When you’re just getting started in internet marketing, you are told how easy it is to make money online, and are given so many ways to do it, it generally comes out confusing. The first thing you try and do is use the best bits of everything you have been told, or mix and match with what seems to make sense, but the problem is, it doesn’t work, you’re getting 5c here, and 10c there, but you’re lucky to be making $5 a month.

You start wonder why it’s not working. If you have followed the steps like they said, you should be making the money right? Then what went wrong, you followed the steps, chose your site topic, make the content, and then drive the traffic, but the traffic never comes, and the visitors you are getting, aren’t clicking on anything, and not producing the intended results.

So what do most people do next? They believe that system/method failed, and move onto the next one. Follow the steps one by one, like your suppose to, and bam, the same results again, little to no traffic, and none of that $5000+ month income they promised.

Does this sound familiar to you at all? If so, you’re not alone, most internet marketers are in this cycle, and it’s a hard one to get out of. Where is it going wrong? Well it’s a hard one to work out until you’ve been in the cycle a while. Is it the site topic? Is it the content you are using? Is it the method you are using to drive the traffic?

What if I told you, the main error people make is before they register a domain, or even pick a topic?

I’m going give you an example, of what this is like in the real world, a real brick and mortar store. Let’s say you where into long distance cycling, So you decide to open a high quality bike store aimed at long distance cycling, a great idea. So you decide to open a shop, get in your bikes, advertise in the paper? This is what we are doing with our sites, well the online version.

But what are we missing? Well we didn’t go and find out what people where looking for, we opened our business in a high rise area, where there are no parks, no bike lanes, or anywhere you could freely ride your bike. Now even if someone wanted to ride a bike, they wouldn’t be able to, so you wouldn’t get the sale, or many visitors past opening day.

This is what most people are doing when they are starting to get into internet marketing, making their sites, putting in the goods, and putting out the message that the site is open. But they are doing the right thing; they are just not putting in the right amount of research into the site. A lot of guru’s talk about volume, the thing is, if you made 100 sites, you might get lucky a few times, but it’s so hit and miss the time and effort you put in, isn’t worth it as a whole.

You need to get your keywords right, and know if they are keywords where people are looking to buy or take action, or if they are keywords that people are using to gather information.

The blog post called examples of internet marketing takes you over several of the things you need to look for when you are looking for keywords. You can still make a site about your favourite hobby, but if you want to make money out of it, you need to ensure you are picking the right keywords to target. Staying on the bike topic, do you think a keyword like “City cycling paths” or “Brand X replacement tires” is going to have someone looking to spend money.

One of the main things you need to understand is that the amount of traffic doesn’t matter, it’s the quality of the traffic that does. If you got 10,000 visitors a day to your “City cycling paths” article, you might get a sale, but they aren’t looking to buy anything when they visit your site, if you are lucky, you might get a sale or two (or a click or two), but that wasn’t the purpose of their visit.

If you got 100 visitors a day looking for “Brand X replacement tires”, you can assume they are looking for new (or used) tires for their Brand X bike. They Intend to buy new tires, so the likely hood of a sale goes up greatly, the more targeted the keyword towards a buying visitor, the more likely they are going to take action on your site.

When you’re looking for keywords, if your following the money, you’ll also be directly targeting visitors, if people aren’t willing to pay for the keywords, it means the visitors it’ll generate aren’t worth it. This video called examples of internet marketing video which is a follow on from the last post, shows you not only how to target the money keywords, but also make sure there are people searching for them.

So just remember, at the end of the day, if you don't get your foundations right, the house is never going to sit right.