Over the last few days I’ve been giving thought to the reason why so many people have a hard time with making money

online, and I think that I’ve captured the 3 biggest problems that most people have when trying to earn money on the Internet.

1. They don’t treat it like a job
2. They don’t commit any time to learn the industry
3. They don’t stick with it long enough

So let’s dive in an talk in detail about each of these items.

They Don’t Treat it Like a Job

Running a website, even a little tiny one with one money-making link, takes a lot of time and dedication. From talking to others who have tried making money online, they give up after just a few DAYS of no visitors to their sites. Even worse, they don’t spend any time developing their idea, train of thought, or marketing ideas to promote their product. They’ve read that all you have to do is get a spot on blogger.com, write 2 or 3 crappy articles with links, upload them to an article repository and magically they’ll be making hundreds of dollars a week or day with their website.
Guess what? This doesn’t work. Sure, that’s one way to get started with a website but a one time effort won’t result in long-term gains.
This, I believe, is because of #2:

They Don’t Commit any Time to Learn the Industry

Internet marketing is a big business. Forrester Research estimates that by 2010, marketers will be spending up to $28 Billion per year on Internet Marketing (1). With so much money being spent on just promoting certain websites, marketers certainly have a lot more to gain and those who not only understand the competition but also understand the market in which they are competing have the most to gain.
Market research is tough. It is difficult to find reliable information on a certain topic and truthfully, a lot of would-be marketers give up at this stage or they proceed to create a junky website with bad information that gives their potential visitors no incentive to stay for more than 5 seconds.
So, before jumping in and going about their bad business practices, I think that more marketers need to do more research in order to really understand what they are trying to accomplish with a certain product.

They Don’t Stick With it Long Enough

I definitely believe that the 80/20 is very much at work in Internet Marketing. 20 percent or less of the marketers are making 80% or more with certain products or affiliate industries. This is because they have committed time to learn the industry, they have treated their website like a job, and they are giving it enough time to stick and to catch on.
Marketers need to spend time developing a good quality site with original content, update it frequently, and let it rise to the top of search engines.
I really do believe in the potential of Internet Marketing and am working to someday be closer to the 20% making the big bucks than the 80% who don’t have much to show for their time and effort. I’m giving it time and effort and trust that it will begin to pay off soon.

1. “US Online Marketing Forecast: 2005 To 2010 by Charlene Li, Shar VanBoskirk – Forrester Research,” http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,36546,00.html (accessed October 15, 2007).