Guest Post: Donny Gamble writes a blog about creating wealth by combining Internet Marketing with Network Marketing.

I have been doing Internet marketing for sometime now and if I would have known about having these two things when I first started out, it probably wouldn't have cost me all of the mistakes that I have made over the years. I was not worried about creating a brand for myself at the time; I was just worried about making money. If you are just starting out with any sort of online business, I highly recommend that you get these two things in place before you do anything else.

The first item that you need is a personal blog. I cannot explain the true importance of branding yourself through a blog. Many bloggers don't even realize the influence that they have on their current audiences. This is literally costing them thousands of dollars every day. Once you begin blogging and sharing your story across the Internet, people will begin to relate to your story and start to develop a relationship with you without actually even meeting you in person.

I remember when I went to the Affiliate Summit in August and meet John Chow, it felt like I had known him for years because I had been reading his blog for about a year and it seemed like we had been friends forever. It was kind of weird when I first meet him because it was a lot different actually to meet him then reading one of his blog posts.

This is the type of influence that you can create on your audience just by being yourself, telling your story, and sharing your experiences and topics that you are knowledgeable about. There is no other form of media that can accomplish this besides the Internet, so I recommend that you take full advantage of it before the market becomes to saturated and you find yourself competing for prospects against your friends.

So now that you know that you need to start working on your personal blog, now you need to establish a personal newsletter. Most people hate the idea of not only writing content for their personal blog, but know they have to write content for their newsletter as well. My response to this is, setup an autoresponder, like Aweber, so that you only have to write the material once and the rest will become automated. Within this newsletter that you start, you must and I repeat must, build a relationship with your newsletter subscribers first before you ever try to sell them anything. If you start out trying to sell them different products without building a relationship first, a lot of them will quickly unsubscribe or never buy anything from you.

I have subscribed to a newsletter before and the very first email that I received was a product that the person was trying to sell me. I immediately unsubscribed to this newsletter and told them the reason why I did so. If they had introduced themselves to me in the first email, then I probably wouldn't have unsubscribed so quickly.

Without a doubt, building your email list is one of the most important things that you should be focusing most of your efforts on. So if you start developing a relationship with your audience while building your email list, you will begin to see the type of influence that you will create and also the viral effect that it will have on your personal brand. I hope everyone learned something new from reading this post and apply the knowledge that they learn from it because like I said before, knowledge is useless without application.

I would like to thank Ian Fernando for letting my write a guest post on his blog.