Absolute beginners guide to internet marketing

Est. reading time 10 mins. 15 secs.

Why Read This Article?

• To break-through the noise of ever-growing content, you need to build your authority
• To build your authority you need a strategy
• A strategy that focuses on monetizing (i.e., earning money) for you in one way or another
• This is what we cover in this article – where to spend your energy first?!

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You cannot put off learning about internet marketing just because you think you lack the time? It’s critical to your online business start and success. Do you have ten minutes? That’s all the time it will take to go through this ten-minute guide to internet marketing success.

Of course, internet marketing requires more than five minutes to master for real impact, but you have to start somewhere, right?!

Let’s start with the basics. What will this guide cover? You will be able to decide what makes sense for you and to choose a path to success, all right here in this guide. Off we go!

 

What is Internet Marketing?

The 1st question that needs an answer before we move any further is: “What the heck is internet marketing?”

You may not be familiar with what it involves. If you are good at internet marketing already, you can skip ahead (unless you need a refresher). For beginners, internet marketing is a term that covers just about every moneymaking effort on the web. There are a bunch of different strategies involved in internet marketing. This general term covers them all.

Bear in mind internet marketing is different from countless ways to make money on the web. It has more to do with promoting yourself to make money, rather than the actual money-making tactic.

Internet marketing describes a very specific type of lead generation (using knowledge of how the internet works, specifically, how websites are ranked in the search engines) to make money online.

For example, if you have a website on ‘sprinklers’, and you have the know-how to get that website ranked #1 for that term in Google and/or Bing, you are looking at hundreds of thousands of views every single day. This translates to a solid sales pipeline.

 

How Do You Make Money in Internet Marketing?

The logical next topic is how you make money with internet marketing. We will continue with the previous example. Caveat: we need to realize that it is unrealistic for someone just starting to rank high for ‘sprinklers’. But assume that you were able to rank for the extremely lucrative term ‘sprinklers’.

1. You could make money the most obvious way by selling these people the sprinklers they are searching for. This is the best-case scenario for those who are looking to buy.
2. What about those people who are only researching sprinklers and are not ready to hit the “Buy” button now? You could offer them an eBook called “10 Things to Know When Buying Sprinklers”.

Perhaps it is a little on the nose, so you may not be able to convert those people, but the point is the same regardless. You have an audience that you need to convince to buy.

 

How Much Can You Make?

Ok, if everything until now makes sense, then how much money can you make with internet marketing? The answer is cheeky; however much do you want?

Whatever you want is possible, as long as you know how to get it.

Each of the strategies listed here has a different income potential. Well, that’s not quite true. All of the strategies here can make you millions of dollars but the level of effort will differ greatly. So, let’s go into those strategies and their monetary potential quickly.

For example, the way that content marketing works is: you have content that you publish on the web, with the potential to make money from each specific keyword that you are targeting. The method will vary depending upon the monetization model that you choose. In general, internet marketing is probably the easiest way to make a great deal of money quickly, without any sort of major investment, an advanced degree or specialized training.

 

What Do You Need to Start Internet Marketing?

You only truly need two things: a computer with internet access and the desire to make money. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something. This is something that stops many potential internet marketers in their tracks. There are many so-called gurus out there that will tell you that you need multiple websites, specialized web hosting, premium backlink tools, expensive keyword research protocols and most of all, their ridiculously overpriced ‘buy-now-or-forever-lose-out’ courses, to make it in internet marketing.

I have courses on my site, and yes, I have countdown timers that prompt you to buy, BUT even when the timer expires for you, none of the prices are outrageous. It just means that you chose not to take advantage of a discount (but I digress).

Honestly, you can get started in internet marketing without these things. In fact, there are enough resources on the web that you don’t need any training materials at all, as long as you are willing to do the research.

This is a time for a pause. It is worth noting that internet research is a rabbit hole a million hours long. I have been there, there is always something to learn, so be careful – you are reading this to start making money online NOT research something without anything to show for it!

There are also ways that you can publish content without having a domain name or web hosting, you can use free keyword research tools and get free access to understand backlinks.

To be fair though, there are solutions out there that will make your journey a lot easier, if you chose to make a payment. Now, what do all these tools enable?

 

The Most Common Internet Marketing Strategies

The four most common internet marketing strategies are… There are of course many more strategies to choose from, but we are going to concentrate on these four because they are the easiest ones to get started with and don’t require a great deal of investment other than your time.

Content Marketing

First, content marketing. Content marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online and promote yourself. Essentially, to a degree, all internet marketing is based upon content marketing, which is why we will concentrate a great deal on it in comparison to the other strategies here.

No matter what kind of website you have, or what model you are working from, you have to have content if you want the search engines to be able to find your website and index it in the proper location.

Content marketing is creating content that is optimized for search. It requires knowing how keyword density works, what Google looks for in ranking websites and what pitfalls to avoid.

When Google first started, other search engines indexed websites based on what terms they contained. The more keyword instances a website featured, the higher it was ranked. But, to decide how a site should be ranked, Google began using other websites. If the site was connected to a lot of sites, then it was considered an authority.

That same model is still used today but with massive refinements and all kinds of fail-safes to ensure that low-quality websites aren’t able to game the system.

Google wants people to be able to find what they are looking for, so content not only has to be optimized for search, it also must be high-quality, valuable and exactly what the searcher is trying to find.

Blogging

Blogging is the next logical strategy to discuss. You may be thinking that content marketing = blogging. Not quite.

Blogging is mostly content marketing, but with a very different goal. Blog posts are usually about a specific topic, and the goal of a blog isn’t just to have content to cater to specific keywords, it is also focused on attracting regular readers that “follow” it (i.e., read it like a magazine article each time some new comes out, versus content marketing may be a one-time attraction).

To get a following, a blogger must have a niche that they are targeting. The people that follow such blogs are interested in this niche. Example blogs include fashion blogs, computer gaming blogs, self-help blogs and many more.

Blogs that get a following can then monetize using a variety of methods. You can choose from methods like Google Adsense, which displays ads and pays you whenever someone clicks on one. Promote Amazon products that are relevant to your blog. Or even offer something of your own for sale.

Remember, you are marketing (read: establishing your reputation/authority) that is why it is easier to make recommendations and sales.

Affiliate Marketing

Next, we’ll go over affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, you refer people to a site where they buy or subscribe (product and/or service). Once the transaction is successful you get a percentage of the sale or recurring commission if someone paid for a subscription. The purchaser incurs no additional charges.

The Amazon Affiliates program is perhaps the most common affiliate programme in operation today. Whenever you send someone to their site through your affiliate link and they purchase something, Amazon pays you a fee. Since the commission is based on a percentage, if you were marketing the correct goods, you might theoretically make hundreds of dollars per sale.

And Amazon isn’t the only affiliate program out there. You can choose from thousands all over the web. You can find affiliate programs for any topic that you want to promote.

There are even huge dedicated reference libraries of every product/service that offers an affiliate program. One of the best places to find products to promote is a website called ClickBank. ClickBank hooks up sellers of digital products with affiliates who want to earn a commission by promoting them.

How is this internet marketing? Again, you have content that is relevant, valuable and up to date, which you monetize using affiliate links. You essentially make the process of choosing easier for me if I am looking to find a particular solution.

Be careful though, do not be “salesy” and push anything that makes you a huge commission. this is completely contrary to what you want to achieve. This will quickly tank your reputation and is a very short-term strategy.

Product Creation

Finally, you could create your product (digital or physical) and sell it. We were just talking about ClickBank. Instead of recommending other people’s product, you can develop a product and then list it on ClickBank and let others promote and sell it for you.

Digital products are great because their marginal cost (i.e cost to duplicate) is nothing! You sell a million copies of an eBook and it does not affect our overall expense. With a real book, printing a million copies is a huge chunk of time, money and logistics. But eBooks are not the only type of digital product. You can also sell videos, courses, audio files, photographs, infographics or anything else you can create.

Good news! Creating products doesn’t have to be performed by you directly. You are still free to outsource the job to someone else. Assume, for instance, that you hired a writer to create an eBook for you. You could possibly get an eBook with 10,000 words written for around $200. You own the eBook from that point forward and you can do anything you want with it. Next, set up a sales page and drive traffic to it or use the product as as part of a larger offer. As well Amazon also has an eBook publishing program, as do several other major book retailers.

Why is this a good internet marketing strategy? Think about it, if you have a book on Amazon, then anyone who searches for you, or your niche will likely be served up an Amazon product as one of the top results. This is the kind of ranking many would die for.

SUMMARY

When it comes down to it, you just need two things for internet marketing success: a computer with an internet connection and the will to work as hard as you can to be successful.

The latter is why a portion of my courses and materials is dedicated to solopreneurs mindset. It is not trivial to stay motivated, to get through the low points and all be optimistic.

You can choose any of the business models listed here to market yourself. But whatever you choose, work at it every day, learn as much as you can from trusted and respected sources.

It takes time – YES. But it is NOT rocket science, just keep plugging away until you figure out what you are doing.