Internet marketing has the potential to earn you a good profit. But for a lot of people it turns into an expense rather than a money earner.

A few dollars for hosting a month, a few more a year for some domain names, the “essential” autoresponder service that stubbornly just has you as the sole subscriber. Not to mention all the ebooks and other products you’ve bought. Each of which promised to be the one that would turn your fledgling internet marketing business from cash drain to regular profits…

1. Focus more

It’s really easy to sign up for emails and get swamped by them. You spend time reading them and get conflicting information from them.

This should tell you two things: there are lots of different ways to turn a profit on the internet, most of which work, and that you should regularly cull your email subscriptions.

Any email subscriptions that you delete more often than you read are a good candidate for finding the unsubscribe link. The same goes for emails where there’s never any information, just sales pitches (unless you’re building up a swipe file to use for your copywriting). And any where the angle being pitched isn’t one that you want to pursue. You can’t be an expert in everything so stop trying to be!

2. Set aside time

It’s very easy to persude yourself that you’re being productive when you’re only really checking emails, Facebook and Twitter.

Then an hour or more has disappeared and you’ve got nothing to show for it.

Set aside some time for your internet marketing activities. The ones that stand a chance of making you money rather the ones that never will. After all, there are only so many pictures of cute cats you can look at.

A block of 30 minutes, twice a day, will make a tremendous amount of difference.

At first, you may only manage one new page on your website or a handful of helpful forum posts or one new video. But those mount up over time and if you did that every weekday for the next year, you’d have over 200 pages on your website or whatever else it is you’re focusing on – assuming you didn’t speed up, which you will with practice.

3. Use those products you’ve already bought

You know what I mean here!

You’ve almost certainly bought quite a few products, some of which you’ve never even accessed and are still in their digital equivalent of the shrink wrap.

Or you got as far as the first one or two chapters or videos and then got distracted and never went back because something else had caught your attention.

Internet marketers everywhere do this.

Some are serial buyers of products, each of which promise the world in terms of profits. And maybe they’re right but you’ll never find out if you don’t actually put them into practice.

So go back over your purchases over the last few weeks or months and revisit each of them.

Then use the next step:

4. Pick one main method

That could be posts on your website like this one, videos on YouTube, forum posts, Facebook posts.

If you’re already in negative cash flow, discount all the methods that require you to spend money to make them work.

Ignore them at least until you’ve got some spare cash from your internet marketing. Maybe forever.

That means forget solo ads, advertising on Adwords or Facebook, CPA promotions or whatever else will almost certainly cost you more to learn than they earn, at least short term. You can always go back to one of these later, once you’re in profit.

Whatever you choose, keep at it.

Devote around 80% of your alotted time to this one main method.

So if you’ve got an hour a day that you can spend on internet marketing, spend at least 50 minutes on your main method.

Or 4 days out of 5, spend all your time on your main method and then the fifth day on your secondary methods.

5. Pick a few support methods

A few could be as little as one method. But no more than two or three.

This one way to apply the 80/20 principle.

Unless you’ve been really unlucky in your choice of main method – and you’ll know in a month or two, if only from gut instinct – you’ll start to gain traction with that.

The support methods could be anything else from your list of possible activities and it may be that, over time, your focus changes. But don’t let it change every few hours or days!

6. Be persistent

Overnight successes are rarely that.

Most take time to come to fruition and internet marketing is the same.

Don’t give up the first day, when no-one (not even Google) visits your first post on your new website.

And, while we’re on the subject, don’t count checking stats as one of your methods!

If you’d like more help, take a look at my affordable product Internet Marketing in an Hour a Day.

And then apply it!