How I Got Started in Internet Marketing
Many years back I came across what seemed like a very strange website to me at that time. It consisted of a single page, with seemingly endless rows of words describing and selling the merits of a product that claimed to teach me how to make money off the internet.
I had immediately dismissed it as a scam.
After all, online scams were all too common during that time. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the single web page I had dismissed as a scam was probably one of the earliest internet marketing tools in history and what internet marketers call a ’squeeze page’ today. It was also probably a tool that was instrumental to making thousands of dollars, and quite possibly even tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, for the internet marketer who was using it.
A typical "squeeze page"
Years later when I crossed paths with an internet marketing website again, I was searching for ways to drive traffic to Mediafreaks – the website for my tech new media and animation company . During that time I knew absolutely nothing about the world of internet marketing nor traffic driving. I had not even heard of the term ‘internet marketing’!
My Googling brought me to several websites – mostly to blogs discussing internet marketing and traffic driving and web sites selling e-books promising to teach methods to deliver great riches and generous amounts of traffic.
At this point in my life, I was at a stage where my business was doing well and I had disposable income.I was willing to spend on a few info products to see what the hype was about, even though each product cost between $47USD to $147USD. I was curious and eager to procure this knowledge and I whipped out my credit card to make my first purchase – a product called Google Payload by Alex Goad.
Basically Google Payload teaches you how to drive traffic from low cost pay-per-click sites where you pay very little for the traffic to sites that you create embedded with higher paying ads. The concept is sound and simple – buy low, sell high. It made a lot of sense to me at that point and I followed the advice in the book.
I would like to tell you that I made oodles of money through that, but the fact is, I did not. In fact, I even sustained a couple of hundred dollars loss. The reason was – the traffic I was purchasing was not recognized in the higher paying ad network’s eyes, and therefore I did not get paid for the traffic I directed!
I later realized that relevant traffic from natural sources is very important to ad networks.
For example, if you are selling sports shoes on your website and you are catering to US citizens only, then you want visitors that are relevant, i.e. sportsmen from US, because these visitors might convert to customers. Conversely, if your visitors come from China and they are looking for Chinese food recipes, such traffic is useless to you because they will never buy your shoes. Traffic that is relevant to your site and can potentially purchase from you are valuable to you, and this traffic is best described as relevant traffic.
Natural sources are traffic sources that direct traffic to a website in a non-contrived manner. Search engines are probably the best example, because they direct people who are searching for a particular answer to relevant websites that can hopefully address it. You can imagine how frustrated one may be if he searches for a dentist in his area but ends up being directed to a gambling site through a search engine which doesn’t quite function the same way as a search engine. That is an example of an unnatural source because this ’search engine’ has been designed to direct traffic to websites the web master of the ’search engine’ owns as well.
It is not difficult to understand why the ad networks do not respond well to non-relevant traffic from unnatural sources because accepting such low quality traffic would result in low quality conversion for their advertisers and impact their businesses at the end of the day.
Saying all that, Google Payload did teach me a lot, although it certainly did not teach me how to make money off the internet. It taught me how PPC networks work. It taught me how to set up ad accounts and install ads on my websites. It taught me what traffic arbitrage meant. It taught me that you could not make money off the internet using ‘quick and dirty’ methods.
If fact, I felt that this experience helped to build up a positive attitude in my approach towards internet marketing. I was convinced that it was very possible to make money online. After all, didn’t the author of Google Payload – Alex Goad – make oodles of money from this product? During that time, Google Payload was one of the best selling products on Clickbank and going for $77USD, with the back end video product going for $97. The product sold a few thousand copies, so just do your maths!
I will not comment further on Alex and whether Google Payload can teach you how to make money, because there were people who swore that they made money following Alex’s advice. But it’s just that for me, I realized that my personality is more suited to taking a methodical and step-by-step approach to building online businesses. Quick ways to make money like the traffic arbitrage method taught in Google Payload are just not for me.
After Google Payload, I went on to invest in a few more internet marketing info products – products from internet marketers like Michael Cheney, Joel Comm, Dylan Loh, Brad Callen, Yanik Silver and more. And let me just say that these products taught me a whole lot.
I not only learnt how to make money online, I also learnt how to drive traffic to any website I desired.
A few thousand pages and a few months later the results spoke for itself.
It was initially a trickle, I was making only a less than a hundred per month. Then as I perservered and continued putting in more time and effort to build the foundations of my internet businesses, I was making back the money I spent on internet maketing products every single month, and the figures kept increasing.
Today, after years of setting up several streams of online revenue for myself, I’ve finally decided to set up this blog to share my knowledge on internet marketing.
Make no mistake that I do want to create another revenue stream for myself, but more importantly, I have a desire to contribute genuine, tried-and-tested information on making money online and the corresponding knowledge and tools associated with it to folks who are searching for a way out of their low-paying or unfulfilling jobs.
I want you to be able to always trust what I tell you, so there will never be incredulous unproven hype posted here. I will recommend products I have personally read and reviewed, and I will sell useful internet marketing info products I personally author. I will also be contributing only valuable tried-and-tested knowledge on internet marketing to this website. It would be a great achievement for me if I can bring this knowledge to as many folks as possible and show them how to make money online.
Up until now, I am best known for being the founder of Mediafreaks and being a creative entrepreneur.
It is my goal – with the publishing of this first blog post on this website – that I would also soon become known too for being an expert internet marketer.
ALDRIC CHANG | Follow me on Twitter | Be my friend on Facebook
CREATIVE ENTREPRENEUR, INTERNET MARKETING EXPERT, CARTOON PRODUCER, SONGWRITER, MUSIC PRODUCER, VIRTUAL WORLD CREATOR
"Aldric Chang is the Founding Managing Director of the 
I must say this is a great article i enjoyed reading it keep the good work
I want to make money like you but don’t really know how, can you help.
Hi Joseph, follow my “Blogging for Money” posts. I will share what I’ve been doing there
Nice article, really enjoyed reading. Thanks for sharing
nice share and website..thanks for the tips.
Hey there. Great information. I believe what you can learn from your experiences is far more superior than hearing something through word of mouth. Can you help me out with my blog too? I need few suggestions about my keyword strategy.