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Unsuccessful online marketers are notorious opportunity seekers – giving an opportunity only a couple of weeks to start showing results, before changing directions to chase the next flavor of the week. It almost seems that the majority of online marketers are chasing get-rich-quick schemes, rather than trying to develop a legitimate business.

Sometimes it seems like the majority of online marketers change the program that they are promoting, almost as often as they are putting gasoline into their car. “Okay honey… I filled up the car today… it is time for us to find another business opportunity to promote…”

There is also another group of online marketers, who seem to make a real commitment to a specific business opportunity, but success continues to elude this group is well. The second group fails to make a commitment to a particular marketing plan that is designed to help them to achieve success. Like the first group, they change directions, as often as they put gasoline into the car.

Those who are successful online, are the kind of people who make a solid commitment to a particular business model and make a long-term commitment to a realistic marketing plan.

I am not telling you these things because I think I’m better than you… In fact, I am telling you these things because I am guilty of having done the exact same things myself.

Towards the end of 2001, I finally started making serious money online, after having spun my wheels online for more than four years, chasing one opportunity after another, until I made a commitment to a particular business model.

I managed to increase my income year-over-year, and in March of 2005, I quit my job and started working full-time online. I have continued to earn a nice living online, ever since.

My 2009 revenues were down, but primarily because I was working less than normal… In November 2008, I learned that my father was ill… I had my suspicions right away, but we did not have verification of cancer until February 2009. (Contrary to popular belief, he was a non-smoker.)

As 2008 wound down, I made a commitment to my father that if he needed any assistance whatsoever, that I would make myself available to help him. That meant, if he needed transportation to and from doctors’ appointments, I would drive the one-hour to his house, and then take him wherever he needed to go. If he needed me to come to his house to help him with anything whatsoever, I would come to his house to help him.

I made the commitment to him, and I honored that commitment to him.

My online business suffered considerably, as a result of my making that decision. But, I have no regrets… It was the right thing to do, and I am grateful that I did it.

My dad passed away in November of 2009.

I continued to miss work, through November and December of 2009, while doing those things that must be done in relation to matters of his funeral and his estate.

Just a couple weeks ago, I sat down and calculated exactly how much time I actually spent outside the office in 2009.

Not all of my absenteeism, during 2009, could be attributed directly to the time I spent assisting my father during his illness. In March of 2009, I had missed two weeks when we moved across town. My websites had also suffered a 16-day shut down in May, because I was unable to update the DNS records for my domains, when my web hosting company migrated my account to a new server. When I went to do the DNS updates, I discovered that ICAAN was in the process of shutting down my domain registrar and moving my domain registration information to a new domain registrar. Unfortunately, during a move of that type, updates cannot be made to the DNS records. So, my websites were offline until ICAAN finished its work.

All told, I missed two weeks while moving, two weeks while waiting for ICAAN to get everything moved so that I could update my DNS records, and another 12 to 14 weeks while assisting my father and taking care of the things that I needed to take care of after he passed away.

During the course of the last eight years, there has only been one year in which I was not fully committed to my business. That year was 2009. I did not walk away from my business, but I had made the decision that taking care of my family was more important than my business.

While my business, my reputation, and my income suffered tremendously in 2009, due to my frequent absences and slow responses, the commitment that I had shown my customers in previous years helped my business survive 2009 intact.

Now that I have returned to my business full-time, my revenue is starting to bounce back.

The past nine years has been a wild and exciting ride. The thrill of growing a business from nothing to something worthwhile has been an awesome experience for me.

But to the point of this article, this story would have been very different if I had not committed to a specific business model in 2001, and it would have been very different if I had not committed to a specific marketing plan for the promotion of that business.

If I had not made the commitment to develop a viable business model and commit to a specific marketing plan, I would have probably still been working 60 hours per week on a job when my dad got sick. If I had still been working in the brick-and-mortar world of retail sales, I would not have had the opportunity to help my dad when he most needed my help.

Then again, I would have had a different job than I had previously, because my last employer went out of business in January 2009.

With all that has happened in the last 16 months, I count among my greatest blessings the care and concern that was shown to me by my clients. Sure, some of the new people had absolutely no patience for my absences… But, I received a large number of personal phone calls, snail-mail letters, e-mails, blog comments, and tweets from my clients and people that I know from online, who wanted to offer their support to me, during my emotional roller coaster ride.

My greatest blessings have been realized in 2009 and 2010. I am blessed by the wonderful people, whom I have met online through my online business. And I am blessed to have a business that was strong enough to survive my frequent absences, during the last 16 months.

Those blessings were available to me, because I made a commitment in 2001 to stop chasing new opportunities every couple of weeks. I made the commitment to a business model that I believed could be successful, and I made the commitment to promote that business in a consistent and reliable manner.

When I brought commitment to my online marketing endeavors, I finally started to make money online. As I maintained that commitment over several years, I was able to grow my business to the point where I would be able to consistently earn enough money from my business, so that I would never have to have an outside job again.

To be honest, I believe that the reason my business continued to attract new customers through 2009 was because I had used article marketing to promote my businesses. The articles I write and distribute, for the promotion of my online businesses, seem to have real staying power.

The articles that I wrote and distributed, over the last nine years, continue to influence readers to visit my websites and to learn more about my businesses and what I can do for the reader.

Between September 2008 and January of 2010, I only wrote and distributed four articles for the promotion of my websites. During those 16 months, I barely wrote and distributed one article every four months, yet the traffic to my website was only diminished during May of 2009, when my sites were off-line.

I honestly believe that the reason my websites continued to attract new visitors and new customers, during this period of time, is because I had more than 150 articles online, posted on thousands of websites, doing the hard work of convincing people that they needed to visit my websites to see how I could help them to accomplish their goals.

When your articles are as useful five years from now as they are today, your articles will have the same potential of continuing to send visitors to your website for many more years to come.

If you are seeking true success online, and you are still chasing the flavor of the week in business opportunities, I strongly recommend that you pick out something that seems to have real potential for you and to make a commitment to see it through to success.

If you would like to learn more about how to make article marketing work for you in the same positive manner that it has worked for me, pick up one or both of my article marketing ebooks shown below in my author information.

Editor’s Note: Article previously published here.

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I encourage you to download my free ebook, “Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics” ebook at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html If you find my free ebook useful, and most people do, I would encourage you to purchase the more advanced ebook, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”. It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information about how to make your article marketing truly profitable: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html My name is Bill Platt, and I have been earning a nice living from article marketing for more than a decade. In my ebooks, I try to share with you the lessons that I have learned about how to get the most from your article marketing.

Read more articles written by Bill Platt

If you’ve been marketing products online for any length of time, you’ve likely heard people talk about the power and promise of article marketing for the promotion of your online business.

Unfortunately, many online marketers have tried to utilize article marketing to benefit their online business and failed. After numerous failures, many online marketers decide that success with article marketing is an illusion. They decide that article marketing is a complete and utter waste of their time and resources.

As one of those people, who has found great success with article marketing, I have taken it upon myself to try to help people understand what enables some people to be truly successful with article marketing, while others will never see any success at all with it.

Some people believe that the only way to learn to be successful, in any task, is to study those who have been successful. I happen to be one of those people, who believe that studying failure can be just as useful, as studying success.

I see the concept of studying successful techniques and techniques that fail, as the yen and the yang of success.

It is one thing to study the people, who have been most successful with article marketing. If you are attentive, you can learn a lot from them. It is quite another thing to study the people, who have failed with article marketing. If you are attentive, you can learn a lot from them as well.

In my recent e-book titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”, I talk about what it takes to be successful with article marketing. But in this article, I am talking about the reasons why many people fail with article marketing.

Top 10 Reasons Article Marketers Fail

The top 10 reasons why online marketers fail to find success with article marketing:

1. Failing to create an article that carries an interesting title – a title that will attract the attention and interest of publishers first and readers second.

2. Failing to acknowledge that publishers have a vested interest in keeping their readers happy – submitting crap articles that publishers know their readers will not want to read.

3. Failing to understand that people want articles that help them solve problems and answer questions – as opposed to glorified sales copy.

4. Failing to keep the information interesting for the reader – when people abandon your articles, they will never see the link to your website.

5. Failing to present a strong call-to-action in the authors’ resource box – if the resource box does not attract a click, the article is simply page filler.

6. Failing to focus on the needs of readers in the authors’ resource box – readers, who enjoyed reading your article, want to know why they should visit your website. Don’t bore them to tears with a lengthy personal story and a lengthy brag fest about what makes you more special than everyone else.

7. Failing to expend a few more minutes during the editing process, to present your article with nice formatting – articles that break to a new line in mid-sentence are annoying and hard-to-follow. Long paragraphs that run for miles are hard-to-read and lead to eyestrain and article abandonment.

8. Failing to spell check your articles can annoy a lot of people – you may not catch all of the mistakes, especially when your Spellchecker software does not identify the misspelling to you. Often, you can get by with a few misspellings and instances of poor grammar in an article, so long as the misspelling or poor grammar does not distract the publisher, when he or she is reading the article.

9. Failing to make sure that you put the article into the correct category – when publishers ask you to select a category for your article. Do not cut corners here. If you expect the publisher to fix your category for you, they won’t… If a publisher sees your article in the wrong category, they will more often hit delete, rather than fix your article placement.

10. Failing to follow simple instructions – the easiest thing to fix is the one thing that 85% of article marketers ignore, and that is making sure your articles’ word counts match the publishers’ requirements for word counts. Article marketers, who are willing to waste a publishers’ time, by submitting articles that do not meet minimum or maximum word counts will find that the publisher would prefer to reject all of the marketers’ articles, rather than to take the time to check if the marketer finally started following instructions.

Final Thoughts

In the end, as an article marketer, you must always strive to satisfy two audiences – the publisher, who might want to publish your articles, and the reader, who might want to read your articles.

If your article fails to satisfy one or both of the people in your target audience, then you should not be surprised that your article marketing failed to achieve its intended goals.

The most common reason for failure in article marketing is actually the tendency of marketers to view article marketing, in the same way that they view ordinary advertising.

With ordinary advertising, people write sales copy to generate an immediate action.

With article marketing, the process is a little bit different. With article marketing, those who are most successful answer the needs of the reader first, before presenting the sales copy that is designed to get people to take an action. This is why successful article marketers solve problems and answer questions in the body of the article, reserving the sales copy for the authors’ resource box.

By putting the focus on solving problems and answering questions for readers, we are able to get the attention of the publishers, whom we absolutely want and need to publish our articles. By restricting our sales copy to our authors’ resource box, publishers are more inclined to give us what we want (access to their audiences for our sales message), because we have successfully given publishers what they wanted – information that their readers will find useful and interesting.

Author’s Note: Article published here.

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My name is Bill Platt. If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, then you will love my newest ebook titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts”. It is 70-pages of hard-hitting information about how to make your article marketing truly profitable: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html Or, you can get warmed up with my free “Article Marketing: Beyond The Basics” ebook at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html

Read more articles written by Bill Platt