Are you missing something? Do you feel like there’s some unknown piece of the puzzle you need to go further?
Most marketers will happily share their methods and techniques, but here are 6 secrets some gurus don’t want you to learn.
1) There is no ‘secret’
The biggest secret in the internet marketing world is that there is no secret.
As much as we want to believe it, there’s no hidden formula or strategy that will change everything.
The faster you can accept this fact, the better.
Once you stop looking for a secret strategy, you can start seriously studying successful marketers and see what works for them.
And you don’t have to look for hidden clues or covert campaigns. It’s right there in plain sight.
What are they doing with their website? How are they turning visitors into money? And how are they attracting the visitors in the first place?
These are the questions you should be asking yourself. Not what hidden agenda or secret formula they are using.
You can learn much by studying successful people. The clues are right in front of you. Some details may not be apparent, but luckily, a lot of marketers are also very generous about sharing their strategies and tactics.
And no. They are not hiding their best secrets. The “real gems”.
Just because a strategy sounds simple, dull and maybe even boring doesn’t mean it won’t work.
When you start to study successful people, what you will find is that…
2) Successful work is a lot less flashy than you might think
The main difference between writing website content for 10 people and 10.000 people is the pressure and the number of haters you have to deal with.
Sure, you’ll have an audience to write for. You’ll have proof that your work is something that resonates with people.
That’s great.
But the grind is still the same whether you have one follower on your social media account or thousands.
You still have to keep producing when you feel all creativity has left your body.
You may get better at your craft over time, but that has little to do with your success. It has to do with you improving yourself and your skills.
The lesson you should learn from this secret is that you better learn to love the grind and the struggles you have building your website now. Because they are not going anywhere.
I have bad news for you if you are just waiting for the big break. For when you can scale back and relax.
That break is most likely years away, and it may never come.
That’s not how success works. The struggles don’t stop. You don’t wake up one morning and everything you touch turns to gold.
Nope. Instead, you keep grinding. You keep struggling.
That’s how success is made. And it is also how you keep it around for a long time.
But first, you need to love the struggle and the daily setbacks you are dealing with. Because they are here to stay, success or no success.
3) It’s not that easy. And it doesn’t happen overnight
This secret is hidden in plain sight.
Yet, you may still subconsciously deny it.
Why do you think most people struggle or even fail at ever achieving anything substantial online?
The answer is quite simple: because making money online is hard. Making money anywhere is hard, and the internet is no different.
This simple truth can be hard to convince your subconscious mind to accept. Especially when you are constantly bombarded with quick-fix success secrets and strategies that will make you rich overnight.
But the fact that most people fail is a testimony to this truth.
Sadly, this mindset of quick and easy is harming you more than you may think.
The main issue is that you are expecting results too soon. And when you do, you feel down when you see poor results in the early stages of your development.
Building a website online is a long journey.
You need a range of skills to succeed. Content creation, advertising, selling, technical setup, product creation and marketing, social media, etc.
And when you are just starting out, you have none of these skills.
So why expect that you can compete with websites that have been in business for years? Built and run by marketers who started honing their skills long before you even knew what online marketing was?
Blame this mindset on the community, the false advertising, our society or whatever you want. But blame isn’t going to help you get anywhere.
You need to accept that making money online is hard.
But if this is something you want, it is also worth the struggle.
Accepting that it will take hard work is the first step towards success. A first step that will already put you miles ahead of most internet marketers.
4) Success alone isn’t going to make you feel more comfortable
I used to have this utopian view of success where I would see myself finally making it.
A world where I was on top and had control of how things went. I was comfortable and without any doubts.
Most of us think about success like that from time to time.
But I’m starting to learn that this is far from what success looks like in the real world.
Let’s dive into this with a little mind game: Imagine your website suddenly became successful overnight. You woke up tomorrow with thousands of raving followers and website visitors.
That would be awesome, right?
…Right?
Or maybe it wouldn’t be that great. Suddenly you would have thousands upon thousands of people eager to read your content — and hungry to bash you as soon as you take just one wrong step.
Or let’s take it one step further: imagine you are a celebrity.
That’s the dream, right?
…Right?
Have you taken a look at what the gossip columns write about our beloved celebrities? To put it nicely: they can be quite harsh at times.
Just imagine they one day wrote about you. That would be a good sign, meaning you are famous enough to attract readers.
However, if this happened to me I would feel terrible.
Luckily, I’m just a nobody so I don’t have that many haters to deal with. But this mind game shows something interesting.
Sucess doesn’t turn your life into a utopian dream.
It won’t make you feel more comfortable. It definitely won’t shred you of all your doubts and fears.
You need to work on your own personal growth to achieve that. And when you grow as a person, your website will most likely follow.
Success won’t make you more comfortable or happy. Only you can provide that.
5) It doesn’t have to be advanced
I’ve tried lots of advanced methods, strategies, techniques, tricks, tips and hacks. And one thing they all have in common is that they rarely work as well as advertised.
Most of the time, these advanced, new ideas are cooked up by marketers trying to sell more stuff.
Instead of always looking for the latest new marketing trick, I suggest you focus on the basics of marketing first.
The fundamentals.
When you have mastered these, you can start adding fancy stuff to your repertoire.
The basics of online money making comes down to two simple elements: traffic and conversion.
And you can compute how much money you are going to make using this simple formula:
Traffic x Conversion = $$$
And that’s it. Not advanced or fancy. But it works.
Traffic is the visitors that come to your site. This is the lifeblood of any website. Without visitors, nothing is going to happen and you may as well just have a private site for yourself.
But traffic is not enough.
If you want to profit from your website, you also need to turn these visitors into money. That’s conversion. And it’s a quite difficult discipline to master.
If you want to succeed online, you should focus all your efforts on improving your traffic and conversion.
The first one means learning what drives traffic to a website.
And no, the answer is not some new shiny app that promises to drive automated traffic to your site at no cost. Sorry to burst your bubble, but those kinds of apps don’t exist.
Instead, it means learning about some of the core traffic strategies that have stood the test of time. Master SEO, direct adverting, email marketing, outreach, social media, content distribution, etc.
These strategies may not excite you, but I promise you the results will once you start improving your skills.
And for conversion?
Here you need to learn how you can turn visitors into customers. Businesses have been doing this long before you even existed, using techniques like copywriting, storytelling, relationship building, marketing campaigns, etc.
Stop chasing advanced, fancy and new marketing tactics. They may work, but until you have mastered the basics they won’t work for you.
When I started following this idea, I started seeing results that were actually worth something. Instead of doing one-off tricks and here there, I started building out a proper website, backed up by a business focusing on traffic and conversion.
The result? I finally started making money online.
It wasn’t easy, and I’m still building. But it is the only way to create a successful, lasting website.
6) You can do it
Most of this post has been somewhat discouraging: success is mundane, hard and slow to achieve. And when you finally get it, it may not make you feel any better.
Luckily, that’s not the whole story.
Success can also give you an incredible feeling of accomplishment, matched by nothing else.
If you are chasing the right things, you will have to grow to get them. And as a result, you will become a better version of yourself.
To close out this post I want to share a final secret:
The gurus are scared of you.
They are scared because you can do it. You can reach your goals. You have it in you to become successful in this life.
If you are still here, reading this, it means you have the desire to improve yourself. Fuel this desire and turn it into action.
The gurus won’t know what hit them.
Start building a successful website
– This is the most important skill any website owner can have. (Hint: it’s not traffic or conversion.)
– If you want a great website, you need traffic. But before you get any, you need to learn the truth about ‘free’ traffic.
– Discover 7 improvements that will make your website better overnight.
