The Road To Online Marketing Success Requires Commitment
Copyright (c) 2010 Bill Platt
the Phantom Writers
http://thePhantomWriters.com/

Unsuccessful online marketers are notorious opportunity seekers -
giving an opportunity only a couple of weeks to start showing
results, before changing directions to chase the next flavor of
the week. It almost seems that the majority of online marketers
are chasing get-rich-quick schemes, rather than trying to develop
a legitimate business.

Sometimes it seems like the majority of online marketers change
the program that they are promoting, almost as often as they are
putting gasoline into their car. “Okay honey… I filled up the
car today… it is time for us to find another business
opportunity to promote…”

There is also another group of online marketers, who seem to make
a real commitment to a specific business opportunity, but success
continues to elude this group is well. The second group fails to
make a commitment to a particular marketing plan that is designed
to help them to achieve success. Like the first group, they
change directions, as often as they put gasoline into the car.

Those who are successful online, are the kind of people who make
a solid commitment to a particular business model and make a
long-term commitment to a realistic marketing plan.

I am not telling you these things because I think I’m better
than you… In fact, I am telling you these things because I am
guilty of having done the exact same things myself.

Towards the end of 2001, I finally started making serious money
online, after having spun my wheels online for more than four
years, chasing one opportunity after another, until I made a
commitment to a particular business model.

I managed to increase my income year-over-year, and in March of
2005, I quit my job and started working full-time online. I have
continued to earn a nice living online, ever since.

My 2009 revenues were down, but primarily because I was working
less than normal… In November 2008, I learned that my father
was ill… I had my suspicions right away, but we did not have
verification of cancer until February 2009. (Contrary to popular
belief, he was a non-smoker.)

As 2008 wound down, I made a commitment to my father that if he
needed any assistance whatsoever, that I would make myself
available to help him. That meant, if he needed transportation to
and from doctors’ appointments, I would drive the one-hour to
his house, and then take him wherever he needed to go. If he
needed me to come to his house to help him with anything
whatsoever, I would come to his house to help him.

I made the commitment to him, and I honored that commitment to
him.

My online business suffered considerably, as a result of my
making that decision. But, I have no regrets… It was the right
thing to do, and I am grateful that I did it.

My dad passed away in November of 2009.

I continued to miss work, through November and December of 2009,
while doing those things that must be done in relation to matters
of his funeral and his estate.

Just a couple weeks ago, I sat down and calculated exactly how
much time I actually spent outside the office in 2009.

Not all of my absenteeism, during 2009, could be attributed
directly to the time I spent assisting my father during his
illness. In March of 2009, I had missed two weeks when we moved
across town. My websites had also suffered a 16-day shut down in
May, because I was unable to update the DNS records for my
domains, when my web hosting company migrated my account to a new
server. When I went to do the DNS updates, I discovered that
ICAAN was in the process of shutting down my domain registrar and
moving my domain registration information to a new domain
registrar. Unfortunately, during a move of that type, updates
cannot be made to the DNS records. So, my websites were offline
until ICAAN finished its work.

All told, I missed two weeks while moving, two weeks while
waiting for ICAAN to get everything moved so that I could update
my DNS records, and another 12 to 14 weeks while assisting my
father and taking care of the things that I needed to take care
of after he passed away.

During the course of the last eight years, there has only been
one year in which I was not fully committed to my business. That
year was 2009. I did not walk away from my business, but I had
made the decision that taking care of my family was more
important than my business.

While my business, my reputation, and my income suffered
tremendously in 2009, due to my frequent absences and slow
responses, the commitment that I had shown my customers in
previous years helped my business survive 2009 intact.

Now that I have returned to my business full-time, my revenue is
starting to bounce back.

The past nine years has been a wild and exciting ride. The thrill
of growing a business from nothing to something worthwhile has
been an awesome experience for me.

But to the point of this article, this story would have been very
different if I had not committed to a specific business model in
2001, and it would have been very different if I had not
committed to a specific marketing plan for the promotion of that
business.

If I had not made the commitment to develop a viable business
model and commit to a specific marketing plan, I would have
probably still been working 60 hours per week on a job when my
dad got sick. If I had still been working in the brick-and-mortar
world of retail sales, I would not have had the opportunity to
help my dad when he most needed my help.

Then again, I would have had a different job than I had
previously, because my last employer went out of business in
January 2009.

With all that has happened in the last 16 months, I count among
my greatest blessings the care and concern that was shown to me
by my clients. Sure, some of the new people had absolutely no
patience for my absences… But, I received a large number of
personal phone calls, snail-mail letters, e-mails, blog comments,
and tweets from my clients and people that I know from online,
who wanted to offer their support to me, during my emotional
roller coaster ride.

My greatest blessings have been realized in 2009 and 2010. I am
blessed by the wonderful people, whom I have met online through
my online business. And I am blessed to have a business that was
strong enough to survive my frequent absences, during the last 16
months.

Those blessings were available to me, because I made a commitment
in 2001 to stop chasing new opportunities every couple of weeks.
I made the commitment to a business model that I believed could
be successful, and I made the commitment to promote that business
in a consistent and reliable manner.

When I brought commitment to my online marketing endeavors, I
finally started to make money online. As I maintained that
commitment over several years, I was able to grow my business to
the point where I would be able to consistently earn enough money
from my business, so that I would never have to have an outside
job again.

To be honest, I believe that the reason my business continued to
attract new customers through 2009 was because I had used article
marketing to promote my businesses. The articles I write and
distribute, for the promotion of my online businesses, seem to
have real staying power.

The articles that I wrote and distributed, over the last nine
years, continue to influence readers to visit my websites and to
learn more about my businesses and what I can do for the reader.

Between September 2008 and January of 2010, I only wrote and
distributed four articles for the promotion of my websites.
During those 16 months, I barely wrote and distributed one
article every four months, yet the traffic to my website was only
diminished during May of 2009, when my sites were off-line.

I honestly believe that the reason my websites continued to
attract new visitors and new customers, during this period of
time, is because I had more than 150 articles online, posted on
thousands of websites, doing the hard work of convincing people
that they needed to visit my websites to see how I could help
them to accomplish their goals.

When your articles are as useful five years from now as they are
today, your articles will have the same potential of continuing
to send visitors to your website for many more years to come.

If you are seeking true success online, and you are still chasing
the flavor of the week in business opportunities, I strongly
recommend that you pick out something that seems to have real
potential for you and to make a commitment to see it through to
success.

If you would like to learn more about how to make article
marketing work for you in the same positive manner that it has
worked for me, pick up one or both of my article marketing ebooks
shown below in my author information.

———————————————————-
I encourage you to download my free ebook,
“Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics” at:
http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html
If you like that ebook, you will love “How To Use Article
Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”. It is
70-pages of hard-hitting information about article marketing:
http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html
My name is Bill Platt , and I have been earning a nice living
from article marketing for more than a decade. In my ebooks,
I try to share with you the lessons that I have learned about
how to get the most from your article marketing.