So I was over browsing one of my favorite marketing friends Jennifer (PotPieGirl)’s site tonight, looking for some good tips to help me get back into the online marketing game and found this page:

5 Steps to make $200 a day online

Naturally, the whole post is a great read, but the thing that stood out to me was her step #2 – where she believes that 95% of online marketers fail at trying to make money. What is it?

Get a plan!

If you don’t have a plan, you have no direction. Like the saying goes – “Failure to plan is planning to fail”. Without a plan, there’s no reason to believe you’ll see any rewards of hard work, no matter how hard you work or how passionate you are.

Even if you do manage to achieve some level of results, they will be nothing compared to what you might have had if you just made a plan.

I’ve seen this come true in my own life – maybe you have as well?

Let’s say you’re going to throw a big birthday party for a friend – and you really want it to turn out well. Are you going to just wait until the last minute to throw ideas together  and hope everything all works out? Probably not!

If you’re like me, you’ll want to take some time, sit down, plan out when it’s going to be, where it’ll happen, who will be coming – and of course, what kind of food everyone will be enjoying.

None of these steps is really that difficult – but a plan requires at least 2 key steps to work:

1. It has to be well-defined.What exactly are you going to do? When will it happen? Who’s in charge of it? How will results be evaluated? Well-defined plans are easier to follow because they require less thinking, thus less time spent grinding your gears trying to figure out how to work the plan. Pay a little bit more effort up front to define your plan, and you’ll thank yourself on down the road as your momentum powers you to success!
2. You have to be committed. You may have the best plan ever but if you don’t commit to working the plan, you’ve only wasted your efforts. Instead, make sure that the plan is realistic. Making a plan to lose 50 pounds in a month is well-defined, but it sure ain’t realistic! If you keep your plans to stuff you know you can commit to, you’ll never have to worry about losing interest in the plan and walking away.

So where’s my plan?

My plan is simple. I want to see if I can use Jennifer’s 5 Steps to make $200 a day online post to make money online.

What will I be selling? Don’t know yet! I’ll probably go with Clickbank, Amazon, or Commission Junction. What I do know is that I won’t be selling anything that seems shady or that I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling (or selling to) my friends in real life. So probably no “Make Money Online” products, Lotto/betting systems, or full movie download sites/products.

How will I be selling it? Well, Jennifer’s guide recommends Squidoo, and maybe some articles or niche sites, so I’ll start with Squidoo and see how it goes from there.

How much do I want to make? Just 20$ this month. That’s it! Not even a hundred bucks, just a simple $20 bill. Since today’s June 1st, that gives me a full month to see if I can make just $20 using a plan that’s designed to make 10x that in a day! If I end up beating my goal, so much the better!

Most Importantly, what do I want to learn? I want to learn the process. How to go from not even having a squidoo account to finding a hungry market, finding the keyword they’re using for searching for products to buy, setting up a Squidoo lense for it, optimizing the lense – and then getting enough traffic to start making sales.

So! That’s it for now. I’m going to get started bright and early tomorrow morning and start in on the plan. I’ll keep you all updated on how it goes and what I’m learning along the way so you can hurl encouragement or jeers my way!