I don't know about you, but sometimes it starts to sound a little absurd. Doesn't it? Kinda like this:

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Here's a way to make HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars online, and it only takes a few days to implement!

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But wait, here's a way to make MILLIONS online, and it takes only a few hours to set up and then works automatically year round while you're on vacation!!

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But wait, here's a way to make BILLIONS online and REVERSE TIME AND GROW YOUNGER while I do all the work for you…!!!

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Okay, I'm exaggerating. I admit it. I haven't heard any hype lately that goes quite that far. But close. Yep, kinda close.

(I know, I know. You wait eagerly with the greatest of expectations for each and every precious word I post (right? I mean your very destiny hangs in the balance), and it's been way too long between posts — but I've been BUSY! And better eventually than never, right?)

But anyway, putting my delusion of grandeur aside (just for the moment), it's Monday, the start of a new work week! So let's ignore all the hype for a sec and get serious. Here's how to make money, online or off:

• Get in touch with your passion. Find a related need and fill it. Unless you are mentally ill, no matter what your passion is, it is very likely that someone out there has made a successful business out of it — or something closely related. Why not you? Why be halfhearted? Why not be passionate instead? Especially since much of your success (or failure) may depend on it.

• Develop a clear and compelling vision of your business goals. Know what you are setting out to accomplish. If you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, you are already ahead of 95% of the competition. If you don't, you're already falling behind. If you are pursuing goals you haven't even defined, you are wasting your time and energy.

• Do. Take action. Do the work. At your first inkling that you may be over-educating and over-preparing, stop. Then do what you already know. Just do it. Now. Don't be afraid to fail. Fail fast and fail often. Learn by those failures and enjoy them. Enjoy them? Yes! Celebrate! Jump up and down, do a little dance and pat yourself on the back. Heck, go ahead and gloat. With every failure, you're learning and growing! Learn to understand and appreciate that.

• Understand the power of your own mind. Don't hope for success. Expect it. Positive expectation is far more powerful than hope. Unlike hope, expectation does not include a consideration of the possibility of failure. Be positive, stay positive, pursue positive. Avoid negative people and negative influences and negative self-talk. Focus on developing strong belief in yourself and your vision. Remember the vision? Focus on that, not on what you are having to go through to get there. Know that the vision is worth it.

• But keep initial day-to-day expectations realistic. Stop striving for perfection. If you're just starting out, start out walking, begin small, be patient.

• But be prepared and willing to learn and grow and run.

• Don't be afraid of the competition. Today's competition may be tomorrow's customer or partner.

• Network with successful people, and remember, companies don't do business with one another, people do.

• Know your subject. Don't scatter your attention too broadly.

• Refocus daily on your top two or three goals, and stick with that focus until you are sure you have maximized potential.

• But be flexible. If something isn't working, be willing to change course, even be willing to re-envision and refocus if necessary. Be willing to cut your losses. If a strategy is failing, drop it. Move on.

• Be willing to invest — your time, your energy, your money — whatever you have. And be willing to outsource. Unless you enjoy and get a great deal of satisfaction out of the work, outsource what is not making you money or drop it, and spend the majority of your time and energy on what is.

• Document your successes. Any approach that works has the potential of becoming a system. Systems are easily repeatable. Replication of a successful, working system will often be the best possible return on your investment. But don't be afraid to tweak and test the system. Just because it works doesn't mean it can't be improved over time.

• Celebrate your successes, too (not just your failures) — but be willing to re-invest. Sure, go ahead and reward yourself for a job well done. You deserve it. But don't be too eager for lavish celebrations that will simply eat up your earnings. Re-invest a reasonable portion to ensure your long-term success.

• Work steady but stay balanced. Balance your work and your schedule. Don't lose sight of who and what all the hard work and money are for. Be willing to take time off for your health, and your family and friends, and (sometimes) just to play.

That's it. Everything else is a tool. There are useful ones and useless ones and all-shiny-and-new ones, but they are all nothing more than tools.

And we're all just tools when we let ourselves believe anything else.

Let's all try to help each other remember that.

As all online marketers know, this game's all about traffic and conversions. But how can you be sure your conversion strategy is the best it can be?

One way of course would be if you could watch your visitors and see how they respond to differing parts of your sales message, i.e., your web page(s). Well, ClickTale won't let you do exactly that, but it does come fairly close.

ClickTale can provide online businesses with some very real insights into customer behavior. Many marketers are already finding this an excellent resource for helping to improve the performance, usability and conversion of their websites. Every mouse move, click and scroll is tracked.

There are also what ClickTale calls "heatmaps" and behavioral reports that complement traditional web analytics.

Definitely worth checking out. Sign up here for your FREE subscription,

To your success!,

Richard D. Farley

As some of you already know I promised some information recently, but felt obligated to withdraw the offer after an associate of mine insisted. Well, I've now decided to try to make it up to you by recommending something very special.

Would you like to know what is quite likely one of the easiest, simplest and least expensive ways to make money right now in 2010 and beyond? And what if you could simultaneously be of service to others, expand your understanding of internet marketing, and be true to your highest values all at the same time? And what if you could find out all about it for FREE (with no marketing tricks, no upsells, no nothing)?

Does that sound too good to be true? Well it isn't. This is such a simple, easy and effective way to make money some of you will be stupefied that you haven't thought of it before. And no tricks. I promise. It will all be explained in more detail when you confirm, but the short version is, I won't spam you, you'll be under no obligation whatsoever, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

And all you have to do to find out all about it for FREE is to sign up to my list to request the information:

Sorry. This offer has expired.

• have your own unique and valuable product to sell; and/or
• have all the right connections within your particular industry, and/or
• be one of the very first to find out about and implement a new and effective methodology, and/or
• have at least $10,000 to invest upfront with previous and up-to-date experience in marketing, and/or one or more valued information technologies, and/or
• just luck into something.

But not very many of these things tend to be very true for those who are brand new to the game. That's all. That's all I was saying. I wasn't trying to discourage anyone. I was trying to tell those who need to be told that it's a business, like any other — except that it's been rather like the wild, wild west so far — but that's changing some already and likely to change a lot more in the next few years. So if you are in it for the long run, if you are going to stay legal, ethical, honest, and add value for your customers — and there simply are too many out and around who don't act as if they understand that — then it most likely will take work, lots of it. So, yeah, maybe you can figure out a way, as a still-wet-behind-the-ears newbie to make a lot of money fast and easy. What do I know? It might be that very next product launch that will make it happen. But if you compromise on the long-term strategy I've laid out above, as far as I'm concerned, you might be a rich crook or a rich con artist, but you are not a successful marketer, and anything you do that doesn't pass the smell test probably will come back to bite you sooner or later. Well, that's my take on it anyway. Regards, Richard D. Farley

First, my approach here is to be something other than, or more than, simply promotional. I've been promotional on this site, sometimes, and in all but a couple of cases, that's been because I had seen the product, used the product, or believed in the marketer who was selling the product, and in the other cases, because they were recommended to me by someone I believed in, and, well, you either believe that or you don't. The point is, I do want to be more than just promotional, so I want to talk about a couple of issues that really have been bugging me.

One of them is that, if all you newbies want, or all you are going to respond to, is hype, then you will get what you deserve. Chase after the dream of instant, easy money if you want, but the truth is that just about everyone in this business that has done well has had to work very hard, at least at some point, to achieve that — either to build and build, gradually, on their efforts, or to FINALLY make that sudden breakthrough.

Now, I know this isn't what some newbies want to hear, but those guys around that are telling you that you can make a lot of money in a month, or a week, or a few days, or within 24 hours, or whatever, generally speaking, are not worth listening to. Yeah, sure, every now and again, someone figures out some 'trick' or some methodology that pays off in spades, but, you know what? Every now and again, someone wins the lottery, and someone else gets struck by lightning, but — and this is what you need to listen to — it doesn't happen very often. In fact, given the number of people involved in internet marketing, the percentage of those kinds of stories that are valid is miniscule to the point of being almost nothing.

So you got to expect to work.

A second item that has been really bugging me lately is the attitudes. Just yesterday I was out on a site and seeing all these comments, and some of them were complaining that this and that product or strategy doesn't work, or was deeply disappointing, and I mean some of the products and services that were being dissed were literally only a few weeks or a few days old! What?

One guy was saying that Site Profit Bot was a big disappointment. What? Like four days after its release, you're saying that? Did you even bother to try to learn how to use it? Have you taken even a moment to ask for support? Do you understand that results take time?

My last post was entitled, in part, 'Or what more do you want?,' and if Site Profit Bot is such a disappointment, I guess I have no choice but to conclude that what some of you want is to have a truck full of gold backed up in your driveway or deposited in your bank account the day after you first try something. No. Come to think of it, I bet some still would find something to complain about even then.

I mean, c'mon, people! Some of you buy into all the hype and so you expect something to work instantly? There are a fair number of good products out there, folks, but they are for marketers, and a marketer doesn't just try something for a day or two, or even a week or two, or even a month or two, and say it doesn't work if he or she doesn't get results. A marketer knows better than to buy into all the hype.

Sure, you may think its quick and easy someday, when you've got the traffic, when you've got the skills, when you've got the instincts. It might even be second nature someday. But a marketer knows that no matter how good or 'easy' something is, it is very likely going to take time and energy to learn, and time and energy to implement, and time and energy to work. A marketer persists long enough to be sure the product or service has been given adequate time to prove itself, or not.

And no, I can't tell you how long that is, because it depends a lot on the product, and on you, and on how quick a study you are, and how much time and energy you devote to it, and how much action you take, and how often, and whether and to what extent you can, as Winston Churchill once defined as the secret to success, 'move from one failure to the next without any loss of enthusiasm.'

So stop dissing products and marketers you know nearly nothing about. And take action. And persist. And expect to have to work your butt off, at least for a while, because winning the lottery is not a plan to bet your life and well-being on, and lightning isn't going to strike very many of us very often.

I'm sorry. For some of you, it's probably tough medicine. I wish it were otherwise, but that's just the way it is.

And finally, a few years ago, I was doing a little contract work for a fellow who…, well…, let's just say he had obtained a somewhat higher net worth than yours truly (about $80,000,000). And I'm thinking of using something that guy said to me to segue into something else I want to talk about, but it'll have to wait.

Maybe next time, or if not, sometime soon.

Thanks for visiting.

His name is Bill McRea, and he calls it 'Marketing on the Fringe 2.0.'

I took his original course, 'Marketing on the Fringe 1.0,' and was so impressed I am thinking about signing up for the new course even though I'm expecting a good percentage of it may be the exact same information as his original course.

So what I'm saying is, you REALLY need to check this out.

Why?

Well, I won't ask you to suspend your better judgment and swallow whole every miniscule mote in his sales copy, but Bill's "traffic machines" are the real deal, and this new course is the next level in his traffic machine revolution.

They are almost COMPLETELY automated, and they do drive the traffic. Since taking the first MOTF course, and implementing only some of Bill's suggestions, I have sites that are driving at least 10 times the traffic they were before. Frankly, I need to cut this post short so I can go implement some more of his suggestions.

Bill's letting people in the door to test the system for just $5 right now. But I don't expect that offer to last very long. So you've got to move on this.

Those of you who know me, know I've only rarely been this promotional or this enthusiastic, so you also should know I'm really serious this time.

Check it out right now, okay?

(Edit:: Nov 21 2009 – I owe most of the recent increase in my traffic to what I learned in his first course. Not all directly of course as I've continued to build on that knowledge, but I wouldn't have ever had the knowledge to build on in the first place if I hadn't taken his course. Bill told me this morning that he is almost sold out and expects to be tearing this down soon. Now maybe that's just a marketing ploy, and maybe it's not. In my experience, Bill usually means what he says, so to be on the safe side, you should fork over that massive $5 for the 7-day trial and check it out now if your current traffic strategy isn't all you hoped it would be.)

http://mythospheres.com/recommends/McReaMOTF2

To your ever-increasing success!,
Richard D. Farley