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