Internet Marketing - an introduction to using the techniques of Internet Marketing to make money online.

Introduction

There is now a whole world of opportunity to increase the profitability of your online marketing activity. If you have a website, or a product or business to promote, then you can increase your traffic and orders, and therefore your profit, by applying these proven techniques.

Even if you don't have a website or product of your own, there is an opportunity to make money from internet marketing. Many thousands of people all over the world are using these techniques to build profitable online income streams varying from a few pounds a day in their spare time to hundreds or even thousands per day in serious long-term businesses. The same principles apply to both ends of the scale. The difference is in the extent to which you apply them and how much effort you put into it.

This article explains the principles, and shows you where to find the resources and information you will need to get started. After that, it's up to you how far you go with it.

The process

The process is the same whether you are a conventional business using the web as a means of promoting your products/services, whether you are an individual looking to build some income in your spare time, or whether you are the latest internet marketing whizz who is going to build a large income sufficient to give up your day job and let the web make you money while you spend your time doing other things.

The process is the same as conventional marketing:

  1. You identify a profit opportunity. This could be selling your product or service in a straightforward sale in the conventional business model. It could be selling somebody else's product or service that you take a commission on. Or, it could be making money from carrying other people's adverts on your site like the ones on the right of this page.
  2. You exploit this profit opportunity (whatever it is) by promoting it to targeted people who will be interested in it. If your offering is attractive, people will buy it, or click on the advert, or do whatever it is that triggers your profit.
  3. You continually test and refine your marketing machine to produce better returns by making your offering more attractive, exposing it to more people and thinking up new offerings.

All straightforward common sense, but also at this stage completely intangible and therefore worthless!

So what do I actually do?

The Profit mechanism

The first thing is to establish what it is that is going to make you money. If you already have a business, product or service that you want to promote then that's done. You can move on to the next step. If you don't, then how can you create one?

Well you could always develop a conventional product or service (say manufacturing watering cans) but that is not an easy undertaking and is probably a bit too much trouble if you're just looking to make some extra income, with a possibility of growing it in the future if it takes off. So what can you do?

Well this is the clever bit. You can take somebody else's product or service and providing you can find a way to promote it profitably, you can make money from that. You don't need your own factory, or book that you've written, or loan company. There are plenty of people who already have these things that are looking for other people to sell them, in return for commission. There are established frameworks for operating these types of systems - these are called Affiliate Programs. In an affiliate programme you sign up with a merchant (this could be a book publisher, a retailer, a manufacturer, a credit card company, or pretty much anything you could ever think of) and every time one of your visitors buys one of their products, they pay you commission. Many companies with affiliate programs (such as ebay and Amazon) regularly pay their top affiliates Thousands of Dollars per month. These are household names and it is a very established system. It could be you earning this money - you only need to have internet access, the right techniques and the right ideas. It requires almost no capital, but it does require a lot of learning and a fair bit of work.

Promotion

Having found and setup your profit mechanism, you now need to feed it visitors who will trigger it. There are two ways to send traffic from Search Engines, and a host of other ways to send traffic to your site from links on other websites, offline activity (such as Advertising and Direct Mail), email broadcasts, viral marketing (nothing to do with Viruses!) which are outside the scope of this article.

We will look at driving traffic to your site from the search engines, via two methods: Natural Listings (or Organic Results) and Pay-Per-Click advertising.

Natural Listings

The so-called natural listings are the results that occur when a search is performed in a search engine such as Google. If your site appears high in the search engine results for your chosen topic, they can deliver vast quantities of visitors to your site free of charge. There are two aspects of achieving this highly desirable goal - they are firstly identifying the keywords (search terms) that the visitors you are sseeking to attract will be using, and secondly making sure that your site is ranked highly in the results. This process is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Read more about Search Engine Optimisation.

Natural listings have a huge advantage in that they are free and can deliver lots of traffic. They have a disadvantage in that it's not easy to build good natural listings because everybody wants them so it is very competitive and also it's something that takes time (usually several months) to achieve.

As ambitious internet marketers, you probably don't have time to wait for this to happen (although you must not ignore it) and need some instant results. This is where Pay-Per-Click Advertising comes in.

Pay Per Click Adverts

Pay Per Click Adverts are the adverts that appear next to the natural listings in a search engine results page. You can write and place these adverts to appear next to the natural listings when a viewer performs a search on keywords that you specify. These adverts can be set up instantly (you can literally start running pay-per-click adverts in 15 minutes) so there is no long wait for results, and you only pay when somebody clicks on your advert. Your position in the PPC adverts is determined by the amount you pay per click. In the case of Google AdWords this is factored with the the Click-Through-Rate that your advert achieves so that the more successful your advert is, the less you have to pay to maintain your position.

Putting it all together

So we now have (in theory anyway) a profit mechanism and a means of promoting it and therefore earning money. You now need to formulate an action plan to put these principles into practice.

Establish your profit mechanism
Is this an existing product or service or do you need to find one? If you need to find one, then check out the many affiliate programmes available and see what is on offer. Some of the leading affiliate programes that you should check out are Commission Junction, ClickBank, CB Mall, eBay and Amazon.

Setup your promotion
It is likely that you will want to use both organic search engine results and pay-per-click to get some instant results. If you are going to use organic results then of course you must setup a website and optimise it against your targeted keywords. It may be that you don't need a website at all however - if you are doing affiliate marketing it's quite possible to setup a pay-per-click campaign that sends traffic directly to the affiliate provider's website.Yes, that's no product of your own, no website, and you can still make money! Look at Google's AdWords information for an overview of how their system works.

Constantly measure and improve your results
Some ideas work and some ideas don't. You need to kill the ones that are not profitable and refine and expand the profitable ones to maximise your income. One of the beauties of internet marketing is that your results are measurable so you can see what works and what doesn't.

Next Steps

That is as much as we've got room to cover in this introductory article. We will shortly be producing a detailed toolkit listing all the resources you will find helpful in establishing your online business. In the meantime, look around, learn and try a few ideas of your own.

If you are serious about doing this, then we highly recommend that you invest a few dollars in buying some ebooks to learn more about it. An absolutely excellent place to start is the famous GoogleCash ebook which explains everything covered here and gives you a detailed action plan to start putting it into practice right now. It's only $50 (£25 or so) and as a thorough training course and step-by-step guide it's absolutely invaluable. Click here for details of GoogleCash.

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