First a little background.

Recently I sent the following email/survey to my ezine subscribers:

——————————————————-
Good morning,

I’ve been busy thinking and I wanted to give
you an opportunity to participate!

You see, I’ve been thinking about YOU.

It’s only natural then that you have some input!

I’m constantly thinking about you and how I can help you
make money, improve your business, start a business
or make your dreams and goals become reality.

Here’s something I thought you would want:

A completely automated system for setting up a
web business that closely follows my online Training
Program, “You Can! Make Your Living Online!”.

That includes everything from…

= Setting up capture pages,
= Driving tons of high-qualified traffic to your site,
= Building your list,
= Creating a relationship with your subscribers,
= Selecting the best products to sell,
= Setting up sales pages,
= Delivering products, and,
= Creating your own, exclusive info-products
= Etc…

That’s just one idea…

Here’s what I would I like to hear from you about:

= What do you need to make money - online or offline?
= What barriers, obstacles or problems are you facing?
= What is your BIGGEST obstacle to succeeding in your
online business right now?
= What kind of help do you need FIRST?
= What kind of service do you need that is NOT offered
right now that would help you?
= Is your goal to be 100% online or do you want a business
that COMBINES online with offline marketing and business?

Tell me what is on your mind …

Send it to: [email]

Your personal success coach and partner,

-Dave Vallieres
http://www.infoproductlab.com
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Portions of the feedback I received and the analysis of that feedback is the subject of this report.

This report contains tons of value, insight and wisdom. But you get what you give. So give it your attention and you will be sure to receive lots and lots of value from it, especially if you are conducting any kind of business online.

First, a big “thank you” to everyone who contributed! I really appreciate your opinion. I’m sorry I can’t personally respond to everyone who submitted their opinions-there were too many of them (345)!

After reviewing the majority of the responses, the major barriers and obstacles to your success can be overcome with the proper training and a few tools.

I’ll say that again, “the major barriers and obstacles to your success can be overcome with the proper training and a few tools”.

I was reading an excellent post this week on a forum that said the difference between a successful person and a failure is the way they looked at problems they were facing:

The failure says to themselves, “It can’t be done!”

The successful person says, “How can we solve this problem?”

I don’t want to simplify this too much, but if you don’t at least TRY to solve the problem you’re facing, you’re already defeated.

Successful people will work on trying to find a solution to a problem until they have found one - or they have found a solution that they can live with, even if it’s not perfect.

The barriers and obstacles mentioned by most people fit neatly into about 4 categories.

Here they are in order of the most responses*:

1) They need ‘basic’ technical skills… and I mean REALLY BASIC… (41%)

The majority of the responses I received, surprisingly, fell into this category.

I, like many Internet marketers, think and assume that if someone was interested in Internet marketing they would have learned the basics of html or ftp, etc before getting involved.

That does not seem to be the case. Many people would like to make money online but are clueless when it comes to basic technical skills. This is a huge barrier to their success.

Examples people mentioned they needed help mastering:

· How to upload a page to a hosting server using ftp…
· How to change the html ‘code’ in a page template…
· How to include links in their pages…
· How to include a sign-up code link in their pages…
· How to mask ‘affiliate links’…

So we are talking very, very basic stuff here that I think many Internet marketers assume their customers already know- but don’t.

There are some really excellent tutorials online to help people learn these basic skills… and if you were one of the people that said you needed help in this area please, please look around for qualified training. Most of it is free, some is not.

So the help you need is available. It’s my theory though that some people (maybe even you?) even lack the skills necessary to find the resources online that will help them master these skills!

Maybe the first thing you need to focus on, and if you’re an experienced Internet marketer, develop this tool) is to find a good ’search tutorial’ to learn how to find information on the web!

If you’re one of the people who need to master these basic “HTML” skills here’s the one resource you need:
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp

This is an excellent but basic intro to html. You need to know this stuff if you’re long on time and short on cash.

If you have some money you don’t need to know this stuff just hire someone from http://www.elance.com to do it for you.

I think it’s still a good idea to know some basic stuff because you don’t want to hire someone to do minor changes to your sites for you when they are so easy to do yourself.

2) Information overload …(25%)

Many people complained that they are bombarded with information, books, products, ads etc… each one claiming to be the info they need to make millions online. They are CONFUSED.

I guess you haven’t taken my online training program then, because I discuss this in LENGTH and clear up the CONFUSION once and for all.

No one’s product I have seen clears up confusion about what it takes to make it online better than mine.

New Internet marketing products are coming out at an incredible rate and since everyone in the Internet marketing ‘industry’ knows how to get a product created quick and easy using Elance, Scriptlance.com, etc there are more new products being promoted every week.

I have always said that the Internet marketing niche is huge and there’s still lots of money to be made in it and I have not changed my mind. But the market is changing… newbies and those who have been buying Internet marketing ebooks, course and manuals want to know that what they are buying has lots and lots of value and the product is different than the other products being promoted and how it’s different.

Educate your customer better, give them value and they will come back to you. You do not have to be an ‘guru’ to make money in this niche.

But you do need to deliver a lot of value for the cost.

3) How to get traffic cheap or free… (25%)

If there was a source for perfectly targeted traffic that was also free or cheap… guess what?

It wouldn’t be free or cheap anymore.

If there are NO barriers to highly targeted traffic, everyone would be using it. The really targeted and best source of traffic on the net is not free or cheap.

You’ve heard the saying, “You get what you pay for.”

That was never more true when it comes to traffic.

So what’s the best source of traffic for your website?

Your own list is #1.

Here’s a tip… when you go to Alexa.com and type in a website address watch for the ’spikes’ in the traffic graphic shown for the site. The ’spikes’ are when the owner of the site sent an email with a link to one of his pages on his site so that his subscribers would visit his page. These ‘visits’ are all counted in the Alexa ranking.

These spikes also occur when JV partners send traffic to a site during a special promotion. Most of the traffic you see on a site comes from email marketing. Very little of it comes through SEO (search engine marketing) - except for those sites that get 1st page ranking in their chosen keywords, very little traffic comes from natural search engine ranking.

Don’t have a list? Then you need to build one ASAP. Your job online is to build your list.

Let me repeat that, “your job online is to build your list”.

Advertising online has one job: Getting people to opt-in to your LIST.

Many people are confused about this. Very little of the website traffic and Alexa ‘ratings’ come from people who have never visited your site before.

Listen to this carefully: Your best source of traffic comes from links you’ve put into your email messages to your list! The second best source of traffic is targeted advertising through PPC or offline ads or direct mail.

4) No product or service… (6%)

Finally, many people stated that they did not have a product to sell and needed help putting one together.

Since it’s relatively simple to put a product together, I think the responses had more to do with creating the ‘right’ product, positioning and the actual product creation process than simply not knowing ‘how’ to do it.

Even though product creation is ’simple’ it is not easy and it involves a lot of work.

Any type of product that can make it easier to create your own info-products and software will have a ready acceptance in the marketplace.

The barriers most people run into is when they try to ‘think’ of a product to sell which is the exact opposite thing they should be doing.

If you are the one having this problem you should be monitoring discussion boards, newsletters and opinion sites to determine what problems exist in niche markets and then create a product that solves that problem.

Let the market decides what it wants…

I hope this short report has been helpful.

If you like it, feel free to pass it on to friends, colleagues and associates. While more anecdotal than scientific the survey highlighted the problems in the Internet marketing niche that you may not have been aware of.

Hopefully you’ll have a better understanding of the marketplace. In addition you may even have thought of one of two new products to solve some o these problems