“I’m not an internet marketing guru…I just want to be.”

How that became my mantra is something that at times eludes even me. In default of a more empowering explanation, I’ve elected instead to simply lay blame, and in my case the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of both one of my closest friends, and perhaps more illuminatingly…greed.

I say my best friend because it was he who first really motivated me to explore the possibility of multiple and leveraged income streams, presenting with some enthusiasm (and perhaps unfairly) the potential for wealth generation beyond the average 9-5 desk-job to which most of us find ourselves chained. The placing aside of my natural scepticism of such ventures seemed a small price to pay to emancipate myself from the daily grind, and so it was with a certain sense of anticipation that I opened my mind to the chance being presented to me.

I say greed because any objective assessment of my then financial position couldn’t fairly have classified it as one of necessity. Mind you, whilst I wasn’t exactly struggling to put food on the table, the weight of the monthly mortgage and lifestyle of choice was such that I could all but resign myself to adopting as my own the cliché of retirement at 65 with modest investments, just barely scraping through without the benefit of a government pension. Hardly the realisation of my life ambitions. A little bit of greed can be a powerful motivator, so I’ve embraced it wholeheartedly and without embarrassment. What the hey, greed can be fun.

So it was that I found myself some four weeks ago making my first tentative steps towards climbing what I now know to be the Internet Marketing Information Mountain, never really being certain whether the multitudinous paths to its summit would or would not also lead to the veritable pot of gold at the end of the info-technology rainbow.

After four weeks of solidly digesting the contents of countless internet marketing forums, guides, and blogs, together with a swag of both helpful and disgracefully unhelpful eBooks, I did come to my first major epiphany.

Internet marketing is not going to help me get rich quick…but it might enable me to get rich eventually.

There’s no doubting that many of those new to online marketing commence their involvement in the venture with the mistaken and all too quickly dispelled belief that the internet provides fertile fields of cash crop waiting to be harvested with little or no personal exertion. The experts (or at least the ones I’ve read that make any modicum of sense) suggest that whilst the former part of that theory might be right, the latter generally is not. As a rule, cash will not fall from the sky the minute you manage to cobble together a hastily constructed web site and call yourself an internet marketer, and it might be folly to happily regurgitate information and other products without some foresight as to the effort succeeding in the field requires. Pitty…I rather like being lazy.

The good news is, there seems no question that there is money to be made. The real questions are how much, and by who?

Permitting just an acceptable dose of my healthy scepticism to guide my way, and given my inerrant distaste for pretending to know a lot about something I don’t, I have resolved to chronicle my efforts as I learn what this creature called internet marketing is all about. It probably begs the question as to why you might bother to spend time reading a blog about internet marketing by a bloke who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s a fair inquiry!

I guess there are two pretty decent reasons:

1. Because unlike the veil of secrecy that seems to shroud so much of the genuinely interesting information on online marketing, I’m prepared to blab about pretty much anything of value that I learn. Yep, anything. Is that smart? I dunno…ask me in six months
2. Secondly, there is so SO much information out there that one can literally get swamped and insanely frustrated trying to make sense of it all. If you want to try, I wholeheartedly encourage you. It’s certainly not a pointless task, just a time consuming one. See how you go, come visit this site again in a month…of course by then I’ll know another months worth of information more than I do now, but I guess you can always catch up at some point. All I can say for certain is that I have discovered certain resource gems which could have saved me countless hours had I known about them earlier. You’ll find them all on this blog.

Whilst this blog is as much for my own amusement as anything else, I genuinely hope that my struggle towards guru-dome serves to help others to also make sense of the quagmire of internet marketing. It could be a fun journey to take with friends instead of just alone.

So I wish you (and me) the best of luck!

~Make your tomorrow better than you did yesterday~