Website Marketing Resource

The phenomenal growth of ecommerce lures more and more people to dream about starting an online business. The question that bothers many and restrains them from realizing their dream is what to sell on the Internet.

If you have spent sometime on the Internet trying to figure out what product or service you should choose to sell online, you must have noticed that people are selling every conceivable product and service over the Internet. Contrary to popular belief, even big ticket items are also selling on the Internet very well. But, nevertheless, it is not very easy for a newbie to find a product rather quickly and start marketing online.

If you are having difficulty in finding a good tangible product to market on the Internet or afraid to manage all the hassles of shipping and handling you may seriously consider selling information online.

All online businesses are nothing more than lead capturing machines. They capture traffic from search engines and links from other sources and turn that traffic into leads which turn into sales of products and services being sold on their sites.

But there is another booming industry surfacing that utilizes specific niche content to attract leads for 3rd parties to convert into sales for banks, realtors, lawyers, and many other groups.

And in many cases these leads sell for a lot more than you can make from the same people clicking on your Adsense ads. A LOT more.

This is partially what is meant by going "beyond Adsense." You are simply getting into the lead generation business. Which is the same as Adsense publishing, but with Adsense you are selling your leads for pennies instead of dollars.

You can certainly create sites that sell affiliate products to the leads they generate. Most people are operating under this business model in some fashion.

But you can also capture the leads and sell them to people who are willing to pay anywhere from $1-$25 per qualified lead.

The story of how Hotmail moved from zero to a couple of million subscribers in a few months is one that is often told in many sites all over the net. However it is a story that many do not quite understand. If they understood it, we would be seeing many more online success stories and fewer online failures. Because the word has also been over-used by hype peddlers, many times people associate the word viral with spamming and other online activities bordering on the illegal.

Viral growth and marketing has always been with us.

They fail to realize that viral growth and marketing is not something new to the human race. In fact it has been there since the beginning of time. The human race began with two people, Adam and Eve. Today the human race has filled virtually every corner of this huge planet. Many religions of the world started with a single person but were quickly "virally marketed" to reach millions.

It is important that anybody with a significant online presence understands why offline ads are so important and more so why they are usually much more effective than online advertisements. This is very useful knowledge that will no doubt impact dramatically on the success and profitability of any online enterprise. More so when numerous businesses have lost significant amounts trying to advertise online and have ended up with virtually nothing to show for their efforts. Even the much-talked about pay-per-click ads have been hit by increasing click fraud in recent times. This is where software is created to continuously click at ads with the motive of landing the advertiser with a huge ad bill and no business. Other times the software has been used to profit webmasters who post the pay-per-click ads as affiliates and earn a percentage of the cash paid by the client for every single click that happens on their site.

My wife laughs every time she sees me doing it.

At least once or twice every week, I’ll be at my desk (or at the dining room table) with my Franklin Covey planner open and a stack of laminated checklists in hand.

“What are you doing, honey?” she calls, already knowing the answer.

“I’m planning”, I reply with a smile.

She laughs and I get back to work.

She laughs because she swears I spend half of my time “planning”. But, if you ask me how I’m able to get as much work done as I do in only 3 hours a day, I’ll point to a black Franklin Covey planner with about a dozen laminated checklists inside.

Building an Internet business is easy. Seriously. I’m not saying that it’s not complicated, because it is. I’m just saying that it’s easy to accomplish if you just have a system in place.

There’s very little in this world that can’t be accomplished with the right set of action steps in front of you.

Today, I’m going to give you such a system for building your Internet business. There are only 4 steps…

The days when you could just slap up a Website and wait for the money to roll in are long gone. Success today depends on knowing your target audience and having an effective strategy to reach them. Upfront planning is what separates winning Internet marketing endeavors from failures.

Some people approach Internet marketing as a dynamic exercise. They have an idea and then immediately create a Website to market their product or service, figuring they can tweak it as they go along to see what works and what doesn’t. Visions of wealth or freedom from a dreary day job fuel their dreams, and they are eager to get the show on the road.

This is what I call the “ever decreasing concentric circle strategy to success?or failure.” And most of the time, it is failure that is reaped. This troubled road to discovery gets to be very expensive when Websites must be redone, pay-per-click advertising doesn’t yield the expected results, or sales just never seem to materialize at anticipated levels. These eager “short cutters” may also discover that the market is already saturated, or that the marketing window for their “novel idea” has been gobbled up by someone more focused.

Being successful at Internet marketing does require doing the right things, like search engine optimization and targeted online promotion. But assuming you are already doing these things, the real secret to success is to just do something?anything?everyday to push your website a little further along the road to growing your business.

Selling products or services on the Internet requires patience and determination. The road to success, as they say, “is built one pebble at a time.” That is why it is so important to have a plan and to do something everyday that will help you to achieve your goals.

Begin everyday by listing or reviewing the objectives you want to accomplish. Maybe it is to refresh your Website content, implement an RSS feed, run an email promotion, boost search engine rankings through more external links, find new affiliates or else begin pay-per-click advertising. Perhaps you have some articles you would like to write and then freely spread around the Internet with your embedded URL. Maybe there is a new skill you want to acquire, or a marketing seminar to attend. The point is to make everyday count!

Formal business planning is a process that takes that “great idea” and subjects it to rigorous scrutiny. It either validates your premise or else shows you where the idea falls apart. Business planning forces you to identify costs and develop a sensible marketing strategy before you start spending money. Having a solid business plan will also help you to acquire funding, if necessary.

So what should an Internet marketing business plan address? At minimum, it should be a written document that covers:

Product/Service

Marketplace

When you first make a decision to start an Internet business or to put your existing business online, it helps if you have a realistic appreciation of just how long it takes to break-even on your efforts. Usually, it takes several months!

Putting up a business Website is just the beginning. The real challenge is to achieve visibility in the crowded Internet marketplace. The days are long gone when you could expect to sit back and wait for potential customers to find you. Now, you must be prepared to invest heavily in time and effort to attract traffic to your site.

Depending upon the type of traffic you are trying to attract, your efforts will be focused on:

? Submitting your Website to the major search engines and relevant directories.

? Continually optimizing your Website for the major search engines so that your site at least appears in the first three pages of returns when someone performs an Internet search using your keywords.

? Setting up link exchanges with complementary sites.

? Online advertising through pay-per-click (PPC) vendors (such as Google and Yahoo), article submissions, ezine classified ads, blogs and RSS feeds.

Have you ever been told to find your niche? In business, finding your niche can prove both profitable and personally rewarding.

Niche Marketing is the key to many successful organizations. From the small company that focuses on their niche, putting all their efforts towards it, to large companies with countless product lines, niche marketing is extremely important. For example, if you are a company that produces fishing products, you may have several different product lines and market segments or niches that you sell to. You have fresh water fishing, deep sea fishing, fly fishing, etc. You don’t want to market your Fly Fishing gear in a publication whose niche is deep sea fishing or vise versa. Therefore, it is important to focus your marketing dollars in each individual niche. There are certainly larger publications that cater to a much general audience rather than a niche one. However, are you going to capture your niche market as well as if you practiced niche marketing?

Passionate Fly Fisherman will more than likely respond more to articles in a Fly fishing specific publication then a general fishing publication. These niche publications are more knowledgeable and focused on their subject. It is sometimes better to know a lot about something then a little about everything.