Start an Internet Marketing Business

Starting an Internet Marketing Business is easy if you stay focused.

Here are 8 steps to follow and some good advice from someone who made the mistakes and learned from them.

Getting started in the internet marketing business is an exciting and daunting initiative. Many variables exist that can enhance or hinder your progress but none are so big that they should deter you from moving forward on your goal.

As an entrepreneur you are about to ride a rollercoaster of success tempered with challenge that will advance your efforts and stall your efforts multiple times before you obtain the success you are reaching for. I know because I made the mistakes and went through the ups and the downs before I finally got it. One thing I would like to impress upon you if you are serious about taking this life changing step. Don’t stop reaching for your goal and don’t let others destroy your vision or your enthusiasm for success. Many people will try, they include friends and family. They mean no harm but they are the safe people, you are the entrepreneur and that means you are fundamentally different.

I know that your path ahead is going to be spotty at first and I know this from first-hand experience. I am writing this article to highlight to you that your goal should always be insight of you and do not waver from it. It will be easy to get dejected and walk away and if you do that is OK but my guess is you will come back at some point, so what you do now will still prepare you for when you return. I hope after reading this post you will not give up and instead you will forge ahead and over time achieve the success you are seeking.

So let’s get started. Here is you basic 8 step process.

There are lots of blanks to fill in because obviously I cannot give you a start to finish blueprint in this post but if you gain one valuable piece of information I hope it helps you. I already know the message I want you to take from this but let’s wait until a little later before I reveal it.

Step 1. Picking your Niche

1. What is your niche going to be – have you decided what it is you are going to sell
2. Is it you, your talent, your service to B2B?
3. Are you going to enter the reseller market with clickbank or clicksure?
4. Do you want to be an Affiliate Marketer?
5. Online retail?
6. Do you have your own product to sell?

“True Happiness involves the full use of one’s power and talents.”

John W Gardner

 

 

Many people will argue that this is the easy part of beginning. I will argue it is the one that requires your deepest thoughts and consideration. This is the stage where you set the scene for your future as an internet business person and if you start one thing only to realize a few weeks in that this is not going to work or that you may put that on hold until you are better educated on internet marketing you will not only have lost valuable time but your investment of time and 

     required resources may be wasted.

Research your niche, check out the top 10 in Google for your keyword, see what they are doing, how long they have been doing it, how many visitors they get, what are their keywords and how do they write about their product or service, study them.

 It is important to get your NICHE right!

 If you don’t know what you want to do then follow these steps

Write down your top five skills, write down the top 10 things that interest you or that you have some knowledge of, visit article directories to discover what others are writing about in your areas of interest. Visit niche forums to see what people already in those areas of interest to you are talking about, go to YouTube – see what is being rated high in your chosen niche, check out Facebook and twitter to see what is being talked about or tweeted in your chosen niche. Go to Trend hunter – see what’s hot and what is predicted to explode in the coming year, search google Bing and yahoo to see what is happening in blogs on your niche, use keyword tools to see what are the top keywords in your niche and use them to find out as much as you can. After doing all this if you are confident you have found what you want to do then it is time to move onto step 2.

Step 2. Plan you strategy and set your budget

 

Once you have done all of your research and collected valuable information and statistics it’s time to organize and evaluate the data. Look at what you can do now based on your budget and what you may need to schedule for upgrade in 6 to 12 months. Remember you don’t have to have it all at first, you can let it grow as you become more confident. Ask yourself:

• How long before you realistically want to see a return on your investment?
• What is you start up daily income objective - $100.00 day, more that this?
• Is this realistic?
• How many items do you need to sell to make that much every day?
• How much traffic do you need to bring to your website to generate the volume of sales need to reach your daily income goal.
• What hardware and or software do you need?

Important NOTE*
Throughout your research stage you are going to be exposed to some very savvy online marketers that will WOW you with the latest software to take you from zero to thousands of dollars in sales within days. Don’t be fooled, resist and follow the plan. 
 
You don’t need all of the software they are selling and to tell you the truth there are multiple free versions of the software they will try to sell you but at first you actually don’t need to focus on that. What it will do is divide your focus and cause you to move backwards instead of forward.

Remember: Stay on track – Stay focused

Step 3. You need a website

Domain name and hosting.

Choosing your domain – if you are certain you have identified your niche and you have all of the information required to get started then consider including your niche in your domain name.

Example:  You have decided to sell your expertise in report writing.
You might consider a domain name like;
·         expertreports.com or
·         topreports.com or
·         CEOreports.com

Keep searching until you find a combination that reflects your niche and that is available. These days the .com is less important with the sophistication of search engines so if you have to go for .net or .org or .biz that is OK.

If you have a good profile in your niche and you decide to go with your name johnbrown.com that’s good but I recommend you also use a personal branding program to support your launch. Brandyourself.com have a startup free service that will build your links and profile for you over a 6 to 8 week period. Well worth doing this if you are going to brand yourself as the domain name. 

An internet business must have a website so you are going to need to register a domain and locate good reliable hosting.

There are literally hundreds of hosting companies out there, these days they all have high up time and service stability although you may read that there are several of the big companies that are the best. The truth is, there are several hundred around the globe that all offer the same high quality service. It’s not necessary to have a service in your country these days, you are about to embark on a global business so think big, your hosting can be done from any country if the plan and price fits with your needs and budget. Compare service offerings, stability and price. It is a highly competitive industry so you should be able to get your hosting for as little as $10.00 a month if you want to pay monthly or $100 a year. The longer you register the better the search engines will like you so I would go for 1 year at the minimum.

You need to build a website. There are many very affordable services you can use. You do not need to spend thousands doing this, you can interface your domain with a basic WordPress site to get you started for free. WordPress is highly regarded by the search engines, it is a very good hosting agent and it provides seamless integration with most external hosting services.

The cheapest way to get started is to sign up with WordPress, purchase your dedicated domain name through them and your hosting package. WordPress is very easy to work with and they have some very smart and professional website designs to choose from.

Step 4. Get your site ready to start building a subscriber list

You can use the integrated subscriber service with many host providers and WordPress or you can get aweber or one of many other affordable subscriber programs. There are several very good free services available to get you started. You may want to start off with one of the free services first and progress to aweber once you are up and running. I have chosen aweber here because in my experience it is the best and least expensive for the service provided with excellent instructions on how to use it and develop all of the required squeeze pages and responders. Either way it is fairly easy to integrate with your website and most of the available free or pay for services provide very good video demonstrations.

Once you have your list capture and email follow up prepared it is time to launch your site. I do not recommend launching your site until you have all of these elements in place.

Step 5. You will need a shopping cart

If you are going to be a reseller with clickbank or clicksure, ebay or any other third party vendor or an  Affiliate Marketer or going to become an online retailer using products available through clickbank, clicksure, amazon, ebay or any other host you will not need to set up a shopping cart. Each of these programs offers you the use of their shopping carts however you will need to set up accounts with these providers and you will need to ensure you fill in the required information to ensure that you receive your payments once visitors to your site purchase your goods. Each of these services has very good instructions on how to set up your account.

If you are going to market yourself or your talent by way of services you will need to set up a merchant account. Simply search merchant accounts in google to get the list and decide which one you want to go with. Most major banks offer the services and you will be able to have transactions credited to your account daily.

Make sure you keep track of all expenditure you incur in the set-up of your online business, it is tax deductible and you will need it come tax time. Check your bank/merchant requirements and the local tax laws to see if you need to be incorporated, Inc. or Pty Ltd in structure or if you can operate as self-employed without a registered business name. In most instances you will need to have formed some type of company or business structure but this does vary by country and in some instances by state. Being a registered business of one type or another also adds credibility to your online business so it is worth considering.

Step 6. Product or service delivery

If you are selling a product that is downloaded from your site you are going to need an FTP service. There are some very reliable services available for free.

Try https://filezilla-project.org/download.php

Another service that’s free is www.coreftp.com/download.html

Step 7. Marketing Strategy

Now you are getting to the fun part of your business set up but it can also be the most frustrating.

Don’t let anybody tell you that you can go from $0 to $5,000 in a day, week, month or possibly even 3 months. Seriously, if it was that easy don’t you think everyone would be doing it? It is possible to get to $10K a month within six months but you will need to work your site to get there unless of course you have a sneaky little 100,000 person qualified email list in your back pocket. Seriously not many people have that.

I know there are people out there telling you that they have done it, I say prove it. The screen shots they show you in their hyped up selling videos are not validated and if you really listen to the pre sell hype you will learn that they have been trying for up to 10 years to be successful at internet marketing. You will learn if you listen, that they are networking their lists and by doing this they are getting shared power. Pooling of lists is a good way to reach more potential buyers but it is also a really good way to piss off a potential buyer by bombarding them from all sides with up to 10 emails a day. I find this especially rude because that one potential client would have signed up for a single person to contact them. They did not buy in to be invaded by multiple unsolicited email hits daily. How would you like to receive 60 emails a day from unsolicited affiliate marketers?

Set your pace, be realistic about what you know you can achieve while maintaining your integrity as an internet business owner. Plan your strategy.

Consider these elements in your marketing strategy

1.       Competitive analysis – Look at what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it.

2.      Content Marketing – Story telling is the key to your success.

3.      Keyword Optimisation - title, Meta and heading tags make a difference in search engines.

4.      Back linking – network with industry leading sites and as they rise you will rise with them.

 Step 8 – Who said SEO is EASY?

Content marketing and blogging is SEO. Support your business, position yourself as an authority and drive traffic to your sales site.

Consistency of content marketing is the key:

 

Writing an article is easy if you know your business. Writing a 500-word article is all it takes to get started but you need to be consistent. Get an article template from the web, there are hundreds out there but E-zine Articles has a great one and you are going to want to publish to this article marketing site so why not use theirs for all of your writing and get into the habit of getting it right all the time.

Visit other leading blogs and comment on their articles – this will create a backlink to your site and generate solid traffic over time.

Post articles on LinkedIn and engage in discussion in your groups.

 Post content to your blog at least 3 times a week – 5 times is ideal and be consistent. Sometimes to give yourself a break you can reblog from another site and this builds relationships as well as ensuring you have quality ever changing content on your site.

Give a freebie away – you can get royalty free rights on white papers, eBooks, videos and audio. Just google to see what you find that matches your niche.

 Create accounts with Facebook, twitter, yahoo, google+, weebly, Zerply, YouTube, slide share, scribd. Post to each of them at least twice a week and make sure they all link to your website and blog. You can tweek each article to give it some minor variatation and post to all these sites. You don’t need to write different articles every day for each of them. By having multiple social media sites you are creating a funnel that drives traffic to your blog and your website.

Video and slideshare marketing sites such as YouTube and slideshare are very popular, so you can benefit from the traffic that they send your way after posting items. Making videos can be a tedious task, but if you can stick with the technique, you can benefit from all of the traffic.

Use good quality pictures in your articles to add depth and interest for your readers. Pinterest is driving unbelievable traffic so posting and having an account with them is recommended.

 Look at the following article marketing sites and start posting to as many as you can.

EzineArticles.com - goarticles.com - ideamarketers.com - articledashboard.com - articlesbase.com

It’s a lot of work but if you keep it up in a short time you will see the results.

It’s not easy but even a newbie can do it. Just set yourself one goal every day and keep going. Don’t waste your time or money on programs telling you they can get you to number one tomorrow. Only you can do that but do use some of the free programs out there that can give you analytics on the health of your website. Google analytics can do this and it’s free. If you find problems, search google and you will find the answers. If you still can’t get your head around it ask a friend or family member who is a bit savvy to help you with idea’s for things to write. Start small and grow big.

Concentrate on your headings, titles, paragraph headers, pictures in your articles and on your blogging and success will be yours. Be patient, be practical and set realistic goals. You will get it and you will climb your way to page one in Google. If you get bumped just keep going you will come back.

My message to you

Stay focused – it’s easy to get sidetracked. You are a sponge for the first six months and you will seek out information. In doing this you are going fill your inbox daily with emails from people telling you they have the magic key. They don’t. YOU Are the magic key, focus, stay on track, commit to your success and you will get there.

If you do want to dabble in affiliate marketing below are a few I recommend

http://get1958.gsniper.hop.clickbank.net

http://www.fatburningfurnace.com/?hop=get1958

For more information please visit my blog at http://marketsocialmedia.blogspot.com.au

Feel free to comment on any of my articles and I will be happy to link to your site if your content fits with mine, just ask me to visit your site when you comment. Don’t forget to google+, tweet and like and encourage visitors to your site to do this as well. You need to ask them to do it, never assume that they will. My best wishes’ for you success, please let me know if there is any part of this article you would like me to elaborate on or if you would like future articles on specific topics.

To your success!

Gail Worthington-Eyre