The Silent Misery of the Newbie
February 18th, 2007 by TatmanI remember being new. There was so much pressure. Rent: due. Cash: low. I didn’t even have groceries. The start of my business was a last ditch effort at survival, let alone success.
Those first few months, I struggled in silence. I didn’t tell my family or friends that I was in need, just scraped by day to day and begged God to let me wake up to at least three sales a week. All day, every day, I marketed. Free ad submission here, article submission there, manual traffic exchanges to build my list. Called people, emailed people, did link exchanges. Submitted manually to hundreds of directories.
As a new internet marketer, it is crazy to put yourself through the process alone. Nuts. My salvation was in the form of internet marketing forums, particularly two private ones in which we all shared our web addresses and lamented not being able to make one sale a day. We also celebrated landmarks like the first time we made a thousand dollars in one day.
Of particular help was in writing to my internet marketing idols. There were people I looked up to online that I’d never met in person, and I wanted to reach them, in the days before blogging. I’d buy their products and look for direct email addresses. It would take me two days to decide what to write. I kept my messages brief, complimentary, and included offers of help in exchange for knowledge.
This is a big, big secret, that you hear about from time to time but don’t really understand, until you experience it first hand.
The people who make it online, who have businesses that are around for years, who are the “names” in the business are the best and the friendliest people around. If you approach people with respect for them and their time, they will bend over backwards to help you get ahead.
All you have to do is ask them. Yet so many of us are so afraid of having these conversations. I still can’t get up the nerve to do interviews, even though I have an idea that, with my contacts, would make me a small fortune within about a month. I’ve been interviewed myself dozens of times, but contrary to how I appear online, I’m often painfully shy.
I’ll never forget the day I realized that I had gone beyond not being new, to being successful. It was the day I got my first email from a tentative marketer asking for my opinion. I still keep that smile in my pocket.
Posted in My Internet Marketing Secrets, internet marketing how-tos, internet marketing stories |
February 24th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
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February 24th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
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February 26th, 2007 at 9:46 am
I once reached out to Yanik Silver in this manner, and was responded to by an assistant who was rude and said he charged something like $1000 for an hour of consultation, when essentially, I had asked if I could take him to lunch. We all have to eat, right? It made him look like an arrogant, incredibly greedy assh*le.
March 5th, 2007 at 1:01 am
Tat,
You’re not alone. I’ve gone through the same misery. And many people I
talked to shared the same lousy experience.
It’s called growing up pain.
Some never even live through the pain (guess the pain is too much for
them to endure).
I was a little more lucky in the sense that I could live through my days without any income from that source while I was learning.
I did pick a few “gurus” to learn from them. Three of them to be exact.
Learn anything ?
Nope. But I did help to increase a couple of millimeters to the thickness of their already bulging wallets.
Sending an email to any of these guys would be no different than throwing
stones into the ocean. In the latter case you can at least enjoy seeing a few ripples !
Nah, they feel a humiliation to reply to an email from a guy like me
who just started out.
At the end, Google taught me everything I wanted to learn or to know.
And I didn’t have to pay no more.
Pretty interesting to look back.
To many it can be painful looking back.
Chee
March 5th, 2007 at 2:36 am
I hear you and Blogs are a godsend to provide useful information to others. Not too much worries about the grammar, just the ability to spill it out and answer to comments in case your writing was a bit too gibberish or cryptic :). It was also the reason for my personal endeavor with Cumbrowski.com. I started it when I realized that I often sent very similar emails to different people. So I decided to dump it all on a site, what I did and now I have to clean up the site and sort it etc. hehe.. but that is fun though.
Cheers!
March 23rd, 2007 at 4:33 am
Thanks for coming by. I’ll go back and edit.
March 23rd, 2007 at 4:34 am
Oh and Chee, didn’t see your comment. This was about when I was a newbie. I haven’t been one for four years, at least not at marketing or search engines. I appreciate that you took the time to comment.