Introduction

I have so struggled with trying to understand why 95% of Internet marketers can’t make a dime online. I have actually sat up nights trying to understand this. Personally, I know that once I finally got enough information to put my business together, it has taken me 6 months but I am finally starting to see a profit.

So what’s wrong? Why do so many people have so much trouble?

I then took a look at all the so called “guru” books out there. I bought them all. I read them all. Knowing what I already knew about Internet marketing, I wanted to see if what they were telling people to do was really going to help them or if it was just more BS. Son of a gun, the books I read, for the most part, were EXCELLENT! I kept saying to myself at each part of instruction, “I do that!” and “I do that too!”

This made me scratch my head even more. I know these books are selling. They’re constantly at the top of Clickbank’s best seller list. So why aren’t new marketers having success with these books?

What’s missing?

So what I did was sit down and make a checklist of what’s in these guru books and then made my own list of the things that I do and looked to see if there was something I was doing that the gurus were NOT teaching. That had to be it.

And that’s when it hit me. It had NOTHING to do with anything I was doing or not doing. It had EVERYTHING to do with my approach to the situation.

That’s what gurus don’t teach. They tell you to “do this, do this and do that” but they don’t really explain the why. They don’t REALLY make you understand WHY you’re doing the things you’re doing. They don’t explain it in a way where you read it and say, “Ah, okay. Now I understand why I’m supposed to do this.”

If you do something like a robot, without understanding the reason why, you’re going to end up missing a fine point that may make the difference between success and failure.

I’m going to give you an example right now so you understand EXACTLY what I am talking about.

Many ebooks suggest writing articles and submitting them to directories in order to get people to come to your site. Hey, great. I’ll write an article, submit it to a directory like Ezine Articles and put my site link in the resource box and I’ll get people to come to my site. Right?

Wrong!

And this is where we get to the parts that the books don’t teach you because they expect you to use some common sense. Unfortunately, not all of us have common sense. We are creatures of following directions and we can only follow the directions that we’re given.

Well, here’s the bad news.

I can’t teach you how to think. Honestly, I can’t do much more than the gurus do. I can give you some basic instruction and hope that you understand it enough to apply it. But if you’re only going to take the basic step by steps and not put your own thought into them to improve on them, you’re only going to get so far. In many cases, it won’t be far enough to build an income.

In the case of the articles, if you don’t write articles a certain way, if you don’t write articles that people will want to read, if you don’t write articles that are relevant, all the instruction in the world is not going to turn you into a successful article writer.

And therein lies the rub of having success online. It’s the reason why I can take a recipe for baking a cake and turn it into a masterpiece and I can take the same recipe and turn it into a disaster.

Why?

Because when I get to the part of the instructions that say something like, “Stir until creamy”, I understand what “creamy” is a lot better than others do. I have a feel for what the consistency should be.

If cooking was only a matter of following a recipe, we’d all be master chefs. But we’re not. It takes an intangible skill to cook well.

That doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to cook or market online. You CAN develop that skill. You can learn to get that “feel” for what needs to be done.

For example, when I write an article, I know the exact spin to put on it depending on who I am trying to reach. This is something that comes over time. It won’t happen overnight.

But you do need some direction.

And that direction has to start with a business plan, because that is where all marketers meet their doom right from the start. If you don’t have a solid foundation for your business, everything you build on top of it will eventually crumble. So, this brief report will be explicitly for the purpose of giving you a foundation that will give you the BEST chance of having success online.

Will it maybe require you to take everything you’ve done, chuck it and start all over? Possibly. I don’t know. I have no idea what you’ve done to this point so I can’t answer that. But I can tell you this; if you follow this business plan to the letter, you will have an EXCELLENT chance of building a foundation that whatever you put on top of it, stands a good chance of being there a year, or even 10 years from today.

Okay? So now that you know where we’re going, let’s get down to the actual building of our foundation.