Using Ready, Fire, Aim in Internet Marketing

Using Ready, Fire, Aim in Internet Marketing

Ready, Fire, Aim is the title of a 2008 book by Michael Masterson but the idea has been around a lot longer than that and works well. I first encountered it in about 1996 when I was part of an internet marketing message group (before forums came along to the web) run by one of the internet marketing pioneers John Audette.

The book is a good read but you don’t need to wait until you’ve read its 400 pages before putting the ideas into practice.


That in itself is an indication of how you should use the principle of ready, fire, aim.

Get yourself ready enough

That means do the basics – get a website, put WordPress on it (not everyone’s favourite program and I know some people almost spit blood when they say the name. But it works,), put some content on it.


Then fire…

As soon as you’ve put up that first piece of content, Tweet about it, Google+ it, if you’ve put a picture on the page (and in a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do moment, you should) then pin it on Pinterest.

Then take the content you’ve just written, copy and paste it into PowerPoint or the free LibreOffice equivalent, record it as a video and upload it to YouTube.


Then create a PDF from the slides and put it on SlideShare or similar.

Then repeat…

Which is actually the aim part of the equation.

Do the same again. And again!


Do this while you’re waiting for something to happen instead of twiddling your thumbs and constantly pressing refresh or F5 in the hope that someone will have visited your page.

Even if you only manage to do this once a day for the next month, you’ll have between 20 and 30 pieces of content depending on whether you’re working on your internet business weekdays or the typical entrepreneur “was that just a weekend?” mode.


Or around 8 pieces of content if your day job is sufficiently exhausting that you only get chance to work on your internet business at weekends.

You can fine tune as you go along

Because things will never be perfect.

The internet changes way too fast anyway.


What worked yesterday may or may not still work tomorrow.

And without a crystal ball or the ability to hack into Google’s top secret algorithm (not something I’d recommend) you won’t know what the changes are until they happen.

All you can do is continually adjust what you do in the light of what happens.

But you can’t do that unless you’ve done something first.


Staring at your computer screen playing a mental game of “what if” won’t tell you what will happen because you haven’t done anything to test what could happen.

Start by making a short list of possible things to fire

You could probably think of quite a few of these off the top of your head.


If not, start with these (check out my products page for help with most of these):

● Content on your own website● Videos● Document sharing● Forum posts● Short reports leading to sign-ups to your list● Feeder posts on sites like Blogger● Guest posting

http://trevordumbleton.com/products/


● A Facebook page or Facebook groups● Your LinkedIn profile and articles there● A blog on your favourite forum if it allows one or find a website

that does● Put up “bandit” signs● Give out leaflets promoting your offers● Join a local Meetup group● Network locally to build up your contacts

And, yes, I know those last few points aren’t part of a pure online business.


But that doesn’t mean they can’t be part of your business. Equally it doesn’t mean they should be part of your business.

You won’t know until you try!

And that really is the message here

Ready, fire, aim is all about starting.


You can test and tweak as you go along.

But testing and tweaking is all part of the deal.

It’s what scientists do all the time.

They figure out a theory (that’s the “ready” part).

Then they devise an experiment and carry it out (the “fire” part).


Then they analyse the results and re-do the experiment if necessary (that’s the final “aim” part).

It’s what Edison famously did when he worked out how to create a light bulb. And regardless of the different quantities of experiments he ran according to which site you read, there’s a general consensus he didn’t get the “aim” part right the first time round.

Where should you start?


To a fair extent, that’s up to you.

But I’d suggest that if you’ve yet to make any real money from your internet marketing that you start with something on the easier end of the scale.

You can leave conquering the world and pushing Wikipedia out of its phenomenal number of first page rankings until later in your internet marketing career :)


Affiliate marketing gives you one of the best ways to carry out ready, fire, aim.

You do a bit of research to check there’s a market that spends money,

Then you get a website and start putting up some content that links off to products other people have already created.

At its most basic, that’s it.


Of course, there are lots of twists and turns along the way. If it was so easy and mechanical that even your granny or a 10 year old could do it (like all those sales letters seem to claim) then we’d all be as rich as Bill Gates.

But equally it’s not too difficult so long as you have at least a sketch map to follow.

I say sketch map because we’re all different.


If everyone who decided to be an affiliate marketer did exactly the same thing, we’d all be promoting the same products in the same way.

Fortunately that’s not the case.

I like promoting certain self help products such as binaural beats meditations.

Other people like promoting cures for things you may prefer not to admit you’ve got in the first place.


Others like sports related stuff – I know sport exists but that’s as close as I get to it.

And so on.

All of those work in approximately the same way but obviously the content will be different.

And because it’s different humans creating the content rather than a team of trained monkeys the approach will be different.


So even if you chose the exact same niches as I did, you’d treat them differently within a defined structure. You’d promote slightly different products in a slightly different way with slightly different words.

Which would mean you’d show up for slightly different search results and someone who found your site would probably never know mine existed. And vice versa.

If that sounds like an interesting plan, join me here.

http://affiliatemarketingi.com/


I’ll take you by the hand and show you how to create your own site in ready, fire, aim mode.

And I’ll help you get it from zero visitors to a profitable number of visitors.

That number could be anything – it depends on your niche.

But it’s likely to be a very small number.


One that probably wouldn’t pay for itself if you relied on the pittance you get from Google AdSense payments, always assuming you qualified to be able to show their ads and that they didn’t change their mind once you started to earn a reasonable amount of cash. Because that’s not unheard of either.

A small fish in a big pond.

That’s the aim.


Especially if the same pond has lots of food (customers) in it.

That’s a bit of a sales pitch. Sorry if that offends you (well, I might just be saying that bit, who knows).

But whether you join me here or follow your own path, make sure you do something.

Because sitting, staring at your computer screen, wondering why the only thing happening is the cursor blinking, isn’t the best use of your time!



If you'd like to explore affiliate marketing further, why not join me here.


Using Ready, Fire, Aim in Internet Marketing

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