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Your success on the Internet, or with any other goal, is determined by a series of steps. There is a great book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill that is perfect for developing an action plan for any goal. I highly recommend it… you won’t be disappointed!

I am asking a few questions here to help you drill down to your specific plan. Please put thoughtful consideration into each answer.

OBJECTIVES/CHALLENGES

1. If I had more free time, I would…
2. What is my burning desire? What are my goals? What do I want in life and why am I doing this?
3. What are the greatest obstacles to attaining my goals?
4. How much time am I willing to dedicate each week to accomplish these goals?
5. Will I continue with my occupation after this is completed?
6. Name two things that I am willing to give up or sacrifice on your way:

Those questions are designed to see how serious you are about achieving success. Now for the steps:

The 6 Steps
1:  Fix your mind on the exact goal you desire. Be definite … Be specific!

2:  Determine what value you intend to give in return.

3:  Establish a definite date when you intend to complete the goal.

4:  Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin immediately! Whether you are ready or not… start today. Put that plan into ACTION! The specific details will work out later. Just get started!

5:  Now write a clear, concise statement of your goal, the timeframe, what value you plan to give, and then describe how you intend to accomplish it.

6:  Twice daily read your statement aloud – morning and night! Read with conviction – see it and believe you’ve already accomplished your goal.

Your ability to define specifically what you want to accomplish, putting an action plan in place, and then acting is of vital importance when building an online business. But the key is to convince yourself – with feeling, emotion, and “a burning desire” that you will be successful. That desire, kept strong in your mind, will help ensure that you are acting to accomplish your goals and therefore will lead to your success.

When you follow these steps, you WILL have success!

I will be  upfront and tell you  that this post is not describing any great marketing revelations or IM tips.

HOWEVER….

If you have online goals you seriously want to achieve, this is an extremely important post for you!

Back in 2006, after having great success with my retail site (selling dog related products) I launched my first “Internet marketing” related product. It was a 100 page PDF file called “The Secrets To My Internet Success”.

I didn’t have much success selling just the PDF file. But when I expanded the product into a video series delivered via CD’s, things really began taking off.

Those early packages were filled with the very basic info for building sites (back then with Dreamweaver….uggg!), finding niches and keywords, choosing products to sell, basic SEO, etc.

Now days I don’t sell that sort of very basic info; I give it all away for free now.

This site is filled with huge amounts of free information, tutorials, and videos. Virtually ANYONE who is serious about building an Internet income or adding income via the web to their existing business can begin that process with the free help my site offers.

Why do I now give it all away for free?

There are 2 reasons:

First, as I began personal coaching several years ago I discovered that I enjoyed the coaching process MUCH more if my students already had a basic grasp of how the parts all worked and fit together. The students who already have those basic skills benefit much more with my coaching; we can get right down to the actions and strategies of building traffic/making money.

Secondly, and for full disclosure of course, in a way I do get paid for providing all the basic info for free. I offer affiliate links to all the tools I use in my own business.

Once someone spends the time to go through and study just my “12 Steps” and has learned the basics for building a simple WordPress site, I’m then ready to take them to the next level.

I actually prefer students I’m coaching to start fresh with a new site, but it can work just as well if they have an existing site that is getting little traffic and/or making little money.

Another common question when folks consider coaching with me is “how long will success take”. I have an entire post on that topic, but the answer is highly variable. It depends on how big the niche is (how much competition), how much time they can devote to the project, etc. It could take a few months or it could take a quite a bit longer. But no matter what, the important thing for them is to understand how the process works and that they have the patience to remain focused.

Patience is a huge problem for those who don’t have the support and help provided by a mentor/coach who can see and articulate the “big picture”. It is very easy to get off-track and go chasing the next shiny object, and the next, and the next…

Most wannabe’s don’t have the relentless focus required for success. In fact, it is a good sign that YOU are still here reading this long post.

Maybe you have what is required to “take it to the next level”?

For people like you, I offer free, one-hour strategy calls via an application process( to weed out the “tire kickers”) .

If you are accepted for a training call with me, I’ll get to know you on the call and what your ultimate goals are. We’ll discuss a strategy  for taking you from where you are now to where you want to be in the future…and what’s required to make that happen.

You’ll learn a massive amount about leveraging the Internet to obtain your goals in this one hour call.

And don’t worry, there’s no sales pitch at all. …yeah, I’m serious about that.

We talk about you, your goals, how to get you from here to there. That’s it.

If you choose to hear about my personal coaching and whether or not it could be a good fit for you, you can ask me about it.

But again, the call is NOT about selling you something; it’s only about helping you get on the right path as soon as possible.

I want to help you move forward in your business and be enjoying great success by this time next year!

I look forward to possibly talking with you!

Here’s the form for requesting a strategy call with me:

Apply For a Free Strategy Call With Steve

CLICK HERE

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By most accounts, only about 5% of people who try making money online ever reach the $100 a month milestone. Wow…1 in 20?

From my experience with beginners, that’s probably correct. I wish I could say that half of the beginners who come to my site end up doing well online. But I know it’s not even close to that.

“You Can Lead a Horse to Water But You Can’t Make Him Drink.”

My site has countless videos and pages of content which show exactly how to achieve Internet marketing success. I have reviews of all the tools I use in my own business. I teach beginners exactly how to find a niche. There are many videos and tutorials for making sites with WordPress. Plus there are dozens of tutorials about SEO, List Building, and article marketing…the list goes on and on.

Why do so few people have success?

I’ve communicated in one way or another with thousands of beginners in the past 5 years. If I had to name just ONE thing that is responsible for most of the failures, I’d have to say it has to do with lack of proper focus.

(Many of you may remember from my early days my favorite mantra: Relentless Focused Action)

“…the lack of proper focus.”  The IMPORTANT word there is PROPER.

Many beginners have great focus. Most have INTENSE focus on making money by next month. That’s a problem of course.

They jump from one shiny object to the next. Where there is smoke there is fire so most shiny objects do have potential. But most beginners never give any of them enough time to get traction.

But others have intense focus on a plan that just won’t work

I heard from a beginner once who had many hundreds of poems a relative had written. First, I have nothing against poetry at all. They were good poems. But there are many good poems in the world. They published them into a book and were trying to sell the books on their poetry site. They had tried everything to sell these books on their site. They spent a ton of money on advertising (uggg). They paid for a LOT of AdWords advertising (uggg).

I’m not sure they ever sold a book. I told them to forget the site and just get the book on Amazon. But they had invested too much effort, money and time to go that direction.

Too much focus in the wrong direction.

Back in the early 2000’s I had an issue with focusing in the wrong direction. I made ALL the mistakes that I see beginners make. I could have just quit like so many do.

But it finally occurred to me (luckily) I was trying to reinvent the wheel instead of carefully studying and listening to those who already were successful.

However, as it turned out, success was not paint by numbers; I did have to find my own specific path.

But by looking at the success of others, at LEAST I knew which direction my own path should go. I stayed focused on the main direction and the end results. My path had quite a few detours and backtracks, but I never lost focus of the big picture and the results I wanted.

If you are still trying to “make it” online, here are three things to keep in mind each day you are searching for or refining your path:

• Have patience
• Have realistic expectations
• Study how successful online marketers achieved success and then tweak the methods to fit you and your personality.

Stay focused correctly, never stop  learning, and never give up!

That statement definitely applies to Internet marketing. When I first began building Cactus Canyon, I knew a “little bit” about subdomains. I had the bonehead idea of making a subdomain for one of my main keywords. It seemed like a really good idea at the time. However, it was a major mistake.

There are MANY ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

One big area of confusion for beginning marketers is the issue of using multiple domains to complement their main site. When done correctly, extra domains can benefit your main site. However, improper use of them will REALLY hurt!

I’ve been talking with a friend over the past few days whose Google traffic has drastically decreased over the past few months. I suspect the last Google algorithm change caught up with them.

This is one example of how NOT to use multiple domains:

My friend has a great site. It has many hundreds of high quality pages and Google loved it; it was making a nice monthly income…until page views began falling dramatically.

It made no sense to me. I saw NOTHING wrong with the site. In fact, in my opinion, the site is a perfect example of how to do things RIGHT. So what was wrong?

Almost offhandedly, my friend mentioned something about having other domains she had masked and pointing to her single site.

Uh oh….

Worse still, what “looked” like the main site (and the one all the backlinks were linking to) was actually one of the masked domains!

Double Uh Oh……

Actually, my friend did not do it; a person helping with the site and hosting did it.  They made this one masked domain their “main” site because it had the best name. The original and “real” site did not have a good domain name; that’s why they chose to mask to it.

Oh, and just FYI, GoDaddy offers this masking option for forwarding domains without any disclaimers for how it could hurt SEO. Shame on them.

Probably what happened was that Google put some extra tweaks in their latest update which brought this mistake to their attention sooner rather than later (they would have eventually caught up with this).

My friend had built an entire brand and site on a non-existent foundation. The masking is really an iFrame…it’s not really there. Worse still, there were a handful of other domains doing the same thing. It looked like multiple, identical sites but with different domain names…all owned by the same person!  ….triple uh oh!

The good news is that the 2 main URLs in question are both still in the Google index. Therefore, this problem should be easily corrected. I really expect for things to be back to normal in a few months with respect to page views.

What about buying extra domains to complement your main site? Sure, you can do that…just use them correctly.

For example, if you buy the .org, .net, .us versions of your .com domain, you have two choices. You can just do a 301 redirect from those extra domains to your main site. That is safe. A 301redirect means that if someone goes to that URL in their browser they are redirected to the main site AND the URL changes to the main domain (unlike masking).

Your other choice is to develop those other domains into small, keyword targeted mini sites that link back to your main site. ONLY do this if you create valuable and original content for the sites. Do not simply toss up some content with your link included. Make a 4 or 5 page site optimized for one small aspect of your business. With add-on hosting, these mini sites costs nothing extra vs. just having the domain parked or redirected.

Again, it’s OK to buy the related domains. But don’t believe they will, by themselves, bring your main site traffic…even by doing a proper 301 redirect. For example, if your main site is EasyDogTraining.com, simply having the domain TrainDogs.com won’t result in significant, if any, traffic. (People would have to actually type into their browser TrainDogs.com…that will rarely happen.)

Besides the quick lesson on how to use multiple domains, I hope also you learned to double check all your decisions while beginning your business. This is just one example, of how something that looked like a “good idea”, could sabotage all your other efforts.