When I first started with internet marketing, I was blown away at how little it cost to set up a web business

• You register a domain name for a few dollars,
• You set up a simple website up within a day,
• The software you use to run your operations is in many cases free, or it is bundled with your hosting fees.
• You can be advertising - with Google Adwords - within a couple of hours

In the late 1990s, I worked as a senior manager in a national bank. I was involved with major software systems that cost millions. With that amount of money at stake, we had to work with carefully formulated budgets and tracked project plans to make sure that we came close to meeting our targets.

I left the ’safety’ of corporate life (prison?), and started my own business in 1999. I was immediately faced with the relatively high costs and significant risks of setting up an offline business:

• Startup costs seemed to be never-ending - business registration, ‘business presence’ offices, legal fees, and staff hiring costs.
• And then of course there was the stress of meeting the monthly payroll,
• Software was relatively expensive - certainly significantly higher than the web-based software that I use today.
• And finally - the statutory levies were yet another item that sucked funds out of the coffers.

The high risks forced me to have a clear focus. I had a documented marketing strategy. And our accounting software made it easy to monitor our business results during the month.

The switch to a web business introduced some challenges. But it also offers lots more freedom and opportunity. The one issue that I have with the switch to running a web business is that it’s pretty difficult to apply certain business disciplines that are common.

There’s so much ‘noise’ in Internet Marketing. The ongoing flood of marketing offers makes it very easy to become distracted. They can take you out of Strategic mode, and sucker you into an Opportunity Seeker mode. What’s even more difficult is to monitor your business results.
You need to collect

• your Adsense earnings from Google,
• your 2CO and Clickbank sales, and
• affiliate sales from several sites.

Consolidating all of these into one place is a mission. And then to map that income against your various expenses is a pain:

• subscriptions taken off via PayPal,
• others deductions coming off your credit card,
• more for Google Adwords, and
• some off your checking account

These dispersed earnings and expenses make it difficult to work out how much money you’re really making. Maybe it’s deliberate that business reporting is pretty weak in the internet marketing field. If we could get easily and frequently access our net business results we would be shocked by the poor Return on Investment we’re getting from most of our web purchases. That shock would certainly make us less susceptible to those compelling sales letters …