Give Your Online Career Wings!
Without Failure, Success Is Not Possible!
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What you will learn from this article.
Allow me to introduce myself.
Melting away the sugar coating.
Establish direction to determine need.
Online presence and professional profiles.
Target Your Audience Correctly.
Why it is important to fail.
Equip your online dream with wings.
Allow me to introduce myself.
My name is Deon Christie, knowledge hunter and full-blown research junkie since 2011. My fascination with content marketing strategies borders obsession, or perhaps it’s already too late.
Personally, it took me nearly a decade of “grinding”, and mostly failing before seeing the “light” at the end of the tunnel. I soon learned that it is not about how much money you can make, but rather how far you are prepared to go.
I have tested more systems, programs, ideas, concepts, and methods than I care to recall. Failing miserably over and over, and then failing a few times more. But I was not going to stop until I “did it”. Why?
Well, apart from other people making a lot of money on the internet I figured so can I. There were also all the doubters and haters I had to prove wrong, that’s quite a good incentive I can tell you that.
I am no guru or dot com millionaire…yet. Just fascinated with the entire idea of making money online, and how stuff works. Perhaps bordering obsession, but I just love what I do.
Finding and solving problems by means of content marketing strategies is what I love doing most. I like paying attention to problems people have within my niche, and then doing the research and finding solutions that work.
Truth be told, most of the research is already done on multiple subjects. It took me over a decade to get here, for crying out loud. In this article, I would like to share some basic structural ideas to get your online dream airborne.
Melting away the sugar coating.
Here it is, the less preferred subject, the truth about digital marketing and making money online. Many marketers, knowingly or otherwise often create the idea of “easy money”.
But I think that the promotional message is just misunderstood most of the time. I know I misunderstood because the idea of “easy” and “fast” money is a lot more acceptable than the alternative (failure and hard work).
Making money online is not as easy as is often suggested, and most marketing material (sales screenshots) is an indication of what is possible, not of what is necessarily imminent.
What works for one person might not work for the next, because there is no such thing as “one size fits all” when it comes to making money online.
You may end up spending a few years figuring out what will work best for you, I know it took me a while to figure that one out. The point is that you need to be prepared to keep going until you succeed.
Not until you grow tired of trying or get discouraged by all the failure. Every “failed” attempt, is just one step closer to success. You must always focus on how much you can learn, not how much you can earn.
Just how long it will take before you realize your dream and start making money online, depends entirely on the amount of effort you are prepared to apply.
Establish direction to determine need.
Identifying a common need, and offering a proven solution to the right people, at the right time. Those are the bare basics of generating sales online with any type of digital marketing.
Your journey does not start by choosing the best-paying affiliate offer and flooding every platform on earth with affiliate links. Your journey starts by deciding what fascinates you most.
That one thing you love doing above all else. Because that right there is what we call “your profitable niche”. Simply because that would most probably be the one thing you also have quite a bit of knowledge about.
Knowledge is your only “weapon” to stand out because knowledge is needed to offer the best advice and content. If you want to stand out and get recognized as a professional, then your solutions must be better than that of your competitors.
Therefore, only your level of knowledge can determine your ability to outwork, outwrite, outperform, and outwit your competitors. In light of knowledge being your secret “weapon”, it makes sense why many a hobby had turned unexpectedly profitable.
Because a hobby is something you love doing most, the one thing you would rather do above all else. That is where your knowledge lies, and that is where you should focus your energy. Stick with what you love!
When you have knowledge of the topic (niche), then it becomes easier to understand a common need to be able to offer a solution that will solve the problem.
Online presence and professional profiles.
Zig Ziglar said it in such a way that I have absolutely nothing to add, it is perfectly said. It is also the undeniable truth; that reputation is everything and that is earned.
“If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you!” — Zig Ziglar
You must become a problem solver to make money online, not a salesman. If you solve people’s problems, then they will not only like you, but they will trust you.
Not everything you do online must be because of how much you can earn. You must give way more than you take before people will start trusting you. But you also need a recognizable online presence.
This, in turn, starts with several online profiles. You must make yourself recognizable to your readers or visitors. Personally, I use the same profile picture for all major social and networking profiles.
That way my readers on Quora can recognize me on Medium, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other “usual suspects”. Below are 12 structural elements I find rather helpful in building trust and recognition.
Quora Profile.
Medium Profile.
Facebook Profile.
Twitter Profile.
Reddit Profile.
Sub Reddits.
Facebook Pages.
Facebook Groups.
Quora Spaces.
YouTube Channels.
Websites.
Blogs.
Creating this kind of online presence is of paramount importance, but it is also important to use your real name. All these will show in search result pages when people enter your full name into their browser.
With the 12 suggested elements, you will have the advantage of shaping them into different content marketing strategies. However, I have covered different content marketing strategies several times. Just visit my Medium profile to access them and put them to the test.
I wish I could tell you that this is not really necessary, but then I will be lying because it is, contrary to popular belief. Although it is possible to make money without a website or blog.
It does put you on the next level of professionalism though, and if you are going to compete at a professional level. Then this really is how much work is required, apart from consistent useful content.
Target your audience correctly.
After creating an online presence and working on the best content with proven solutions. You still must reach the right audience at the right time. Targeting is how you turn visitors into buyers, targeting and timing.
This is where many beginners go wrong, I know I did. You need to calculate the best posting and publishing times based on your preferred audience GEO targeting.
This is important for several reasons, affordability being one of them. If you want to target a USA audience, you want to focus on “Pacific Standard Time” and then calculate the time difference from where you are.
In my case, I’m in South Africa and my target audience is in the US. That means the best time for me to publish or post anything would be between 06:00 PM to 03:00 AM (my time).
My current time in South Africa, at the time of writing this article is 10:30 AM. Above, is a screenshot of the Pacific Standard Time. Making it a +10 hour time difference.
Posting and publishing from 06:00 PM to 03:00 AM on my side means I will reach a North American audience from 08:00 AM to 18:00 PM. This is why I also make use of certain auto-posting and post-scheduling tools.
But you can learn more about GEO, and interest targeting in another post on Medium. Where the topic is covered in more detail.
Why it is important to fail.
Learning how not to do something, reveals how it is done. Kind of like eliminating that which doesn’t work and being left with that which does. It will however require quite a bit of elimination, just saying.
Failure is the only way to learn, and failure is often the best teacher. Each failed attempt just brings you closer to your goal and realizing your dream.
Failure is your gateway, not your demise. Failure is an opportunity in disguise, but you must learn to focus on gathering knowledge from failure. Failure is as much a part of success as success itself.
Just how long you are prepared to withstand the storm of failure is entirely up to you. But the longer you withstand the storm of failure, the more spectacular your storm of success will be!
One of my personal quotes on the importance of failure.
“If you have not yet Failed at Many Things in Life, then you might not have much Advice to Offer Either!” — Deon Christie
Keep failing and keep going, your time will come, and it will take as long as is necessary. Success does not care about time, success only cares about persistence and consistency!
Equip your online dream with wings.
Along with all of the above, you want to focus on offering value. People need answers and solutions. Based on personal experience, I find that people are mostly searching the internet for these reasons.
Solutions To Problems.
Answers To Questions.
Guides To Reach Goals.
Free Stuff.
Once you have created your online presence, these four types of content are the wings you will be clipping on your online career. Because that is how you will stand out.
Your job as a writer is to provide people with the solutions and answers they are looking for. That will require a lot of research because you want to come up with something unique.
Offering the “unique” thing means it is not elsewhere available on the internet. That is what makes it so challenging because compiling and testing your own solutions can sometimes take months.
The quality of your content and its ability to solve a problem will always determine the strength of your wings.
Today all of my website traffic is generated from my own efforts, efforts that I have perfected over the years that have created up to 16,364 targeted visitors per day and consistently return revenue! — Source
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