When most internet marketers start out, they are reluctant to invest in… just about anything.

They’ll spend hours researching the right hosting/authoresponder/payment processor in order to save, say, 5 bucks, and they’ll dig through various forums to locate “free secrets”.

However silly that mentality may appear to be, I can understand it (since I had been there too). But I’m not just talking about “savings”.

Let me ask you, what numbers do you think about in your online business?

Do you think about the cost of running your business and how much you can save? Do you think about the hourly rate you’re paying your freelancers, or how much you’re spending on Adwords every day?

Or do you think about the Return On Investment of every dollar you spend, taking the life-time value of your customers into account?

The truth is, if you want to succeed extraordinarily online, you’ll have to think in terms of ROI and not “expenditure A vs. expenditure B”.

Do you know that big players routinely spend thousands of dollars to test just a banner ad on one particular website? And the impressions of ads they deal with are in the order of millions? The big dogs play in a league unknown to most internet marketers, and when you play with big numbers like this, you can make (or lose) huge amounts of money.

The trick is knowing your ROI.

Let me ask you this, how difficult is it for you to turn $100 on adwords into $120? There are many possibilities: for instance, driving PPC clicks to an affiliate product while harvesting the email so you can sell to them again. If you do it right, the life-time value of your list will exceed $120. The next question is, how to turn $1000 into $1200 and how to turn 1,000,000 into 1,200,000? Believe it or not. That latter is not so much harder, if you know your ROI and are comfortable thinking in big numbers.

 “But I don’t have the money!” some would say. That’s not the point. I know you don’t have a million dollar sitting in your bank account, but if you know your numbers, the only left part is to take calculated risks and increase the numbers you play with.