I know this page has nothing to do with dog behavior, but it has plenty to do with human behavior in some aspects. I want my site visitors to see and understand that most “pet” websites aren’t really about pets or animals at all. They are about webmasters trying to make money from a computer, by creating a website about pets and hoping they will run across some owners desperate enough to buy whatever product holds promise of resolving their pet’s problems.
That’s not me. I truly do want to help pet families, searching for solutions to various problems. And the thing is, in my just helping you find a solution that works for you, the vendor of that product will through me some shade. Its a win/win with you getting what you need, the vendor getting what they need, and me getting something out of it too so I can afford to spend time researching even more dog behavior problems and various products designed to help those dogs and owners.
There is a legitimate side to the online marketing business, but a much larger scammer side to this industry.
What the scammer industry does is promise unrealistic results with minimal effort.
Spin is the word that describes what they do. We see it all the time in politics, and quite often in whatever media we might watch. About the only thing they don’t spin is fact of the weather, and results of sports. And even those get some spin in what aspects are brought to light and which are ignored. There was a TV show staring Michael J. Fox called “Spin” where he worked in public relations for a governor. The show was pretty honest in showing that politicians spin the words and which facts are presented to make things look the way they want. Truth is not particularly relevant in how things can be spun. As long as someone give some real facts, they can ignore others to present their case to show they are right.
But what about the legitimate side of the industry? Well, this website, Control Your Dog, is a great example. I am not doing this for the sake of making money. I am truly wanting a site that helps people solve behavior problems. As a side effect, there will be training courses, books, and even hard products like dog food, collars, leashes, clickers, toys and such that people will be happy to order online. And since it costs the same amount either way, they usually wont mind if I get a small commission from the things they order. This is the win/win scenario that drives people to see potential and make the mistake of thinking they can *make* some website with a solution for some problem and they can utilize that to make money as a side hustle.
Do you know that one person in this industry made a list of different techniques, or methods to make money online and that list has over 120 different entries?
I am not trying to talk anyone in to trying to learn to make money online. In fact, I hope to talk a bunch of people out of trying because there is maybe a 96% failure rate. Let me break those numbers down.
I have to ask, why are you reading this? Are you curious about the possibility of working from home somehow and making money? If that’s you, go ahead and keep reading. If not, well I tell a lot of my personal story here but it has nothing to do with training dogs nor helping to keep them healthy. It does show my history of failures and successes, and how for many months I was getting paid every month from a major online entity that everyone has heard of.
If 100 people try to do this the first 25% will realize it takes a lot more work, study, consistency, and commitment than they are interested on putting into what is kind just a gamble anyway so they drop out pretty quickly. Maybe 25% more will try looking at all the free information scattered all over the Internet and try cobble some kind of plan together that might work. 40% more, usually see that no matter what they will have to pay for certain services and items if they are going to do it right, so they take the plunge and purchase some expensive “guru” program to train them. Those guru programs are everywhere. A lot of that first 50 people also got sucked into buying those guru programs too. Sometimes they got the refunds they were promised if the plan failed but most never asked for it, nor did they get it if they did ask. Often after a month or so the guru just shut down that business and moved on so there was no refund. Someone once thought they were getting me a great birthday present and paid $500 for one of those guru programs that promised oh so much, but when I tried following it for 3 weeks, it was completely bogus, but the merchant just disappeared into a cloud of smoke by the time I realized this and finally challenged some part of it.
That money was gone, my 3 hours a day for 3 weeks was gone. The stress of me trying to make someone happy because they invested in me was wasted.
So of our 100 original people, 25 gave up without loosing too much money, 25 got suckered by a slick scammer selling a bill of goods to them, and 40 more having done a lot more research before making the commitment got some plan and tried it, and purchased things like website hosting, and domain names, and some marketing options trying to get visitors to their sites.
And of the 90 covered so far, not a single one got even one visitor to visit their work, not a single sale was made, not a single commission was earned.
We are down to the last 10 people of the original 100 now. These people have worked at their program, most have a website some of them with several websites. They paid for however many domain names they needed, often they got involved in various types of marketing. Some marketing you just pay for and they get your ad in front of the kind of people that might click on the ad and eventually buy something from your site. This is the Facebook and social media kinds of ads you hear about. There are ways to pay browser companies to get your ads in front of people searching for keywords you have on your website and maybe someone will buy something.
In my case, when I started in 2010, I worked many many hours creating articles with a link to a product in my signature, and at least 20 people read at least one of my articles in that 6 month period. We finally decided that if nothing happened by Christmas day of 2010, we were done. Well, it happened on Christmas eve. A sale happened. Some person out in the world, read one of my articles, clicked on the product link, purchased the product, and I earned $10.40. I didn’t realize it had happened until I had already quit trying. A deposit showed up in my bank in February of 2011. There was a 30 hold on payouts so the buyer could get a refund if they wanted. So $10.40 unexpectedly showed up as a direct deposit in my bank.
So back to our 100 people that wanted to try earn this money from work at home thing.
90 of them have failed completely, with most of them paying out hundreds of dollars for guru plans, services, hosting, domain names, marketing. They have invested hundreds of hours of their time, enthusiastic at first, with that slowly melting away to be replaced with tedium and a feeling of useless effort and finally call it quits.
The last 10 people are still at it. It may be 2 years in and they are still paying for services and doing the plan they first got, often they also bought into 2 or more other guru plans. Some of these people have paid thousands by now in dollars, and thousands of hours. Of the 10 people, 5 have still never seen a single organic sale or commission. They learned how to buy through their own links and affiliate codes and get some things cheaper, occasionally getting paid commissions on their own purchases, but they still haven’t made any real sales. And spending $75 to earn $50 isn’t the way to make a living anyway. Eventually these 5 will give up, even though they still hang out on the fringes for a while longer in the believe that if they tried just a little harder, or maybe a month longer, or had just found one more way to get visitors to their links it would all turn around.
I was one of those 5. A failure for the most part. One sale at the 6 month mark made me 10 bucks to recover for the hundreds I had paid, and the hundreds or nearly 1000 hours invested. At the two year mark, I was on a forum one day and saw someone I believed in had made a post. This was a couple years after that post but it still allowed people to make comments. I made a comment, about how that OP had succeeded because she had just kept trying different things, carefully documenting everything until something worked, then repeated that thing and it worked for her again. And again. And she quit her job then changed her title on her tax return from store manager, to Internet Marketer.
Anyway, many months earlier when I signed up to be a member of that forum I had linked one of her products in my signature. By this time, that plan was obsolete and didn’t really work, but I had forgot about the signature. People reading my comment, clicked that product link in my signature and bought that plan. From that one single forum post, I made well over $250 organic dollars. It was an accident, and pure luck. Nothing more. No attempt by me to earn anything.
Because I had had two different types of things work, I still know it was possible. I also had learned so many different techniques with many of them becoming obsolete, and some being downright unethical. I knew I needed some new plan of action, first of which involved in me to stop spending money until I started earning some. It was about this time that I was given the $500 dollar product that was nothing more than a scam. I had been a member to an “Online University” of sorts paying $47/month. I canceled that membership because I found too many things to try and didn’t figure out how to just stick with on until it worked.
Back to our original 100 people, we have now lost 90, with 5 more slowly dying on the sidelines until they gave up. The 96th person made one or two sales on their original plan. They had put in hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours and realized it was a waste of their time and resources, often causing friction with loved ones so they give up. The 97th person actually gets lucky(luck often has to do with enough hard work) and they start some kind of regular income. Mostly these people start out with integrity. They don’t want to spam people’s emails, nor scam people with junk that doesn’t work just so they can make a few bucks so they never get past that very low income. Often these 97th percent people also drop out. They realize unless they get a really good break, they will never make more than about one dollar for every hour they invest, and often their expenses eat more than they ever earn. I have seen comments of marketers saying they spend $50 in marketing per month just to earn $100. That not counting the 100 hours they also put in.
So of the original 100, 96 drop out having lost hundreds or thousands of dollars and hours invested. One of the original 100 may have broken even after years of trying. The last three are what drives the rest of us to keep trying. They sometimes make us crazy because we are doing the same things they say to do, but they are making money and we can’t.
I hope if you are still reading this you understand that 96% of everyone trying this looses a lot of money with little or none ever being recovered. Those guru programs with glamorous cars and mansions are made by people in that last one percent. Not all of that last one percent is, but many are scammers. They are the ones that promise it will be easy, and you can make as much as them, and they live in a mansion and drive a car that has gull wing doors.
And they are outright lying. Often they rented the car, and had someone make a video of them driving up to someone else’s mansion. They know their true skill is in conning others into trusting them enough to spend hundreds on their promise of easy riches. And they know they will run what ever program they are doing right now, then in a month after they have scammed as many people as possible without getting to much back lash yet, they know they are going to take the money and run. Often they don’t even shut down the program, and its financial institutions that have it shut down when card holders try challenge the charge but the banks are unable to recover the money.
Don’t be deceived that everyone in that top one percent is like this. The bad ones, get around a lot and just make it seem like all the top marketers are all bad. They are not.
If you are still here, I must assume you still are interested. Maybe you are hoping you will be the 98th or 99th person of that original 100 people. You probably won’t, but there are some options you can choose that will increase your chances. I do not want you to think I am trying to talk you into trying this as an income source that will allow you to walk away from your day job. I will tell you some options in a bit, not yet.
So my story in Internet Marketing is this. My wife actually was a home maker and wanted to make her own money. I was no where close to being rich, but we had more income than bills so she didn’t have to contribute to our expenses. I noticed her looking at something one evening and asked about it. She informed me she had decided to earn money by working from home. She was trying to decide which to do between stuffing envelopes, or painting porcelain dolls.
My previous wife and I had tried several of these types of things when we were in our early 20s and discovered they were all bogus. The only people ever making money were the people selling the products to the desperate people trying to “work from home” to earn money. Now over 20 years later I had seen it all. I encouraged her to present to me anything she wanted to do, but was not allowed to spend money or time on anything until after I examined it. I told her I would show her the holes in each and every method or process she showed me.
Over the course of the next month, she showed me several. Each time she would research and try figure out what I might find wrong before she presented. Each time something got to me, it would only take me a couple minutes to show how it would fail. Maybe some of those things were not scams, but they all failed at the end worker level. Just like MLM, the only way to make money, was to recruit lots of people under them, and those people would either fail out or become recruiters themselves.
Then one day she showed me something I didn’t remember ever encountering before. And I started researching to find the holes in it. What a surprise when I couldn’t. She had discovered something called “Bum Marketing” and the more I searched the more, different techniques I also found that I couldn’t prove invalid. Just so you know, Bum Marketing has become obsolete since 2011 so don’t try it. It will waste your time and you will fail. In fact, this industry has minor changes constantly happening, and sometimes there are major changes that shut down entire groups of techniques. In 2006 some changes happened that completely shut down people that had been making over a million a year. In 2011, the changes that happened killed Bum Marketing and other techniques.
Anyway, after me trying for several days to prove this invalid, I became interested in Internet Marketing. I also remembered a few things about then from past years. In 1998, I had gotten some emails that I immediately deleted as scams. I realized I missed getting into IM while it was in its infancy, and most people that did it then, succeeded. I interacted with one guy that for a time was earning over 200 thousand dollars a month, just by getting people to sign up on eBay. Yup, eBay used to pay someone a few cents if they got someone to sign up. I am pretty sure I signed up through one of his ads. Other services did so as well, but again, the industry changed and that all ended in about 2007, so don’t try that now because that will also fail.
So at first we tried something called article marketing. A bum could go into a library, work on a free computer, using free online sources, get affiliate ids from various vendors and do this. That’s why some people call it Bum Marketing. If someone searched certain terms in the browsers, those articles would often show up and people could read advice and other stuff in the articles, then click on the link in the authors signature and if they wanted buy a product or training course or whatever. Well in 2011 again in 2012, all the search engine algorithms were changed and those articles stopped showing up. What we had spend hundreds of hours and more that a few bucks on, just to earn $10.40 on Christmas eve, went poof, and stopped working overnight.
Then I hit that lucky forum comment that made me $250.
Then after 6 years I tried again, this time buying a fifteen dollar book from one of those people that does IM, but also sells training and products to n00bies. I got a book on setting up a different kind of website, with links that would work at the world’s largest online market place.
And a couple weeks later got an email from them that my website was outside their quality standards, and therefore I was suspended as an associate because of a Terms Of Service violation. Yup, I had been tossed by the biggest online entity in the world.
And I was ecstatic. My wife on the other hand was nearly bawling because we had done a lot of work, just to get disqualified and suspended. She didn’t realize what it meant to get TOSsed. It meant someone, had found our website. That someone then trusted us enough to click on one of our links to a product we had reviewed. That someone then had purchased that product which should have given us a 4% commission. But as a first sale, that market place always check out the source the sale came from because they get so many people using unethical techniques so they never trust a first time sale. And when our website was weighed, when it was measured, it was found wanting. So they TOSsed us.
We did everything right, but had a low quality website. Well I can fix a website. I immediately contacted that trainer person I had got the cheap $15 e-book from so I could get some real training. Over the course of the next 3 weeks, we corrected that website, and built a much bigger, flasher, newer, more relevant one selling all kinds of household products. And we started making sales. For many months, starting late 2018, we started getting a commission check every single month. That put us into the 97percent bracket. We did better than 96% of people that spent, or should I say lost, thousands of dollars and hours.
Did I mention that there are constant small changes, and occasional big changes in this industry that render certain techniques totally obsolete? Those scammer people I mentioned earlier have no problem selling n00bies training courses on Bum Marketing, and how to sign people up for services like eBay. They have no integrity and will say anything as long as they can trick people into paying them.
COVID made all the big brick and mortar stores start competing with my websites. Coupled with a grand child I had become exceedingly close to suddenly dying in a car accident and we had to let all that expire as I walked away for a time. We had dropped to about $1 earned for every hour I was putting in anyway at that point.
Now four years later, I see the need in two massive areas for some solutions to some very real problems and am making websites to address such. It just so happens that both arenas also happen to be rich with products I can make available to my very hungry website visitors and if they choose to buy something from a link I supply, I get a commission without it costing them anything extra.
So of our original 100 people that try to make money online, about one percent is scammers and they do great, I just don’t know how they can sleep at night knowing they cheated many people out of hundreds of dollars each. About 96 percent give up having lost at least a few bucks and lots of hours, with most of them having lost hundreds or thousands of dollars and an equal amount of hours. About one percent do just well enough to keep thinking they are just one step away from succeeding but they never figure out what that step is and eventually give up.
I once read an article that the guru’s love losers. They think to themselves, there are always plenty more out there and they are going to get scammed by someone and give their money to someone, so why not me? New people don’t know what they don’t know, so they have no idea what they need to learn, and no idea if they are being taught something useless. They only know their emotions want them to grab the shinny program some attractive, charismatic person is presenting to them.
So we only have the remaining two people or two percent of the original 100. They are having the slightest low level success. One of those delves into selling products and courses in how to make money online, and they get quite a few of those losers’ money. Some of the best intentioned people do this and make well more than half their income from those courses and training. They often still keep doing something not related to selling to those MMO suckers, just so they can stay current with what works, but they rarely could live on that income if not for us desperate suckers also contributing hundreds apiece to them.
Now there is that other one percent. That is where I want to fall with this and another website I have. I am producing quality websites, that point out and help solve real problems. People are hungry for those solutions. I am providing easy access to things to people that need those things. And I am going to earn some commissions as a bonus for just supplying good stuff to good people. My nearly 15 years of tinkering with Internet Marketing has shown me many ways to do things wrong, many ways to be unethical, many ways to downright cheat, and I refuse to participate in any of those. I also know how to use some of the tools to legitimately help my sites visitors.
Its almost like I spent my whole life being trained just for this point in time and these undertakings in my life. And I know, there are going to be people I encounter that will want to try make money online. That being said, I will provide some links and advice now.
Advice:
Don’t spend the grocery money on learning how to become an online marketer. That is the kind of thing someone with gambling or drug problem does.
Don’t expect to find success the first week. In my case it took 6 months just for one single sale.
If you are determined to do this anyway, just remember you have to live your life, so budget maybe one to three hours a day to this adventure. Make yourself stick to that time budget and don’t let yourself buy more stuff just because you see it. If I had been better disciplined, maybe I would have succeeded much sooner than I did. It is hard to ignore all the potential things you will see. In fact it is very hard not to want to try something else when you are seven steps into the first thing and four steps into the second thing and two steps into the third thing.
For me, I might as well have been trying to build a car from spare parts. Only the parts were not made to fit together so no matter how I tired, the engine for a motercycle wouldn’t be able to fit into a farm tractor, and no part of that would work on the Ford body I also was trying to fit together.
So that “Online University” I mentioned is the real deal. Of 100 people trying to learn how to make money online outside of it the failure rate is 96% or higher. If you join them and take your time, working through the various exercises they give you your chance for success has increased greatly. Possibly as much as 30% chance to succeed instead of three or four percent chance. By succeed, I mean to make a livable income, or at least a nice side hustle.
You can click this link and go to the Wealthy Affiliate which is a forum made up of just Internet Marketers. Everyone there is either learning how to do it, or the leaders, coaches and such have already made it. You will find many people willing to help no matter what question you have, using any technique, process or method you may have decided to try. Oh, there is a free option at Wealthy Affiliate so you can get a chance to figure out if this is for you or not before you even spend a penny.
If I haven’t talked you out of it and you’re gonna do it anyway, try them first before you spend money on anything. Oh, you can also check out my e-book and website that this very webpage inspired me to create. They are named:
e-book…So You Want to Make a Million Dollars on the Internet.
website..soyouwanttomakeamilliondollarsontheinternet.com.