Your internet marketing strategy options might appear bewilderingly vast at the moment. Each day your inbox is filled with messages that promise the one key, the one secret that will explode your success online. It’s that belief that just one tactic will solve everything that frustrates newbie marketers and sees them buying e-book after e-book with no breakthrough.
So let’s try and condense your internet marketing strategy alternatives into bite size chunks to try and make sense of it:
To make money online, people have to be buying something at some point. It may be your product or e-book, it may be someone else's product or e-book - whom you are an affiliate for. I would always suggest affiliate marketing as an internet marketing strategy to try before spending big bucks on your own product. This way you can test the market. The demand may not be what you believe. Better to know that first!
So you have your offer, be it your own or someone else’s product, (hard goods or downloadable, the principle’s the same). The next thing you need is to build a list of people who are interested in your offer, or at least in its product category. Why? Because people usually need to see an offer a number of times before making a buying decision. Your internet marketing strategy should build this in. After all you don’t see corporations taking just one TV slot at a time do you?
To build this list you need an autoresponder account, such as Aweber, where you will get some html code that you can use to place a form on your landing page. This form should ask for ‘first name’, so you can personalise e-mails in your subsequent e-mails. It should also ask for primary e-mail address. You must offer a free product of genuine value (self-written or Private Label Rights downloadable e-book), as an enticement for leaving their details.
From now on your internet marketing strategy should be all about driving as much targeted traffic to that landing page as possible. You have two choices - throw money at it, or time.
To pay for traffic, here are some good and bad ways: A good way would be to put up a pay per click campaign at Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Bing. Adwords is the superior system in terms of split-testing and tracking, but you do need to study it first. The worst internet marketing strategy you could ever employ would be to embark on Pay-per-click if you don’t know what you’re doing. Buying text link ads, or ezine ads are also good ways.
A bad way to buy traffic would be to buy leads. This strategy never works. The quality of leads is poor and it’s just a money pit you don’t need.
If you’d rather throw time at the problem of getting traffic, then here are a few thoughts. Firstly, some good pay per click data can be a great starting off point, as you’ll know which keywords are bringing good traffic. You can then use these same keywords in articles, in a blog, in a press release and in the anchor text where the link to your website can be found in your article 'bio' box.
Finally, an increasingly important part of your internet marketing strategy should be Web 2.0. This is the wave of the future, make no mistake, and you should look for good information on social bookmarking, social networking, Squidoo, Hubpages, Forums and of course sites like Facebook, Gather and Twitter. Facebook also offer cheap but effective pay per click advertising.
So don’t waste time looking for that one secret that will make you a millionaire overnight. Those claims are just for people to sell you more e-books you don’t need. Be persistent and keep testing everything you try (Aweber records the source of every subscriber).
Author Resource:
As a ‘takeaway’ slogan, ‘persistence and constant testing’ is the one I’ll leave you with. Do embrace the power of Web 2.0 in your internet marketing strategy though. A good way to stock up on high quality e-books to educate yourself would be to visit www.Free-Tools-Giveaway.com. Alun Maxwell is an experienced online marketer with sites in several niches. He is also hired by top companies to help executives improve their communication style.