The Loneliness and Depressing Part of Full-Time Internet Marketing They Don’t Tell You About…

So You Wanna Be An Internet Marketer?

You want to be a full-time marketer working from home in your pyjamas. You want to be able to wake up and take a short stroll a couple of metres to your office, switch on the computer with a hot cup of coffee or tea in hand and proceed with the days job saying to hell with bosses. To hell with schedules and deadlines. To hell with crazy co-employees.

Listen to This Post. In a Hurry, Download For Later.

Welcome freedom. Welcome holidays. Welcome to doing whatever the hell you want to do, whenever you want to do it.

2018 will be over 6 years that I have been working online from home full-time. If you’re aspiring to become a full-time marketer then you read below to learn from my experience and see what awaits you. This post speaks to those looking to attain the full-time online marketer title, but it also speaks to those already full-time marketers and going through some rough time.

The benefits of working online full-time cannot be overestimated. There really is freedom. Lots and lots of freedom. You can even sleep till 12 o’clock. You could even sleep in till 3 o’clock in the afternoon. No one is going to disturb you. No one is going to ask what the hell you’re doing (except you have a partner or parents living with you obviously). You are your own boss in every way, can you deal with this?

With great power comes great responsibility. This is something we all know thanks to Hollywood. The life of a full-time Internet marketer while very very rosy can also have a whole lot of downs. Downs you may not know about if you still are not one of us.

It all comes down to the fact that it’s up to you to make it. It’s up to you to put in the hard work required. It’s up to you to get shit done.

Do you have the discipline? Are you going to pull yourself away from videogames, TV and Movies to write the content, build the links, make the reviews, create the pay per click campaigns, contact potential clients, reinvest into the business, etc etc etc…

You Will Truly Be On Your Own And That’s A Good Thing… Which Can Also Turn Bad.

I personally have been dealing with being my own boss for many years and to summarise everything you need to know in one word. That word will be, discipline. Maybe not just one word. Here’s one more, self-control.

Now that you’re (or when you become) a kid in a candy store with no adults around, are you going to be able to activate your self-control? Are you going to eat what you need, stop then go exercise? Are you going to finish up everything in the shop and then go to sleep?

You want to be a full-time Internet marketer eh? What are you going to do when your income starts drying up? What are you going to do when Google decides to wipe you out? What are you going to do when things go bad?

Anybody can become an Internet marketer full-time. All you need to do is quit your job. Quitting your job is easy. You can write a few words on a piece of paper, pass it to your boss today and in a couple of weeks you will be free.

Do you have what it takes to do something when nobody tells you to do it? Do you have what it takes? I ask you this because I personally have been struggling with taking action and doing what it takes to succeed.

I am my own boss. Not hundred percent but enough. My clients can be considered a form of boss. The difference between the traditional boss and my kind of boss is that I can fire mine. But can I really fire my clients, after all they bring money in. Money that is used to pay the bills. Money that is needed to pay for my child’s play group. Money that is needed to survive. So maybe money is my real boss. A boss I have learnt to make do what I want, to an extent.

What was your answer to the question I asked many times here above and I’ll ask again. Do you have the self discipline and self control to get things done when nobody is breathing over your shoulders pushing you to get it done?

If Your Answer Is YES, My Oh My, You’re Going To Make It. You Going To Make It Big.

The amount of success you will get will only be limited by the amount of hours you have in the day. We’ve got just 24.  24 hours a day has been shared to everyone of us equally. Most of those hours are used for sleeping and doing other personal things. When you become your own boss you will decide many hours of those will be for non-work related stuff. You’ll find out soon enough that the majority of hours will not be used for working hard. Surely not as hard as you may be currently working at your day job now.

If your answer to my question is NOT a resounding “Yes I have the required self-control Roby”. Then, you may have success. You may not. You may be like me and end up having some form of success after a very long period of trial.

My answer to my own question is NOT a resounding yes. I don’t have a hundred percent self-discipline and self-control. In fact I’m a huge procrastinator. I’ll gladly go on the five hours house-cleaning exercise than sit down and send a client an invoice to collect my own money. A task that takes no more than 30 minutes, but it’s real work, not fun.

I also lack focus. Though I don’t hoard gigabytes and gigabytes of Internet marketing courses on external hard drives, I do get attracted to new money making systems and new online personalities. This is a personal battle with myself as a full-time Internet marketer.

The difference between me and a new full-time marketer or someone just starting out is that I have done the hard grind. I did the hard initial work required many years ago. I have failed many times and tried out many methods. I have studied many systems and followed many people.

I have listened to audio training on online marketing while doing the night shift at the factory I worked at. I have spent the little I could on expensive courses only to find out I knew most of the stuff contained in it or I needed to spend more money on domains/traffic etc.

I have invested in pay per click. I have built big sites that ended up getting wiped out by Google. To summarise all this will be to say that I have gained the needed experience. In this line of business, experience is what you need. Experience is something you mostly get as time passes.

This is the reason why people pay thousands of dollars to speak to someone who has experience. Speaking to someone who has passed through all this will put you ahead many years. It will prevent you making mistakes and wasting your precious time.

This is because when you first start out, many things will excite you and you will actually believe that the next venture you enter in will be the jackpot. This is not always the case. You will try many things and fail many times.

Where most of my income comes from today is not what I thought it will be many years ago. For many marketers, the main income stream actually changes year to year. One year it’s SEO for affiliate marketing. The next year you get wiped out by Google Panda, Penguin or some other animal and it becomes pay per click. Then you find out you can make money selling on Amazon. Currently my income or the majority of it comes from selling on Amazon. I didn’t know what Amazon was when I first started working online.

I started my real entrepreneur business by selling Herbalife products door-to-door. The only reason I stumbled upon online marketing was because I decided to look for a way to generate contacts and leads for my weight loss products using the Internet. I was tired of wasting money fueling my car to make the long daily drives going door to door. The Internet never sleeps, so building up a website and getting people to sign up to learn more about my products was the best way to go.

In the many years that I have been online, I have seen many methods come and go, but nothing really changes. What some people think is currently dead is actually the biggest money-maker for others. When you become a full-time Internet marketer, it’s going to be up to you to test what method fits your personality. Are you ready to do this?

Now Lets Go Back To The Mental Part Of Being A Full-Time Internet Marketer.

I’m sure you’ve seen some online guru pictures of travelling around the world. They’ve become digital nomads living in Thailand or Vietnam or somewhere cheap while making all this money. If you’re single and young, yes, you can aspire to this. But if you’re a family man or woman, this is out of the question. You’re going to have to create a base, a solid base for everyone in your family.

So what are you going to do when your wife or partner goes to work and your kid(s) is(are) in school? What are you going to do when you are alone at home and for the next five hours straight, nobody is going to tell you what you can do or should do?

Are you going to write that article or review that product for your blog? Are you going to create that website or set up that landing page for that adwords campaign you planned to do 3 months ago?

What Are You Going To Do When Things Are Not Going So Well. You Know, This Can Become Very Depressing.

Loneliness and depression in full-time Internet marketing is the main reason why long-term marketers struggle to really make it big. The simple case of waiting for Google to rank your website, which could take months/years, IS FRUSTRATING. Losing money on pay per click is frustrating. Things going not the way you want them to go or going too slowly for your liking is very frustrating.

How are you going to deal with this? Most people, me included, will deal with this by hopping onto the next method, by looking at the next shining object as the way to succeed.

Unfortunately this is the route to failure. It is the route to failure simply because losing focus on something you already have traction with and hopping onto something you’re going to have to start from afresh will never bring any real success. Everyone I know who succeeded or made it big in anything in life (especially in Internet marketing), focused on one thing/method/strategy till they saw it through to success. They took a single road and stuck with it for a long period of time. Only when they finally made it, did they invest and “diversify” their business.

The mental aspect of full-time Affiliate marketing or Internet marketing in general is something very few people talk about. In Internet marketing, we mostly see gurus who focus on the money making aspect. Very few products, if any at all, are launched that speak about the mental and psychological aspect of taking the Internet marketing career route. I can safely tell you that even when you hit it big online and start making good money, a hole suddenly manifests itself in another part of your life. Holes like, friendships, relationships, self-confidence etc.

Losing It All…

I personally deal the lingering scars of depression as well. It started in 2012 when I lost a website that was making me an average of 200-300$ per day on clickbank. I had a full time virtual assistant in the Philippines that was pumping out two product reviews per day. Everything was going great, I started travelling. I started spending money, I didn’t save much.

I was very aggressive in getting rankings for my reviews and was doing very well. At that time, before the major Google updates, I didn’t think about being conservative with backlinks, anchor text etc. All I thought about was how to find the next backlink possibility where I could insert my main keyword as the anchor text. 100% single anchor text profile, no problemo.

All this came crashing down with the first major Google update which was Panda. Panda took care of low quality content and my website was full of it. Every page was based on a review template. I lost my income and fell into depression. My girlfriend which I lived with and who is now my wife supported me through that time. It was incredibly depressing and I still live with the consequences and tell-tale signs today. I trace my inability to take action at times and my procrastination to this event.

The biggest problem with me losing everything was that I knew how to get back on track, but when will this happen? With Internet marketing, getting back on track from zero to where you where before could take months or years. So you are stuck in a situation where you know that even if you started today working on getting back to success, it will take you a long time to get back a portion of what you’ve lost.

If I wasn’t a full-time marketer, if I worked at a day job, I would have had a boss to push me through the work. If I failed to get the job done, I would have lost the job.

What are you going to do if and when you lose it all and have to start again? When the going is good, are you going to save for a rainy day? Or are your flight tickets, new car or apartment going to be responsible for you squandering your money?

The Loneliness…

Then comes the loneliness. The loneliness of being alone at home with so much time on your hands. The same loneliness that pushes you to YouTube to watch marketing videos so you can hear other people’s voices. Other people’s voices which are going to introduce you to the next “best money-making system” taking you once again away from your current focus. I have already mentioned before that this is the ultimate route to failure.

I feel this loneliness sometimes though I am lucky to have a family living with me. If you don’t have a solid social life in the real world, this loneliness could become big trouble and a success block.

To do the real work. The hard grind required for success, you need to be in a positive state of mind. This loneliness will try to keep you in a negative state of mind.

But…

The Freedom Of Running A Full Time Online Business Is Beautiful. This Freedom Is Truly Beautiful.

I can decide to be in another country tomorrow. I can decide something and have the time to do it. My daughter just started attending playgroup. This winter she frequently gets sick probably because of the new bacteria and viruses she’s exposed to. I’m always at home so it’s not a problem. The doctor says, she’ll need to be home for 5 days, NO PROBLEMO.

I sometimes wonder how working parents do this especially those with no one to help out. What do you do when the doctor says your kid has to stay home for a week and then after two days of going back to school, she comes back, sneezes and you understand that she’s going to have to stay home once again for the next few days.

What do you do if you have a job? What do you do if your boss is an a**hole? What do you do if you are responsible for many things at your office and can’t be easily replaced? The freedom that comes with full-time Internet marketing has no price. It’s not about the travelling, the parting. It’s not about all that stuff. You can enjoy doing that no problem.

It’s About The Freedom To Be There When You Need To Be There.

I’m happy able to be there when I need to be there.

So you want to be a full-time Internet marketer? I beg you, work hard at it and please don’t give it up. The freedom it brings even though it’s a double edged sword, is a very beautiful double edged sword.

Please leave your comments below if you have anything to share with me about how your online dream is going.

Feel free to contact me if you are going through a rough patch and need someone to speak with. My Skype ID is Robinlowemi7. I’ll benefit greatly from our chat as well.

As always, I wish you all the best in your quest to become a successful Internet marketer, or whatever else you want to become.

I’ll catch you in my next post.

Rob