BWMagic’s Internet Marketing News
5 Things I Wish I Knew About Internet Marketing
(Before I Started Making $200 – $300 A Day)
Hindsight is priceless. If only we could take what we know now
and go back and do it all over again; the lessons learnt over
time would make that difficult journey much easier. The same
applies to me, I have been online since 1998, but it took me
years before I could make a full-time living from the web, mostly
with affiliate marketing.
Over the years, there are many things I wish I had known earlier
in my struggle, this knowledge would have made my progress much
easier and faster. So I sat down and listed the FIVE most important
THINGS which would have helped me SUCCEED much sooner. Never know,
they might even help you on your own journey of becoming a full-time
online marketer.
SEO Is King
When I first started online, I didn’t have a clue about SEO
(Search Engine Optimization) or even search engines and how
they worked. More grievously, I didn’t even know about keywords
and the essential, no vital role, they play in your online success.
To me at the time, a web site was just a place where I put my
information and affiliate links. Nothing more.
Little did I know how important proper site construction, optimized
for the search engines, played in your success. These days I would
start from the very beginning and place my major targeted keyword
phrase in my domain name – using hyphens if I had to. Next, I would
create or layout my site with related keyword pages all linking back
to my homepage. I would keep the site navigation extremely simple,
with no page more than three clicks away from the homepage. And if
I didn’t use SEO rich blogging software like WordPress for the whole
design of my site, I would have one of these WordPress blogs on my
site for SEO reasons.
Onsite or onpage optimization is very important but QUALITY BACKLINKS
and lots of them will get you the top rankings and those targeted
visitors from the search engines, especially Google. And the key to
getting those quality backlinks is providing valuable information and
superior content in articles, posts, videos, ebooks… and spreading
those items around the web. However, just getting the high rankings
and traffic through your SEO efforts is just the first step. You must
have an overall marketing strategy which will take this quality
traffic/visitors and turn them into buying customers. You have to
create marketing funnels to take advantage of this traffic and produce
your sales. This rather complex topic is discussed in more detail
down below.
Develop Your OWN Brand
You must stand out from the crowd, you must create something that’s
unique to you and to the web. Whether it’s developing your own product
or creating an authority site on the web, you must in some way differentiate
your marketing from the rest on the web. Establishing your own brand
starts with your own website which will become your main drawing card.
Many times this is simply picking a little known marketing niche and
becoming the dominant site in that niche. This is something I didn’t
learn until I was well into the marketing game, but becoming or being
perceived as an expert in your niche is vital to your success. It will
open up marketing and linking opportunities for you and your site.
It will help build your reputation as an authority site or figure in
the eyes of everyone, including the search engines. I found concentrating
on a few lucrative niche markets is very manageable if you’re a one-man
outfit and you don’t want to hire employees which is another option,
but will result in a totally different lifestyle.
I like affiliate marketing because it comes with fewer responsibilities…
all you have to do is refer the potential customer to your clients and
they do all the rest. They do the real selling, they do all cash transactions,
they deal with all refunds and support issues… all you have to do is
cash your affiliate commission checks each month. Regardless of which
route you take, you must choose your market niche and establish your
expertise in that area.
Pick Your Associates & Products Carefully
Along those same lines, picking the companies and products you decide
to promote is vital to your success. This is something I got very wrong
at the very beginning of my online work, I picked the wrong things and
I wasted years trying to sell worthless products which should never have
been marketed in the first place – at least not in the way they were marketed.
I am talking about those silly multi-level sales opportunities (which will
remain nameless) where you try to sell a product by recruiting a sales
force under you. Never worked for me and I wished I had stayed well away
from these types of schemes.
More importantly, I soon learned that picking the proper companies and
associates will play a major role in your success. Finding quality companies
and products to promote is essential to building a solid reputation on the web.
I later found some well-established marketers and started promoting their
products which helped me tremendously, especially when I started promoting
products and services which gave me residual income, make one sale and get
paid repeatedly for years. I also concentrated on top brand name companies
like Sony, Dell, Toshiba, Apple, HP… which also helped me in building a
solid reputation and gave me credibility. Actually, selling a million dollars
of product for a company will get you noticed, even online.
Another marketing strategy which has proven very successful for me is simply
selling something which can ONLY be bought online, or which can more easily
be bought online; you will sell more products this way. I also found promoting
well established merchants like Amazon worked very well because online buyers
trust Amazon and are USED to buying from them. Regardless, you must pick quality
products and companies to promote, I found using well-established Affiliate Networks
like Commission Junction, LinkShare, Shareasale… extremely helpful in finding
those quality products and companies. Just wished I had used those at the very
beginning of my online marketing.
Marketing Funnels and Automation
I never started making a regular income from the web until I set up my
automated marketing funnels which kept sending a steady flow of willing
buyers to my promoted affiliate products and companies. These marketing
funnels are not that difficult to put into place but they make all the
difference in the world. For example, here’s how many of them are set-up,
I first find a niche product or service, I build a keyworded domain site
around this product. I usually offer a free guide, course or ebook on the
product in exchange for the potential customer’s email. I follow up with
6 or 7 helpful emails on the promoted product or service, offering quality
information along with some special deals/coupons where the prospect can
get $100’s off the price of the item if they buy through my affiliate links.
Make them a deal they can’t refuse.
This is a simple list-building process where you build a large group of
potential customers. All of this can be automated through an autoresponder
service such as aWeber or GetResponse, your emails are automatically sent
on a regular basis. In order to feed this autoresponder and bring potential
customers to my sites, I use article marketing, video, blog posts… to draw
traffic and to build my top rankings in the search engines, mainly Google.
All this brings free targeted traffic to my sites and into my marketing funnels.
Another marketing funnel I use is through the PPC or paid traffic, this
advertising from Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter supplies potential
clients to my landing pages and onto my autoresponder lists. Again creating
a stream of customers for my affiliate products and companies. All of which
can be automated and run without any more work once they are set up.
And if you really want a hands-off lifestyle, I found it helpful to automate
all my monthly payments and renewals (hosting, domains…) by using Paypal
or by credit card. Plus, many other aspects of your online marketing can be
automated such as article distribution, blog posting, Twitter accounts, Facebook…
and don’t forget to regularly back up all your sites and blogs.
Believe me, $%*& happens and you will need those backups.
Persistance Is The Key
Most of the things listed above have to do with actual marketing techniques
or automated systems you have to set up with your online marketing. However,
there is another rather intangible element to all this online marketing stuff.
That has to do with your own mind-set and determination. Building an online
business and income takes some time, you must have the patience to go the
distance. Especially when it comes to SEO and building your keyword rankings
in Google, you must give yourself some time for all your marketing to fall
into place. Truth be told, I was three years before I saw any serious money
from my online marketing. Of course, I was totally new at this game and even
had to learn HTML from scratch. Back then, I really didn’t know what kind of
marketing strategies worked and what kind of automated systems I needed to
put into place.
However, all the knowledge which I now have, still wouldn’t have worked if
I didn’t have the persistence and stubbornness to stick to my plans. If you
start on the same road of building an online income, make sure you have that
same persistence and stubbornness to give all this marketing stuff time to work.
Like many things in life, your online marketing needs time to grow and mature,
just make sure you’re of the right character to make that happen. Needles to say,
the rewards are well worth it.
P.S.
And if I really had to start all over again, I would
go with something like Ken Evoy’s SBI because it
would have cut years OFF my journey to becoming
a full-time online marketer.
To learn more about SBI, go here:
Marketing Courses
Helping You Succeed Online Since 2002!
Kind Regards,
Titus
http://www.bizwaremagic.com
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