjoy.  On the other hand, once some money starts coming in, you might find you enjoy doing those things more than you did when all you saw was an empty PayPal account balance!

The bottom line is that you need to make consistent efforts in order to build your Internet marketing business.  If you struggle to do things consistently and find yourself easily distracted, try writing down the things you need or want to get done.  Don’t spend any time reading marketing websites and forums until you’ve crossed off a number of items on your To Do list.

Consistency takes effort, but it will also pay off.

Get your online business off on the right foot by learning more about Internet marketing fundamentals with the Internet Marketing Backstage Pass, a beginner’s guide to getting started in Internet marketing.