50,000 Foot View of the puzzle called Internet Marketing

Welcome – it’s lovely to see you.

I hope that the material in my blog helps you to focus on learning in a logical, and methodical way.

As the title suggests, as you might have already come to appreciate, on-line marketing is a huge field.

I created this post particulalry to help break this down into very simple terms to help you understand the most improtant components and their logical order a long with their relationships.

But first.

Three Types of People

Firstly I would like to say there are generally three types of people that enter into the field of internet marketing.

1. Those with a reasonable amount of money to invest in their business, usually with not much time
2. Those who have a lot of time and little money to invest.
3. And those with No money and No time.

Now if you fall into category 1, I suggest you outsource as much of the work as possible and save the heart ache of trail and error.

If you fall into category 2, I suggest you use you time wisely to up-skill yourself in every aspect of marketing, in a logical and methodical way. Move through each step and learn progressively.

If you fall into category 3, you are in for a long and hard road. It is possible but a great deal of patience and persistence is required. As with those in the middle category, you will need to learn how to do everything yourself, so read, and learn in a progressive and consistent manner.

To all – get yourself a one-stop-shop, where you can learn from others instead of being all things to all people. Remember to include your family in on your plans, do not neglect them but be very regimented with your time and energy – do not waste either, both are very precious commodities!

The Break Down

I have listed here the key components of internet marketing in the order that they should be investigated and understood.

1. Research your market
2. Find your keywords
3. Build products and services around these keywords and gaps identified in your selected niche
4. Build a keyword rich and S.O.E (Search Engine Optimized), compliant website.
5. Set up a domain name, point to hosting, and set up autoresponders.
6. Forms of driving traffic to your site.
7. Test, alter, test, alter, test, alter…

Seven steps in total, each step must be fully understood and completed before moving on to the next step.

Be unique in your approach to whatever you are deciding to do – don’t be another clone. Dare to be different, dare to be you – the real you.

If you have already started down this road and perhaps have some unprofitable or unresponsive businesses already, my advice to you is kick it and start from scratch – regardless of how much you have invested in time or money.

Some of the tools and products you already have compiled may come in handy in each step, so keep these handy on your hard drive. You will use this material to READ and LEARN – but only as you need them.

Now lets do a very quick overview of each of the seven steps. This will not elaborate on each too much – the point here is just to understand the fundamentals of each component.

Research your Market

This is the foundation of your new business – it must not be underdone, just as you would not make a poor foundation for a new house you might build, so with your new business, it must be built on rock.

The idea here is to list the top ten things you personally are interested in. List them in the order of those you love the most down to the tenth thing you are less passionate about.

Don’t over analyze things at this stage, just list them. If you love sport the most, write it down. If you love being a mum, write it down, etc.

Now most of these are subjects or topics, not a niche, so the next thing to do is write under each of these ten subjects particular things you like about it. For example if sport was your choice, perhaps ice hockey or wrestling is your particular favorite. If being a mum, perhaps it’s teaching your children things like dressing themselves, etc. Perhaps you love making things, whatever – just do not discard anything.

Now you will use tools to research your market to see what is being searched on by people, questions they are searching for answers about that perhaps you can fulfill.

This can be a time consuming and arduous task – but, again it must not be underdone. Use all of the material you have to identify how best to perform this task or join a membership that will provide you all of the material you will need to do this.

Find Your Keywords

This is closely related to the previous step of finding your niche.

Keywords are what people use to search in the search engines, to find what they are looking for. For example they may be searching using the keyword term “wrestling heroes of the 90’s” or ” how to get your children to eat their dinner”, etc.

I have already entered a blog on keywords that I feel will be very helpful in this subject – so I recommend you read it fist, then go to other related material in your chosen marketing membership, or material you have already compiled.

Your chosen niche will help you to decide what keywords you should be using, so I won’t go any further into this topic for fear of losing your interest )

Build products and services around these keywords and gaps identified in your selected niche

Before spending any more money, you would want to develop a series of products and content that are directly related to your chosen niche.

This content and products, e-books, video’s, articles, e-mails that you can deliver to your interested prospects, newsletters that you can send out monthly or semi-monthly. This content should last for at least 6 months, so you can focus on the testing and improvement aspect of your site before having to create new content.

Starting from scratch is fairly difficult, but your aim must not be forgotten – to answer questions people are searching for answers on within your chosen niche.

Use your membership to gain PLR material about your chosen niche that you can pull to bits and alter to make your own product and provide answers to the starving thousands looking for answers. This is not too difficult, there are many opportunities to find such material, it exists everywhere. For example my membership has already given members over 600 such PLR articles in one monthly PLUS package, with another 8000 articles coming out in the PLUS July package.

Don’t be fooled into just buying any old PLR, you really need material within your chosen niche.

Another useful way is to get ideas from competitors, join their free forums or newsletters to get ideas for material that you can progressively release. Provide good material, not junk, and as original as possible. For example – everything, and I do mean everything, on this blog has been created by me from scratch. If I can do it – so can you.

Compile at least one or two original e-books and maybe a set of videos to sell to your customers. Make your news letters and articles lead your prospects to buying these items. For example – raise these problems in your e-mails, the answer to their questions – found in your material for sale, where else.

Don’t be stingy though, give your reader something new and fresh – answer some of the questions partially or fully if you believe your product is that superior. Maybe give them the first chapter of your book as an appetizer.

A good idea, if you are lacking in talent in this area, is to hire a professional ghost writer to do this job for you. Good ghost writers can be rather expensive, but you will end up with very original content that is very readable and targeted at your audience.

Warning be very specific in giving them instructions on exactly what you need – you can never give professional writers or designers too much information – be precise in your requirements and you will be very pleased. Do not skimp and hire a cheap one, you WILL get what you pay for.

Start with the service at Elance.com and search from there to find other good services if you wish to pay for a ghost writer.

Build a keyword rich and S.O.E (Search Engine Optimized), compliant website

Again, this section has been partially answered by my blog on keywords.

Your site needs to have several key components.

1. A great sales letter – forcing your customer to buy your product, they just can’t bypass it.
2. Attractive to the eye, not crapping looking or cheap.
3. Informative, funneling your customers to one ultimate conclusion – buy the product.
4. Be logical, easy to navigate and readable – not clogged with ’stuff’, ads and distractions
5. Keyword rich (for your natural organic rise in the search engines) and optimized

This is another rather large task that you may want to engage help in building your site. You do not want a clone of another site, you want a unique but have a visually beautiful site.

Whatever membership you have selected should have tools and material to help you build such a site, but remember that the HTML or PHP code should have your selected keywords infused in the right places.

Think of its design, how do you want to lay it out so its easy to find certain information. For example, if your site is about wrestling heroes of the 90’s, perhaps you might like to have a page about each of the characters, a page on famous matches, a page on competitions, etc. If you have one on training children – a page on toilet training, a page on teaching manners, a page on teaching them to perform simple chores, etc.

Will you have a separate landing page from your squeeze page, one to solely devoted to capturing your visitors e-mail information before sending them to your sales page? Perhaps you might take that opportunity to offer them an e-mail course, or newsletter, or other bribe your prospect in order to get their name and e-mail information. This is entirely up to you, but must be thought out – particularly if you plan to outsource much of this work.

Your site should have logical header information that has your keywords built into each of the titles. The content under these titles should also have the keywords repeated in the information, not in an unnatural way, but weaved in so that it makes sense. Search engines can pick up those spamming keywords just to get rankings – so be careful not to over do it.

You can always outsource this job if you have the money to do so, but not the time. Elance.com is a good starting point for these kind of services, search this name on Google and then click on the ’similar services’ link to find other such services.

A good website might cost you a bit but look around to find someone who can create you a site based on a basic template, but use original graphics.

Set up a domain name, point to hosting, and set up an auto-responder.

Now is the time to purchase a domain name and hosting account that will hold your website information.

First item of business – do not get your domain name from the same place as your hosting account. This could be described as having all of your eggs in one basket. You have been warned.

The domain name you select should be very relevant to your chosen niche and all attempts made to include your prime keyword, the one that best represents you service or product, the one that has been infused into your website everywhere. For example if your site is about training kids and your selected keyword was “toddler training”, perhaps a site name like “toddlertraining101.com”, or “earlytoddlertraining.com” or how about “toddlertariningformummies.com” (a little play on words there – hoped you liked it?).

Please purchase a dot.com name. Other domain extensions can be cheaper but can also turn off your potential prospects from clicking your link.

This is likely to cost around USD $10.00 per year, but I suggest you get the name for at least 2 years if you intend to stay in business, 5 years would be better. The cost for 5 years is not huge and avoid additional costs, like related names, etc – it just isn’t necessary at this stage. Perhaps if you start to get very big, other extensions (*.tv, *.net. *.us, etc) will then become important – just imagine owning yahoo.net for example.

I have personally used “Godaddy.com” for most of my domain names, just a suggestion – you go where you like. I have found them to be very reliable and a great service, easy to navigate and change your DNS server name quickly. DNS is the domain name server, or in other words where your site is being hosted, your hosting account.

Now to get a hosting account.

You need to have a very reliable hosting company, one that can grow as you grow and is responsive to you needs. Although I despise recommending, I have found hostgator.com to be a very reliable company and you can upgrade to a larger hosting account easily. A ‘baby’ account will set you back roughly $10.00 USD per month, so leave this purchase until you are ready to upload your completed site.

Think big – think very big. Can your hosting company handle the traffic you expect to send it? Is the bandwidth allocation you have been given enough? What if you had a 1000 visitors watching videos you have put on your site – this uses a great deal of bandwidth for each user, will it be chewed up quickly? Can you increase your bandwidth allocation quickly, without interruption to service?

The disk space capacity – is it enough to host the material you plan to put there?

Does the hosting account have c-panel? This is a very important tool, allowing you to manage your site quickly and easily. It allows you to create e-mail accounts and databases to facilitate software scripts that can assist you in automating you business.

Once you have uploaded your site into the main “public_html” folder, or sub director of that folder if you plan on hosting several websites on this account, you must now point your domain name to your hosting account.

You do this by getting the information from the e-mail sent to you by your hosting company after you have signed up. You will see in that e-mail several important things, such as the DNS information as well as the FTP information, so you must keep this e-mail somewhere safe and easy to retrieve.

No go to where you purchased your domain name (toddlertraining.com,etc) from, e.g. godaddy.com, and access your account. Now change the DNS name to the ones you where provided in the e-mail from your hosting account. Search on your domain name provides’ help section in order to find where to change the DNS information if you have problems. I have a number of training videos on my site on this subject, and I am sure others have similar videos if you need extra help.

This means when anyone types in your domain name, this will now point to where your site is located, your hosting account.

Ok, ok enough already. Just helping you make good decisions.

Does your hosting company have a autoresponder service? What is an auto-responder?

Simply put, an auto-responder is an automated piece of software that will respond to a set of common customer actions. For example you can set one up to send your customer a product link if they purchase your e-book or video (you normally have a thank-you page for this).

You can send out your monthly newsletter to all those that have subscribed. You will point the form on your website where the customer enter their e-mail address and name to your auto-responder and it will compile a list of these names. If you have setup a newsletter or e-mail course, these will be automatically sent out to your customer on the preset time you have defined in the auto-responder software.

Sorry -this is getting too long to explain auto-responders, I suggest you use your membership or other, already obtained material, to learn about this aspect of marketing.

Suffice to say that auto-responders are an integral part of automating your on-line business. You do not want to have to manually respond to every person that buys your product or signs up for your newsletter.

This is another cost that you must wear, but be careful not to purchase a sub-standard service or a free one that creates tacky adverts to the bottom of your e-mails. This looks very unprofessional and you can lose a great deal of your potential customers as a result.

Also, this mechanism is being used to compile your list of prospective clients, your list is your life-line, your money tree. Pick a bad service and you could lose you list – NOT GOOD, not good at all.

There are very good services out there, just search on google and be picky about the service you select, reliability, functionality, and longevity of the compnay should be of top most priority when selecting a service.

Forms of driving traffic to your site

There are literally a hundred different ways of driving traffic to your site, but my suggestion is you only focus on a few at fist, until you perfect them.

I have provided two good free sources of traffic (Web 2.0 and Blogging) in this blog, which I suggest you use and perfect before trying other forms of traffic. The only exception to that is PPC or Pay Per Click (paid traffic).

People can get very, very bogged down in trying to perfect too many forms of traffic, becoming a jack of all trades (traffic), and mastering none.

I beg you to just try three forms as I have suggested, use this blog to understand Web 2.0, but perhaps perfect a PPC campaign with Google adwords first, it is less time consuming at the beginning but does have an associated cost. Get it perfect in order for you to save money, then move onto Web 2.0.

This is getting far too long, so I’ll move on.

Test, alter, test, alter, test, alter…

This stage is critical to your success. This is where you find out what is working well and what is not.

Unfortunately this involves analyzing numbers, statistics, in order to understand what you can improve on to increase your R.O.I (Return on Investment).

You do not want to waste money on paid traffic campaigns if your customers are not buying your products or services, so its important to understand why.

If you have undertaken a PPC campaign with Google Adwords, they provide tracking software that will give you some idea of how long people are staying on your site, how many performed a certain action and from where on your site they did this.

For example, perhaps your sales letter is just not convincing enough and they leave after only a few seconds. Maybe there are not enough people actually clicking through on your ads, which need some work. Perhaps the product itself is priced too high, or too low – and they feel it’s probably rubbish.

Split test your ad campaigns first, so you have a decent click rate per 1000 impressions (how many times google shows the ad to your web searches that use related keywords). Try 2 different subject lines in your ad campaign. Try different material in the body of the message once you find a good subject header. See which one works best, then try different variations of each.

Once your click though rate improves, try improving your sales page by split testing. Try two or three different versions with different header titles and see which ones keep your visitors reading on – staying longer on your page.

Once that improves, but sales are still low, try different pricing options. See which makes a greater sales ratio per visitor improvement.

Keep plugging at this – again in a logical and progressive manner, one a time (so you don’t get confused as to what worked and what didn’t) until it is at it’s peek performance.

NOW try to formulate different traffic strategies in order to gain more traffic.

Look, I promised not to plug, but this blog has warn me down.

The key thing is to just join a membership that will provide you all of the training and materials you will need to get the job done. Now you can chose any you like, but I know my premium service will do the job. Sure you will still need an auto-responder, hosting and domain registration on top of that – however I am not aware of any membership that provides absolutely everything.

If I did, I would be straight with you and mention it. At the moment, until I get 100 into this membership, you will get all of these tools and training for nearly 50% off, which will remain that way for the life of your membership.

Anyway – that’s it from me. As always I would appreciate any feed back and comments, good or bad.

Signing off until next time.

Doug Turner,

MarketingWahoo.com