What’s The Next Step
In August of 2006, I received an email about mentoring. Oh no, not again. 
Well, this one was from an Internet Marketer whose emails I had been following for about a year. I felt he was an ethical person and someone who sincerely wanted to help others.
He was offering a trial subscription for a buck and this included a half hour phone consultation with me. So I signed up. Thus began an association with my first mentor. His name is Matthew.
I had put together my Goal Setting Tool – you can see it over there under “Web Sites.” It was nothing than like it is now. However, Matthew did a teleseminar about being persistent and promoted it to his list of about 15,000. I ended up with a list of 80 and had 8 sales from the teleseminar. And than…
I didn’t know what to do. I had no plan for the follow up. I had no sales funnel. And I was just getting started in the new job at the big box computer store.
I started another learning curve. And begin to learn how to put together a web site, how to set up an auto responder, etc.
About November, I dreamed up another product and Matthew agreed to be a part of it. He was putting together a coaching/mentoring program. My part was in leading some Mastermind Coaching Teams. This would involve a weekly phone call of about an hour to people in the program would have a place to check in and share ideas, get answers to questions, etc.
This got kicked off in February of 2007 and at one point there were 5 teams up and running. As I am writing this at the end of February, 2009, one of those teams is still connecting on a weekly basis.
This was the second time I actually made some money on the Internet. Not a whole lot, but I had some income through the summer. I invested in my business bought products that I felt could help me. Again, however, I was on a learning curve.
One of the things I learned from leading the MasterMind Coaching Teams was that I needed to have my own product. I also discovered that most people seemed to have very little clues about how to get started. Of course, I didn’t have much more experience, however, because I was the “expert” to the people on the calls, I begin to think that I knew something.
And so, I conceived my next product. This was to be a membership site teaching people how to build a list by using giveaway web sites. I had kind of stumbled on the fact that you could put a free product (eBook) up on a giveaway site and if people wanted it, they had to sign up for my list.
Of course – once again, I didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing. I got membership site software, affiliate software, learned how to make PDF eBooks, have audio recordings of the eBooks, and on, and on, and on. Thought I had some fairly well known Internet Marketers to help promote the web site.
Kicked off the membership site about the middle of November of 2007 and basically it bombed. Since I really didn’t know what I was doing, no one really follow through on promotion. I had no sales funnel to lead prospective buyers up to the membership site, I wasn’t well known so as to pull it off without a sales funnel.
I restructured the pricing, Matthew did a promotion, and I got 6 sign ups. Got a couple of more with a year end teleseminar with another guy. Got a couple of more during the first quarter of 2008, however, by mid 2008, the whole thing had pretty much died a natural death.
So it is on to the last chapter in “Chasing The Internet Dream.” It is titled, “The Final Chapter.”
Tags: building online business, business opportunity, internet marketing, making money online, work at home