Dear Lovely Simplerista,

When you're starting out in the internet marketing business, the hardest part is to get your basic concept right. Figuring out which audience you're serving, what their pain and problem is, how you can reach them, and how you can use everything that you are to connect with them in an authentic way.

If you don't have that nailed, then no amount of fancy online marketing tricks are going to help you.

If you do, it's mostly about executing and continuously tweaking.

But finding that sweet spot is as much art as it is science. That's why I always advise people who are new to online marketing to not just dig deep within themselves, but also to throw some things up against the wall to see what sticks, if you will. Get out there and give a talk to some folks who you think might be in your audience. Go out and put on a webinar and get feedback from that. Offer to work directly, one-on-one with people, to learn more about them.

Then when you find the audience, the problem, the pain, the words, the solution, the tone that works, you do more of that, you add fuel to the fire, and you let it evolve from there.

Most people tend to either think that "more" marketing will solve their problems, or they're too obsessed with having everything thought through in advance, so they never get out there and have a real interaction with real human beings in the marketplace.

It's been said the definition of a start-up is an organization designed to search for a sustainable, scalable business model. Once that business model has been found, it's no longer a start-up, it's a company that needs to scale, and requires a different skillset, hence typically there's a management change.

The same goes for our type of business. If you haven't found your sweet spot in the market, your focus would best be on discovering that sweet spot through introspection, courageous experimentation, and mirroring by the market.

Once you have it nailed, just add fuel.

With love,
-Calvin

PS. We keep adding new cool stuff to zenbilling and making it better for you. The latest one to be launched later today is automatic payout of the commission owed to your affiliates via PayPal. Makes it much easier to use affiliates for your marketing.