Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing

The Internet has been a blessing for many people who had the dream of starting their own home-based businesses but had been held back by high costs, poor location, or limited opportunities. Today, the Internet has given people the opportunity to set up home-based businesses from their “home office” (or even the kitchen table)and create a full-time income.

Yanik Silver, for example, started his Internet business from a small table in the corner of his living room and has now become an internationally respected Internet marketing expert who pulls in millions of dollars for his information and coaching. Others, who simply want to supplement their current income, are able to spend just 30 to 45 minutes a day on their home computer and create $1,000 to $2,500 a month or more in extra income. With the low-cost of entry, software that can create and run an entire website on autopilot, and a wide variety of order processing options, virtually anyone with an idea can start their own business on the Internet.

Internet Marketing Secret #1:
Sell What People Are Buying!
This is an obvious secret, right? Unfortunately, many beginning Internet marketers have their own ideas of what they want to sell. So they spend their hard-earned money creating an Internet business with all of the bells-and-whistles and end up with nothing to show for it, other than a well-designed website.

To create a solid Internet business, you need to do a lot of research first and find out what the market you’re going to target wants to buy or is already buying. To see an example of this, let’s take a look at the huge diet and weight-loss industry. Someone interested in dieting and weight-loss is NOT going to stop at buying one book, course, tape, or coaching program. In fact, people who are serious about losing weight often end up buying all sorts of books on the subject, spend money with Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, sign up for memberships at 24-Hour Fitness and Bally's, and buy diet patches and pills and all sorts of exciting new exercise gadgets. 

In any market, a buyer is a buyer is a buyer. If you were going to enter the weight loss industry, I’d recommend that you sell something that people are ALREADY BUYING rather than come up with something new and untested. People will always buy THE NEXT BIG diet plan, even though the weight loss industry is crammed with thousands of diet plans. So sticking to selling what people are currently buying gives you a better chance for success.

To find out what people are buying (or are interested in) in any particular niche market, you can use services like Wordtracker (wordtracker.com) that give you the ability to see exactly what search terms (keywords) people are using in the major search engines. Then, with this information, you can continue your research into niche markets, find out what people are buying, and create or find similar products to promote to that target market.

Remember: In any business, you want to FIND YOUR MARKET FIRST and get to know them incredibly well. It helps if YOU are a buyer in the market you’ll be targeting. For example, if you run a carpet cleaning business, it makes more sense to sell information products to carpet cleaners than it does to people who own pet shops. You know the lingo, the frustrations, and the problems of carpet cleaners. You’ll have a better idea of what type of information carpet cleaners want to buy. If you don’t know your market, do some research and find out all you can about them. Read the magazines they read. Go to their trade shows and conventions. Talk to people in that market. Read the books they’ve read. Do whatever it takes to fully understand your market.

Once you know the market inside and out, you should know two important pieces of information. First, you should know what they’re already buying. Second, you should know the main problems and frustrations that your market would be willing to pay to solve. With both of these pieces of information, you should know exactly what your market will buy. Now, all you have to do is either find or create the product and sell it to your market.

Internet Marketing Secret #2:
Start creating an email list from day one!From the moment you launch your new Internet business, your website should have a form (either in the website itself or one that pop-ups separately) that asks the visitor to give you their name and email address. You can give them an incentive to sign up, like a free report or a multiday course. Or you can simply ask them to sign up for your monthly newsletter. Whatever you do, you need to start capturing the names and email addresses of your visitors.

Here’s why: only a small percentage of the visitors to your website will be converted into buyers. Without the names and email addresses of your visitors, you won’t have any control over whether or not these people ever return to your website. And statistics show that it can take multiple visits to a website before a prospect buys something. With a list of your visitors, you can email them on a regular basis and get them to come back to your website and purchase your product.

Once you have the names and email addresses of visitors to your website, you can contact them on a regular basis about new products, special discounts and offers, or just give them valuable information that will motivate them to want to visit your website and look around. Keep in touch with your email list and you’ll create a strong bond with them. People like doing business with other people. People they like. By connecting with the people on your email list, you increase your chances of getting them to convert into buyers. And the more often they buy, the more often they’ll buy. (It may sound like a riddle, but it’s true. If someone gets into the habit of buying from you, they’re more likely to purchase more products from you in the future.)

Internet Marketing Secret #3:
Viral marketing!Viral marketing is a tremendous tool on the Internet that can pull in money for you, 24-hours a day, 365 days a year, non-stop. Basically, “viral” marketing is any type of marketing that spreads from person to person automatically-- kind of like a flu virus spreads from person to person. Another form of viral marketing is word-of-mouth advertising. If a movie gets good “buzz” (a lot of people talking positively about it), that movie will normally have long lines outside and make millions of dollars. A restaurant that gets good “buzz” will be booked solid with reservations for weeks. 

Online, viral marketing is more powerful because anyone with an email account has the ability to tell people all over the world about a particular product, service, or company. One of the most popular forms of viral marketing are viral e-books. A viral e-book is meant to be given away free, with full rights to anyone who downloads it to also give it away free. The purpose of giving away the free e-book is simple: Inside the e-book are links back to the company and their products. If the e-book provides great information, there’s a very high likelihood that the e-book will be passed around thousands of times. And since everyone who downloads the e-book also has the right to give it away, one free e-book can very quickly get into the hands of huge numbers of people. Best of all, there’s no shelf life for these viral e-books. 

Once you’ve given the e-book away free, it’s virtually impossible to stop it from spreading. Viral e-books soon become bonuses for other people’s products and services. They’re given away as bonuses for signing up for an online newsletter. They’re uploaded to free e-book sites. They’re compiled with other e-books into larger packages and either given away or sold.

They’re duplicated again and again for a variety of purposes and end up living “forever”. The amazing thing about viral e-books is that they can produce a tremendous amount of traffic and sales with no additional effort on your part. Once you put the viral e-book together and start giving it away, it can soon spread on its own. It can soon become a 100%, fully automated money-making machine.

Some smart marketers have even used this viral marketing method without owning their own products. Instead, they’ll sign up for free affiliate programs and put their affiliate links throughout the e-book. This method is ingenious, because not only is the marketing free (since other people are spreading it around the Internet for you), but the marketer gets affiliate checks from multiple companies and has no products, no inventory, no fulfillment, and no customer service.

ADVANCED INTERNET MARKETING SECRET:
If you create your own viral e-book to give away, make sure to include links that YOU CONTROL. For example, in the past marketers have included affiliate links inside their e-books.

Unfortunately, some of these companies change their affiliate software, making your affiliate links dead; they stop offering an affiliate program, they stop offering that particular product, or they go out of business entirely. So your link continues to get “clicks” but it stops making you money. The secret is to include links that you control. For example, if you want to put your affiliate link for an autoresponder service in your viral e-book, it’s smarter to create a page on your current website that then re-directs a person to your affiliate link for the autoresponder service. A sample link might look something like this: www.website.com/autoresponder. Then, if something happens with the affiliate program, you can sign up as an affiliate for a different autoresponder service and simply change where your prospects are re-directed to when they click on the link in your e-book. This way your links are always working for you, no matter what
happens with various companies. (Some marketers realized this too late, and their viral e-books are being duplicated and given away every day with dead links that make them no money. Make sure not to make this same mistake!

Internet Marketing Secret #4:
Let other people do your selling for you.
One of the most powerful marketing tools on the Internet is an affiliate program. Basically, as an Internet business owner, an affiliate program gives other people the ability to promote your website and receive a commission for any sales generated by customers they referred to you. They advertise your website (through their specially-coded affiliate link) and when someone visits your website through their link and buys a product, they get paid a percentage of that sale.

The late Corey Rudl, founder of the Internet Marketing Center, created millions of dollars in sales with his affiliate program. At the time I’m writing this, his company has over 70,000 affiliates (myself included) promoting his products and services, generating $1,876,053.00 just LAST YEAR ALONE! Corey’s affiliate program is so popular because he creates and sells highquality products and services for Internet business owners. For example, his course, Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business Online, is widely recognized as a blueprint for starting and running a successful Internet business.

To see what a successful affiliate program looks like you can sign up for The Internet Marketing Center’s affiliate program absolutely free. Once you’ve signed up, which takes less than 2 minutes, you can log into their affiliate center, check out their system, and see how they work with affiliates so both make money.

The Internet Marketing Center is a great place to begin your affiliate marketing adventure. They advertise that earning affiliate commissions is 100 times easier than running your own business and they aren’t kidding. Some of the advantages include:
• Immediate profit with zero risk. There’s never any cost to you.
• No hassles of product development, ad writing, order processing, shipping, refunds, and customer service. They do all that. All you do is drive visitors to their site.
• You don’t have to spend a dime to develop, produce, or warehouse products. The owner of the Internet Marketing Center invested years and hundreds of thousands of dollars producing cutting edge books, courses, newsletters, and software so that you don’t have to.
• Earn money 24 hours every day, even while you’re sleeping or enjoying yourself on vacation. The website sells for you, non-stop.
• Make profits from $65 to $200 per sale!
• Generate profits from other affiliates who you refer to the affiliate program.

Another Internet marketer, David LeDoux, has made over $1 million dollars online with the help of over 4,200 affiliates. He’s using The Internet Marketing Center’s software, AssocTrac, to work with affiliates and track their sales and commissions. Instead of doing 100% of the selling himself, David is letting thousands of people all around the world spend their own time, money, and energy advertising his products and services.

The biggest benefit to having an affiliate program is that it’s free advertising. It’s like having a huge commission-only sales force. You can have hundreds of thousands of people selling your products (like Amazon.com has) and they ONLY get paid when they make a sale. With an affiliate program, links to your website can be on thousands of websites and mailed to millions of people on opt-in email lists, and it costs you nothing! Then when someone comes to your website and buys, you simply give the affiliate that referred the customer a portion of the sale, from 5% to 75%. Of course, the more money you give your affiliates per sale, the more affiliates you’ll have promoting your products and services.