Beginners should not get discouraged by these findings. If you are really serious about online business, it should get you motivated seeing that it is completely normal to not make $ 10k in the first month.

Same as Shawn McAfee, I’d love to see in which earning range the ‘starters’ ( < 1 yr) are!

Keep up the great work!

What we have found is that and incredibly large percentage of the people that buy our membership site NEVER open it or finish it. I’ve heard it said, among my peers, that 97% never get past the first chapter/module/video/etc of a product they buy… I think this says a lot!

I also see people focusing on the wrong things, like the shiny and new stuff rather then the fundamentals. There are so many places that the machine of online business can break down, the wrong niche, no real sales funnel, not actually asking for the sale, constantly changing models based on the shiny and new, not understanding it’s about relationships, etc. If you are 2 years into this and not making money then you have a broken machine. I’d buy something that teaches the FUNDAMENTALS and walk through your machine step by step and find the issue. It could be the slightest of changes, which is something we find when we tweak things. We added a pop-up optin box on our front page and DOUBLED our opt-ins. Why had we not done that years ago?!

What made it work for me is CONSTANT focus on the next step (and only the next step), buying my education, and persistence.

Not that many people are doing email marketing tho which is surprising to me. Building email lists are my nr. 1 priority for 2012. My goal is to become an expert on building email lists on social media sites. Social media is still relatively new and has huge potential. So many businesses aren’t using FB or are using it wrong.

Keep up the good work Mark!

Thanks — I am actually already working on that very graph (income versus years in IM). Will post here when it is available.

A good question to add would be “Does your internet marketing income come from the make money online niche or are you focused on non-internet-marketing niches?” Something like that…

Thanks for the compliment — pass the word. 10,000 responses would be awesome.

Thanks!

Traffic is more important than anything — that is for sure. Finding offers is easy. Finding buyers is harder. Thanks for the comments — could not agree more.

A breakdown like that will give a lot more information on whether this is profitable. One other question that would be interesting to ask is what topic they cover, and then to find out the percentage of those in the “make money online” niche that are profitable.

Really a cool study, I hope it gets to 10,000 responses or that you will build upon the 4 questions to 6 or 8 questions.

Thanks Rob. Appreciate the comments. You know what Mark Twain said — “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics”. And thanks for taking the survey.

Thanks for sharing!

Cheers, Rob

P.S. Off to do the survey now….