Forcast Your 2012 Internet Marketing Future With Purpose

Dec 1, 2011 by Holly Ralston-Oyler

This is the first in a series of Posts about Forecasting Your 2012 Internet Marketing Future With Purpose. Over the next few days I will be posting about the trends in 2012 Internet Marketing.  Oh, and you can relax…I am not selling a companion product or eCourse on this series of posts.

In order to start December out in a Happy Holly Day mode I have a couple of FREE goodies for you.

Dr. Janette Cates is offering her 12 Days Of Free Gifts again this year and you definitely want to take advantage of them. They are all new, so if you did the giveaway last year you will not be cluttering up your hard drive with additional product.

Every IM Marketer needs a Blog and Lynette Chandler makes the planning and tracking of your blog quick and easy with her FREE 2012 Blogging Planner and Calendar.

Questions abound when anyone starts out in the Internet Marketing  journey. There are so many highways, expressways and yes, side roads to choose from. How do you even know where to start, much less end up.  I would love to tell you I have wisdom beyond belief and the Internet Marketing experience and peer respect to back it up, but I don’t. Even though I have had a e-commerce website online since 1997, in the IM world that is not considered experience. Actually, in most Internet Marketing Inner Circles, especially among the teachers and high 6-figure (how many times have you heard that term this week?) I’m nothing but an experienced newbie. I’ve been a part of  the “true” Internet Marketing world for less than two years. Truthfully, I am not sure that is where I belong, except maybe for this website to bring some sort of normality and balance to the otherwise seemly insane IM world.

Of course going into my 52nd. year of business and having a business sense does not count. Nor does having owned and operated a retail store for 30+ years, having my own registered  signature line of product and an online website since 1997, all of which have generated over five-million dollars in sales since 1997. I don’t mean to rain on your Internet Marketing parade, you just need to know it is a difficult, hard and cruel arena to be casting your time, effort and net into.

Ask just about any Internet Marketer what they wish they could have changed about their journey and they would most likely say knowing how to plan better.  When you are first starting out it is really hard to know exactly where you are going or even how to get there.   There are so many facets to to Internet Marketing you may struggle for a long time before making your first dollar.

From Retail To E-tail…

I started  out with a solid plan, only to get derailed quickly. In a nutshell, I was going to spend six months or a year exploring all the different facets and see which were the better fit for my technology skills, personality and expertise. The plan was to have an Internet Marketing business in place by October 2012, which was my planned exit date from Retail to   E-tail. I had a book of the same name outline and a website in place to document the experience. The only thing missing was a movie deal (sorry, just had to throw that in).

One of the people I had been training with on Internet Marketing basics had a three-day intensive Business-in-a–box class scheduled for Las Vegas in late July. During the event she and her team would set up a Internet Marketing model website, another would teach writing and telling your story and another marketing. It was the perfect storm event on how to enter into Internet Marketing, expensive but perfect. I registered, did a few pre-event phone sessions and was on my way, or so I thought.

Ah…What’s Not To Love About Fate?

As fate would have it,  on July 2nd. I had the first of  two strokes in six days, ending not only my retail world, but my online world as well. My husband closed the retail store in August 2011. I do not remember much from June and nothing  from July and August. He was told the not to expect recovery for many months to come if ever. Luckily, they were wrong. When I became lucid enough to realize I had been written out of society and life as I knew it, an inner strength kicked in to prove them wrong.

New doctor, new game plan. By the end of August I was out of bed and on the computer, learning again, forgetting, learning, forgetting…well you get the picture. Day by day, things improved and the rest is history. By October I was 90% better and on my way again. Only this time there was no window of time to learn and plan. I was flying by the seat of my pants, and truthfully…I think I was dropped them more than a few times. I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way and learned a lot. The only constant and clear vision was simple, I was going to do this my way, not the cookie-cutter model way of everyone else.