What I Learned About Internet Marketing Beginners From Selling Over 300 Websites In 2015

bybryonbrewer

10.5K followers

Updated 8 years ago

I know 2015 hasn't quite finished yet, but I was tallying up how many websites I'd sold this year and noticed that it recently passed 300.

As I sat there thinking "Wow, what a year, there must be a thing or two I've learned from all this experience that I can pass on", the idea of this post slowly formed.

The vast majority of sites I sell are starter "done-for-you" sites for beginners (not always, but probably 80% of them), and as I'm also fairly activate in WA, I've seen a lot of beginners come and go in 2015.

I've definitely learned a few pearl-necklaces' worth of wisdom, so I wanted to take this opportunity to address you, the beginner affiliate marketer.

Please note though, I'm only 3 years into this myself, so it wasn't long ago that I too was a beginner (which probably adds to my insight), but then again, 3 years is a lifetime online.

From watching beginners go through the trials and tribulations of starting life out in internet marketing, I've noticed a lot of things.

Some of them are definitely positive, but there are also a lot of negatives as well. The same mistakes get repeated again and again, so let's try and address these in this post too.

First up, the positive observations.

1.) You Guys Have An Immense Power For Getting Stuff Done

I see it time and time again. Maybe it's the enthusiasm/excitement with starting something new, or maybe it's because you're learning so much. Whatever the reason, beginners really hit the ground running.

You see people posting 3-4 times a day (which is overkill, but love the enthusiasm!), reading posts, viewing other people's websites, networking, asking questions, sneaking onto WA in their breaks at work (while others are looking at cats on Facebook), and generally hammering their sites out as much as they can.

This propensity for getting content out there is insane and I wish I could still bust out tasks like that.

I remember when I was new, I would take my iPad everywhere, and any break that was more than 10 minutes long, I'd be typing out some content. I was probably writing 12 posts a week or something crazy like that. It was way too many, but provided a foundation for me learning to write, and gave my sites some solid content.

Unfortunately it doesn't last for ever (the honeymoon period ends and you fall into a more realistic schedule), so while you're a beginner and you have this passion, make sure you own it and do as much as you can while you've got that power.

2.) You Have So Much To Learn

Well this is neither a positive or negative I guess, but I'm going to put it into the plus side because learning leads to earning.

Never. Stop. Learning.

I'm on course for a 6 figure year and I still learn every day. I read as many different blog posts as I can (inside and outside of WA). I join in discussions in FB groups. I subscribe to newsletters from shady gurus and marketing experts alike. I network like a boss (cos I am actually a boss).

Scale that back to the days when I was a beginner, and it's no different. What's different is the things I learned.

You're in a rare situation in WA where you can learn from people without having them promote to you. There's no-one saying "Hey man, did you know social signals help you to rank? Buy this social signal package to get the same results I did!".

You also learn how to spot scams. Because so many WA'ers are in the scam review business, some of that knowledge rubs off on you. This means that when you do start branching out and learning from as many different resources as you can, you can identify what is gold and what is..mould?

A lot of people learn the basics. Keywords go here, H2 tag goes there, post every day, get comments, rinse and repeat, and then they get in a bit of a rut and stop learning.

There's nothing more exciting than learning something new and sitting down at your computer for a few hours to implement it. In fact, for people who are already past the honeymoon period and are finding their motivation dwindling, this is my number 1 tip for you. Learn something new and get pumped about it.

The only downside is that it often takes a few weeks for you to find out whether or not that worked!

So if you're finding yourself stuc and wondering what to do next, go learn something.

How do you know what to learn? Well you don't, so just go read some posts here at WA or on some well known marketing blogs.

3.) You Come From Everywhere.

Literally everywhere. I've had customers from Germany, from Nigeria, from Kenya, from Australia, from all over the US, from the UK, and so on. As you know, WA itself has an even wider array of nationalities.

It's not only where you come from in terms of your nationality though, but in terms of who you are. Your background could be anything, your age could be ANYTHING, and your experience levels could again, be ANYTHING, and you can still succeed.

One thing that I've learned is, I can tell from how somebody acts and how they speak whether or not they're likely to succeed, but I can't tell by their background. I've literally had people who come from an IT background, who are super WordPress proficient, fail on me because they gave up, and I've had people who mow lawns for a living, who struggle to write well, who get confused by things like sitemaps and meta tags, keep going and going and start to earn an income.

That's mind-blowing.

So if you're wondering if you're not going to succeed because you don't have XY or Z in your resume, please stop. What separates the succeeders from the failers (yeah it's a new word) is not where they come from, but where they take themselves. Self-motivation > all.

....and now for the negatives.

1.) You Get Too Hung Up

Seriously, the one thing that leads to failure is people quitting. It's obvious right? "Why did I fail?" "Because you let yourself fail".

The grey matter between your ears is the only thing standing between you and the reality you want.

Why do people let themselves fail? Because they don't see results right away? Yes, partly that, but it's actually because they were expecting it.

Nobody wants to find out 6 months from now that it was all a waste of time. Nobody wants to spend $47 a month or whatever other fees they're incurring all for nothing. Nobody wants to find out their dreams were not going to come true.

And that very fear is what makes people quit. It's like they're waiting for the perfect time to say "I knew it! I told myself so".

STOP getting hung-up about whether or not you're going to succeed. If you accept that sooner or later you will succeed, even if it's with a future niche, a future website, or some other plan, you WILL succeed. Get on with doing it and ignore the doubts in your mind.

Doubt and fear are the world's biggest attention seekers. They live on attention, feed on it like vampires at a blood bank (that's where vampires hang out right? Blood banks? In Pennsylvania? Something like that).

If you don't give them the attention they need, they die.

So you can either choose to let your fears die, or you can let your fears make you die. Tough choice.

2.) You Get Distracted Easily

I get distracted all the time as well, but it's a different kind of distraction. I was going to write a massive article about ADHD the other day but I saw a butterfly and ..anyway the point is, distraction is bad.

I could have talked it this in point 1 above, but I'll talk about it here. There's a thing called a feedback loop. When you're learning to play an instrument, and you hit the wrong note/chord/string, you instantly know you did it wrong. You try and play a G and you hear a messy clang that doesn't sound like a G at all.

Instant feedback.

You adjust your fingers and play it again, and sooner or later you've got a G.

Instant feedback.

Online though, the feedback loop is long. You pepper a post with keywords, hit the publish button, and it might be weeks before your article starts to make some headway in the search rankings. Might not even make any headway at all. 6 months later you think "Ah man I did something wrong, I wasted 6 months, I quit".

Well, maybe you did and maybe you didn't, but RIGHT NOW you're probably doing things exactly right, you just need to wait another few months to hear if you played the right chord or not.

It sucks doesn't it? We all should have tried to be guitar players instead of affiliate marketers. We'd have ended up with calluses on our fingers either way, but at least we'd know whether we suck or not.

Note: I suck at guitar.

So all of this leads to distraction. We chase after something else and switch niches. If Katy Perry wrote a song about beginner affiliate marketers, it would probably say "You change your niche like a girl changes clothes".

What we don't know is that the path we were already on is quite likely to lead us to where we want to go if we stay on it.

When I was a beginner, I started about 2-3 websites at once. I know people say just do one, but I couldn't. Maybe my way of coping with the feedback loop was to always have other things to work on.

What I learned from this was that whenever I ignored a website because I thought it wasn't going anywhere, a few weeks later I'd find out that it HAD been going somewhere after all, and I'd return to it. Our rankings seem to increase when we stop focusing on them every day.

I once nearly sold a website for $250 because I thought it was dead and wasn't going anywhere, and now it makes me $800 a month.

Even if you're not on the right path right now, you'll get a fork later that you can follow instead. You get nowhere chasing tails and running in circles.

Closing Thoughts

These are the key observations I've made about you guys in the last year. I'm sure there are more things I could have written, but I was running out of lame jokes.

If you have one takeaway from this article, let it be that you should keep learning, keep growing, and not worry about whether you will succeed or not.

I was recently talking with a friend who has spent a long time working in Venture Capital, and I was telling him how anybody could do what I do. I'm not a genius, there's no skill I've got that others don't have, and I'll finish this post with his reply:

I've met a lot of entrepreneurs in my time, and one thing that every successful entrepreneur has, and you have, is the ability to self-motivate.