How To Achieve Internet Marketing Success

Internet Marketing is the general term given these days to anyone who tries to make money online. There are a ton of ways to make money online, though, so let's clarify what I'm going to talk about in this page.

Internet Marketing is the process of identifying a need, filling that need, and communicating to those who have the need what you have to offer.

Or, to put it another way, it's all about getting people to take actions online that benefit you.

Most people get into Internet Marketing because of a strong desire to make money online. They're often trying to escape a day job they hate, and they figure there has to be a better option, so they start looking for something online.

Unfortnately, the path to Internet Marketing success by way of the "make money online" world is a hard one. It's like trying to swim through a school of sharks to get to a nice pleasant beach. The beach is great, but the sharks are murder!

Type the phrase "make money online" into any search engine, and you'll see a lot of sites that talk about it. You'll see a lot of scams, too, people promising you overnight riches if you'll just pay $19.95 for their guide.

The plain fact is that marketing online requires a set of skills for success, just like any other job. You cannot expect to jump right into any job without spending the time going through the learning curve, and online marketing is no exception. Trying to jump the learning curve by throwing money into guides is a sure way to get deep into debt.

This page will talk about how you can, without spending any money of your own, slowly learn the skills you need to learn to succeed online.

It won't happen overnight, but it'll happen.

My name is Jay, and I write a blog about making money online called Online Opportunity. I'm also a college professor who loves to empower his students, so it's no surprise that rather than the typical blog of the niche, which tries to get you to buy things to help you succeed, I try to teach people. Sure, if you buy something, that's great, but I'd rather my readers learn.

This page is part of that effort, to help as many people as possible learn what they need to learn to make something online, rather than spending online.

Rule #1 is the most important one for new marketers.

Don't Spend Your Own Money!

This goes against most of the advice you see online, and the arguments that it takes an investment to make money. The fact is that most of the people giving you that advice want you to spend money with them.

Look at it this way. If you have $200 to invest, and you spend $97 of it on a system that is supposed to make you money while you sleep, that leaves you with only $103 left. Then you'll probably need some web hosting, which will take up the rest of that.

What happens if the system doesn't work? You're out your initial stake, and don't have anything to show for it.

Instead, get into the mindset of reinvesting profits, not using your initial stake. Start small, with marketing that can be done for free, and work your way up to the bigger leagues as you start to make money. That way, if it takes a year to make your first dollar online, you're not out anything doing it.

I'll describe in this page a technique to bootstrap yourself into making some money online, using freely available resources. So keep your $200 until you decide that you could make good use of web hosting.

The first step is to pick a niche.

A niche is a topic area that you are really interested in. So take a moment and think about something that really interests you.

And it can't be "making money online"! That's what you want to do, the niche is how you'll do it. A niche is a topic you feel passionate about, something that excites you, the sort of topic that people know not to mention around you because you'll talk about it for hours.

That's a niche. Make it fairly narrow. Instead of "model building", make it "building model rockets". Narrow niches bring the most targeted traffic (we'll talk more about targeted traffic later).

So, pick a niche, then come back and read on. I'll wait.

The easiest way to make money online is to create content in your niche.

Content just means you're writing articles. Short ones, long ones, whatever. The sort of thing that you see when you go to web sites you really like. If you cannot write about your niche, than you'll have a harder time of it online.

So, spend a week and write an article a day about your niche. Don't worry about making them perfect. Just write them. Nobody will probably ever see these except for you, so just write. And get them done daily!

That gives you a taste of what it would be like to write a daily blog on the niche. If you felt good about what you were doing, wonderful! If you were annoyed at having to write every day, that's not so good. And if you got tired of writing about the niche, that's bad, too.

You can succeed online without writing daily, but writing content is a critical skill.

Go over to Blogger.com and start a blog on your niche. Edit the articles you've written so far and post them (I know I said nobody else would probably see them, but you wrote them, so you might as well use them).

Then keep posting. Build your content writing skills while you're learning the rest of it.

Well, you can make a decent online income just writing a blog and selling ads on the blog. But not without other skills. And those other skills will also help you sell things online.

Here's a brief list of other skills you'll need:

• Master the art of preselling
• Figure out keyword research
• Learn about how search engines work
• Learn about targeted traffic, and why less traffic is sometimes better than more traffic
• Search engine optimization
• HTML
• Figure out Wordpress, because Blogger isn't for the long term income producing blogs
• Learn about PPC
• Learn about list building and autoresponders
• Learn about ad tracking
• Learn about affiliate marketing
• Learn about CPA ads, CPC ads, and CPM ads

• Network
• Experiment

And some of the things you should not do:

• Buy ebooks
• Join systems that promise riches
• Pay for leads
• Buy products that promise riches

After all, to paraphrase an old saying, your job isn't to spend your money, but to get the other guy to spend his money.

Networking is critically important for an Internet Marketer.

Other people have skills that you lack, and can help you to achive greater levels of success than you can alone. Networking is also where the real deals are made between online marketers. Being someone's affiliate is okay, but being their partner is far better.

I've started a private online forum for online marketers to network, called The Advisory Panel. Click on that link to join and see what networking can do for you.

Over time I'll add more Hub Pages about the various skills you need to learn, but absolutely nothing can replace experimenting on your own. That's the only way to really learn anything, by trying to do it yourself.

For more tutorials, you can check out my blog, Online Opportunity, or come by The Advisory Panel to network with other Internet Marketers.