An Introduction into Internet Marketing To download your copy of my FREE eBook with Internet Marketing tips, strategies and resources CLICK HERE… Note: During the course of this article I am referencing to diverse resources. Please consult the “RESOURCES” page for those and more valuable resources. Click on the corresponding menu item at the top of this page to access the resources page. More and more people are realizing that there can be made a lot of money through with online businesses, such as developing and selling your own products, selling on eBay or promoting other peoples and companies products as an affiliate marketer, or even developing and selling their own products. The reason for the interest in Internet marketing or creating an online business is that there are almost no barriers to entry. You don’t need any substantial capital to get started, as you would in the offline world, and your success depends mainly on your own capabilities. For example, you can immediately start selling household items you don’t need any more on eBay. If you don’t have your own products you could purchase some existing products that include Resell Rights for less than $20 each and promote those, or you may prefer to sign up as an affiliate for a company or as member of a CPA (Cost Per Action/Sales) network and start promoting from a selection of thousands of products on the numerous sources of free ads, such as free classified ads sites, safe lists and traffic exchanges, and earn a commission for each sale, or invest some more and put paid ads in Google or other websites, just to name a few examples. This is the reason why Internet marketing today is one of the most searched topics on the internet, with almost endless websites dedicated to the subject. I just searched for “Internet marketing” in Google and it returned about 135,000,000 pages that contain this term. This gives you an idea of the magnitude we are talking about. And let’s not forget the millions of eBooks, audio and video courses on Internet marketing available today; some of which are even free. But be aware that lots of the stuff offered out there is of pretty poor quality and often overpriced. But you can get eBooks and even audios, for less than a Dollar or purchase more sophisticated and advanced training, usually including also software to automate part of your online business, for prices that go up to the thousands of Dollars, plus a monthly membership fee of 30 – 300 bucks.
I also want to be very clear here. YOU NEED SOME SORT OF TRAINING AND GUIDANCE; PERIOD! Don’t think that you can embark you voyage into your new online business without it; 99% of those will fail miserably and end up frustrated, some of which with their selfesteem seriously damaged. And even most of the ones that invest in training and software will fail, sooner or later. Mainly because they do not follow the guidance given and especially because making a living with an online business is much more complex that one would think. There are millions, like you and me, trying to get their small piece of this huge “Internet cake” too. So what do you need to start your online business? In a nutshell it’s seems to be pretty simple: 1. You need something to sell (a product) 2. Then you want showcase it somewhere (a website, either yours or others) 3. You have to let people know that you are selling this “something” (promotion and traffic) 4. And finally a means to collect the cash online (a merchant account) or get paid for the sales you make for others (PayPal, cheques or bank transfers. If you think a little more over it, then you realize that for each of those items there are lots of different ways to implement them. The wealth of options is what makes this process complicate, not the implementation itself. What is the best product to chose? How should I build my website? Among the thousands of options to promote my product and get traffic to my web, which one(s) should I chose? If you select carefully your options first you will save lots of time and money. Start with something simple just to learn the ropes, or do you really think you will be successful with your fists product/sales process? If this was true would be most likely among the 0.001% or less of the Internet Marketers. So before you invest your money in training and software it’s a good idea to first get one of those “Introductions into Internet Marketing! or “How to Start an Online Business” guides, both of which in the end mean the same. You can get one of those eBooks for less than $30 USD and they will give you a good overview and understanding of the basics. You will see that there are thousands of business models and variations to make money online. From then on you should decide what business model suits you best your interest and strength. Maybe you decide to be an article or sales copy writer, or have a very specific area of knowledge that other could benefit from. Once you made this decision you need to TAKE ACTION and STICK TO YOUR PLAN.
Most internet marketers fails simply because they want to learn too much before they start investing, or because the jump from one idea to the other, not even having gone further than a 20% 30% of the way. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about; I was one of those for more than 3 years as full time, “professional” Internet Marketer, and I am still struggling occasionally with my “perfectionism”. I do not recall who said this, but I have it written on the border of my screen “Perfection is the lowest standard of achievement,…DOING is the highest”! Another one I like to is something like “Don’t expect better results if you do the same over and over again”. So I think, in theory, most of us know what they should do, but do not act accordingly. But to get started, there is no better way to learn than by doing, failing, getting up again and improve and retry or start over with another idea if the first REALLY proved to have not worked out as we expected. I am not telling you, that you should insist on an idea, even it seems to make no sense; what I’m trying to explain is that you should not give up too early and not let you get distracted by all the “amazing” new ideas you will get bombarded with, as soon as you start giving away your email to get some free content or subscribe to some newsletters. It happened to me and it has happened to millions of others like us. Why should you be so different? Be selective with what you SPEND your time with, stick to your plans and try to learn a few things good to very good. Let’s take myself as an example. I am pretty good at SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which helps me get my pages well positioned in Google’s search results from quite competitive terms, and as a consequence, get “free” traffic. Well; not really “free”, because I have to put quite some work in it. I also do SEO professionally for my customers, and this is how I really got into the Internet Marketing Business. But then I thought that I could probably get traffic with less effort if I invested in paid traffic. There are hundreds, if not thousands of ways to drive traffic to your website and I tried quite a few of them, but most of the times it was a waste of time and/or money. To be clear again, I did not fail because the methods did not work or because I’m not smart enough; there are thousands of internet marketers that use them successfully. I failed because I never got to skill level that would have allowed me to really take advantage of the methods. When I saw that it did not deliver the results as expected I moved on to the next “cutting edge” traffic driving method. Now I finally am concentrating on SEO again, and if you are reading this article, then you got here because I finally took advantages of my main skills. Having said this, I won’t stop here, but I will choose much more carefully on what I will INVEST my time and money. Most of the resources that you need to start making money online can be found for free or pretty cheap. Although for a very limited area you may not need a Website, in the end
you will find out that it’s best to have your own site, and even better if you have your own domain with full control. Without your own website your earning potential is pretty limited, but again this can be done cheaply if you are on a limited budget. Registering a domain name costs less than $10, and you can get (quality) web hosting for less than $80 per year. To build your site, in most cases your choice may be the WordPress platform. Although initially designed to make installing and maintaining your own blog a breeze, even for non technical people, over the years WordPress has advanced so much that it allows you to build very professional websites. WordPress is free, very easy to manage and has loads of free designs (called themes) and thousands of free plugins (addon functionality like a contact form, semiautomated SEO tools or widgets) that can be added to your WordPress website with a few clicks of your mouse. Although most decent hosting companies have WordPress ready to be installed in minutes, you can also download the latest version on wordpress.org In case you do not want invest initially in your own website, you could also have a WordPress site installed on wordpress.com. Although functionality in this case is more limited it may be a good way to start of quickly. Another, similar option is creating your own blog, using a service like Blogger.com. Both will host your site on their server for free. There is and will be money to be made in with online businesses and applying internet marketing strategies to promote and sell online. However, as mentioned before, if you want to be successful there is a much steeper learning curve that most people expect, reasons why lots of people give up after a few weeks or months because they have made very little or no money or even had substantial financial losses. Take it seriously, like you would take and offline business which also takes its time to be successful. Experienced (Internet) marketers have endless resources they can draw on, that will most likely have come from years of testing and researching. Bear also in mind that you should NOT learn everything and do them yourself, but think about tasks you do not like o lack skills and outsource them ASAP. The best way to start doing this is to hire freelancers on a project base on sites like elance.com, scriptlance.com or odesk.com. If you don’t make any sales at the beginning, stay calm and just keep trying out different things and learning from your mistakes. Noone makes lots of money instantly with no experience. It takes time. One very important point I want you to take in serious consideration is the following phrase: “The money is in the (contact) list!“ No product sells forever (CocaCola may be one of the exceptions), and without building a list of customers and prospects to
contact you will have to start over again with each new product. I would highly recommend having an optin form to capture emails, where visitors to your site can choose to receive valuable emails or a free eBook from you. This way, even if you are not making any sales during your initial phase, at least you are building up your mailing list, which many successful marketers claim is their most valuable asset. On my website I have loads of other Internet Business/Marketing related articles, in categories such as “Internet Business Myths”. To download your copy of my FREE eBook with Internet Marketing tips, strategies and resources CLICK HERE…