For those of you considering a career in Internet marketing, you should know that there are a lot of pitfalls and dead ends before you can make any money at all online. You need someone who knows what they are talking about who actually makes serious money online to lead you through the mine field of mistakes to where you want to be.
There are literally hundreds of self-appointed Internet marketing “gurus” just waiting to sell you their advice, programs, courses, software and the like. Once you buy something from one of them, you will be besieged by email offers from many of them to buy the latest e-book, course or software that supposedly will head you directly to the vaults of Fort Knox.
I am not saying that these so-called Internet marketing gurus are not making money online but most of them are just selling you bits and pieces of the puzzle or old, outdated information that no longer works. The Internet is a rapidly evolving and changing marketplace with enormous competition for whatever you want to sell. Finding a small, unique niche means less competition but it also may mean that not many people are searching for what it is that you are offering.
The trick is to find an Internet marketing niche that has a lot of searches but relatively small competition. You can use a keyword research tool site like http://keyworddiscovery.com/search.html to see the number of recent searches (1000 or more searches is good) and then you can Google the same keyword to see the number of competing pages. Look directly under the Google search box (less than 5 million pages is good). If you can find a keyword that passes the test in both categories (search and competition) you may have found a good Internet marketing niche. Other, related keywords will be listed on the keyword research site along with the one you searched for and some of those may pass both criteria as well.
Next, you have to find an existing product (physical or informational) to sell to your Internet marketing niche. You can make your own product or find one to sell online. You can find drop shippers of physical products at drop ship directories like http://www.salehoo.com/ or you can find informational and software products to sell on http://clickbank.com/. On ClickBank, you can either become a vendor and sell your own product(s) or an affiliate and sell other people’s products.
If you are going to be a vendor, you will need to create or pay someone else to design and create a website. You will have to register a domain name for that website and then pay a company like http://www.godaddy.com/ or http://www.hostgator.com/ to host it for you on their servers.
Once you have reached that point, you are only halfway there. You still have to market and promote your site or no one is going to know that it is there. Here’s where the real Internet marketing work comes in. You will learn all the things you can do for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) including writing articles for article submission sites, creating one-way inbound links from other web sites, forums, blogs and educational (.edu) sites.
You will learn the pros and cons of paid vs. free advertising to promote your site. You will learn about “squeeze pages” to develop profitable targeted email lists. You may also want to create a blog on http://blogger.com/ or http://wordpress.com/ and links to and from that to your web site or affiliate page.
You will have to find major ways to drive traffic to your site, blog or an affiliate landing page and you will learn that qualified, highly targeted traffic is the only traffic that is worth going after. That means people who are very interested in the very kind of thing you are selling and are looking to buy right now. Would you have more luck selling a refrigerator to an Eskimo in an igloo or to a housewife whose old refrigerator just died and needs a new refrigerator before all her food spoils?
At this point, you are probably beginning to see that Internet marketing success requires more than turning your computer into an ATM with a big red “dispense free money” button. If you are discouraged at this point, I don’t blame you but here’s the good news.
There are a significant number of people who, by hard work or good luck, have figured out a way (or ways) to set themselves up to make huge amounts of money online each day, month after month, year after year. Most of them are willing to sell you a small part of what they know about Internet marketing for a price (but not all of what they know) for fear that you will become their competition. This is natural but it does not help you find your way through the minefield and to the door of the money vault.
There are a few Internet marketing gurus who have a better attitude and are willing to sell you their secrets for a reasonable cost. They were where you were once and they sincerely want to help. They know your pockets are not brimming over with money like theirs are now and so they will keep their price within easy reach to just about anyone who is willing to learn and work.
Look for such Internet marketing gurus. They are around and they will often have quick ways for you to make immediate money online to get you started while you are learning all they have to teach you on the subject of Internet marketing. You can find the big money in the not-too-distant future as you take the time to learn and implement the knowledge you have acquired. Knowledge is everything. Learn from someone who knows what they are talking about, who is actually making big money online themselves and can prove it and who is willing to help you get started for a reasonable cost.
