I’m often surprised by how many times I hear this: “There is just too much competition in internet marketing today and learning to make money on the internet is too complicated and difficult for me.”
Nothing could be farther from the truth!
Getting started in internet marketing is easier than ever. Today there are so many tools and services available, many of them free, that almost anyone can start an online business. You may have dreams quitting your day job or maybe you would just like to supplement your present income. Either way, learning to use the internet to make money is not complicated. Plus, competition is a good thing. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Here is what you need to understand before you begin. People are flooding onto the internet for the very first time every single day of the week and this trend shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Many of these new users plus a portion of the millions and millions of users who are already on the internet, are your potential clients and customers.
One: The first thing you should do is to decide on an area of interest or specialization, or niche as it is known in the industry. Let’s say, for example, you are interested in growing orchids at home and that you have a lot of experience and success in doing just that. You can legitimately call yourself an expert in growing orchids at home. Or maybe you are not an expert in orchid growing, but you do have an interest and in fact, you know there is a local garden club in your town with a couple of members who do grow orchids successfully at home.
Two: The next thing to do is see if there is a market for products related to growing orchids. Too many people decide on a niche they are passionate about, develop a product and then can’t understand why they can’t make any money when they launch their product. This is because there was never a market for their product in the first place. Do your market research first. You will save yourself a lot of time and disappointment.
One quick and easy way to see if there is a market is to find out if others are already making money selling products in that area. Many beginners balk at this step and believe they have a completely unique and new idea and that of course, everyone will want to buy it. This is a recipe for disaster! Find a proven market first, then develop a product based on your unique experience and expertise. Ask yourself these questions: Are people advertising on Google for products related to my main keywords when I type them into the search engine? To go back to our example, type in the words “growing orchids” into Google. You will see a large number of small paid advertisements on the right hand side of the page. This is an excellent sign that people are already making money in this area and you have a good chance of developing a product that will be successful.
Three: Once you have picked your niche, develop a free report on some aspect of growing orchids at home that you can give away in return for your web visitors’ names and emails. Set up a simple web page with an opt-in form, then drive traffic to that web page by doing things like blogging about orchid growing, writing about orchid growing and submitting those articles to article directories and posting on orchid forums with a signature link back to your website.
Four: Once your web visitors have opted in to your list in exchange for your free report, you can offer them a product for sale on the next page. This next page is often call the “thank-you” page and most beginning internet marketers waste the space by simply using it to thank the visitor for opting in to their list. You can thank them, but also use this page to offer your new subscribers an orchid growing product as a way of giving them immediate value and allowing you to quickly monetize your efforts.
What if you don’t have a product? The answer is simple. Offer an affiliate product. An affiliate product is someone else’s product on which you will be paid a commission for the sale when you send your visitors to their website. This method lets you get started quickly and easily and best of all, you don’t have to worry about actually delivering the product or taking payment or providing customer service.
How do you find an affiliate product? Just search in Google. For our orchid growing example simply type in the words “growing orchids affiliate program” and click on any links that look likely. When you find an affiliate product you like, sign up for the affiliate program and you are in business. I make it a habit to only promote products that I have personally used and reviewed, so purchase the product first before you recommend it to your list. Later, when your list has grown, you can approach the owners of products and request a review copy before you promote.
Five: Offering various affiliate programs and products to your list will let you quickly determine which ones sell best and you can then work on developing your own product which adds features that are perhaps missing from the affiliate product.
Internet marketing is not difficult, but getting through the mounds of information out there so you can understand the basics can be challenging. So take it one step at a time. Define your niche, build your list and offer affiliate products until you develop your own information product line.
If you will simply take action and put these steps into place, you will be ahead of 99% of everyone else out there who says they would like to make money on the internet but never does anything about it.
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photo: eyestream Mikul http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0