I’ve made a lot of mistakes and entrepreneurs, even complete entrepreneurs , often make mistakes obviously, it is part of the learning and growing process. There is a mistake most people make and it has certainly cost me a lot of money and we don’t do it anymore. It’s a mistake that is probably costing many people money today. I’m going to skip over how to get into the business because I could go on for an entire day on how to pick a niche and analyze a niche but obviously you’ve just got to pick a market and try to get into it. That is not hard to do.

The mistake people make is they hear some of the old teaching and online marketers are just regurgitating what they heard from all the mail order guys in the nineties who were talking about the mail order guys from the seventies and sixties. I’m no different, I don’t like to come up with stuff on my own. I think it was Einstein who said there was nothing new under the sun. There’s not.

So what they do here is you learn that the majority of your money comes from a back end promotion, send to your own customers. There is some truth there. Now there is front end and back end. Front end is a first purchase, first product you make with a company, maybe they run ads or you see some Google Adwords or you get a Joint Venture email from someone and you make that first purchase. It might be low cost or it might be higher cost but it’s a first purchase and that person had to market and they had to do work and they had to do all kinds of things to maybe get you in to buy that thing.

Now these days, with the internet and with a Joint Venture that is pretty easy. If someone gets an email from an affiliate for one of my products and they come over to my site and buy it for $1000, the secret’s out of the bag here, but the affiliate is going to get $500 out of that usually. It’s usually a 50 – 50 split so that did cost me $500 to get one of someone else’s clients to buy my product. So there is a cost there. Now if I email that person, they’re probably on my list, and obviously if they buy a $1,000 product from me, I get to keep the whole $1,000.

That’s the same thing prior to the internet. With any Joint Ventures there is some expense in getting that customer and that is the front end. But once they’re there, you just ask them to keep buying and that is the back end. I always teach that is where the real profit is. Even though a majority of the profits come from the back end, the long term growth and really keeping your online business alive comes from the front end customer acquisition. Not focusing on that and not building a dependable, predictable way to acquire customers is almost certain death for your growth.

Many big name marketers, and I could drop a dozen of them that people know, they probably would think are wealthy and are killing it, but they are barely surviving. The reason is they only do Joint Venture marketing. Eventually someone is not going to want to Joint Venture with you or you’re going to have time when there are big huge lags or you’re going to send the same Joint Ventures or the same offers to your list and they’re going to get tired of them. So you must acquire new customers.

The way to do this is, everybody is always trying to, I want to get Google Adwords going or I want to get some Space Ads going, I want to automate my front end so I can automatically have leads coming in and I can spend all this time creating new back end offers because that’s where the real profits are, don’t I? Jim just said I get to keep all those profits.

The purpose of the front end marketing is to acquire new customers, it’s not to maximize profits and it’s also not to make a sale. Its purpose is to bring in new customers, that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for profit, for break even or for a loss. The purpose is to just get a new customer. The purpose of the back end marketing is to maximize the lifetime value of the customer to your business.