For those of you thinking about an occupation in web marketing, you should be aware that there are a lot of traps and dead ends before you can profit at all on the web. You have to have persons who are well-versed in Internet marketing, who actually make considerable dollars online, to direct you through the mine field of wrong turns to success.
There are literally hoards of self-appointed web marketing "gurus" just waiting to vend you their information, schemes, courses, software and the like. Once you purchase a product or service from one of them, you will be besieged by email sales pitches from many of them urging you to purchase the latest e-book, class or software that seemingly will guide you immediately to the vaults of Fort Knox.
I am not stating that these so-called web marketing gurus are not stuffing cash in their pockets online but most of them are just selling you bits and pieces of the puzzle or old, outmoded strategies that no longer work. The net is a fast developing marketplace with colossal competition for whatever you want to put on the market. Finding a small, exclusive niche means less competition but it also may mean that not many individuals are actively looking for the product that you are marketing.
The trick is to hit upon a web marketing niche that has a lot of queries but relatively little competition. You can use a keyword research tool site like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to see the number of recent queries (sorted in descending order). To easily locate the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, just do a Google search for "keywords tool". It will be the one at the top of the first page.
If you do not yet have a Google Gmail account, open one. The username and password you create while doing so will be your ticket of admission to all Google online services. It's best to access the Google Adwords Keyword Tool from inside the Google system, although you can also access it from without. When you access it from the inside, you are given all of the possible keywords, not just the top hundred. If you re-sort in ascending order in an external search, you will be shown only the bottom hundred. If there were 300 possible keywords, you would never see the middle hundred. Your best keywords are often in the middle, so, always take a minute to go inside for an internal search to ascertain all of the possible keywords. It's free of charge, either way.
Now, do a regular Google query for each likely keyword to establish the amount of competing pages for each keyword. To find this amount, look directly under the Google search box (less than 5 million pages is OK.) If you can unearth a keyword that passes the test in both categories (high search and low competition) you may have located an excellent web marketing niche. Other, interrelated keywords will be listed on the Google Adwords keyword research site along with the one you searched for and some of those may satisfy both criteria, as well.
Next, you have to find an existing, in-demand product (physical or informational) to promote to your web marketing niche. You can make your own product or find one to vend on the Internet. You can find drop shippers of physical products at drop ship directories like Salehoo.com or you can find e-book and software creations to put up for sale on ClickBank.com. On ClickBank, you can either become a vendor and retail your own product(s) or be an affiliate and sell other people's creations.
If you decide to be a vendor, you will need to fabricate or pay someone else to design and build a web site for you. You will have to register a domain name for that web site and then pay a company like Godaddy.com or Hostgator.com to host it for you on one of their servers.
Once you have reached that place, you are only partially there. You still have to market and promote your site or no one will even be aware that it is there. Here's where the real web marketing work comes in. You will learn all the things you can do for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) including penning articles for article submission sites in order to create one-way, inbound links. You can also register yourself on various web sites, forums, blogs and educational (.edu) web sites and leave comments and inbound links there.
You will find out the pros and cons of paid vs. free ads to promote your site. You will learn about "squeeze pages" to develop money-making targeted email lists. You may also want to fabricate a blog on blogger.com or on WordPress.com and post links from that to your web site or affiliate page.
You will have to find major ways to attract online traffic to your web site, blog or to an affiliate landing page and you will find out that relevant, highly targeted traffic is the only online traffic that is worth having. Highly targeted traffic means people who are very interested in the very kind of products you are selling and are looking to buy right now. Would you have more luck selling a refrigerator to an Eskimo in an igloo or to a man in Florida whose old refrigerator just died and who desperately needs a new fridge before all his food spoils?
At this point, you are probably beginning to notice that web marketing success requires more than transforming your computer into an automatic teller machine with a big red "dispense free money" button. If you are discouraged at this point, I don't blame you but here's the good news:
There are a sizeable number of individuals who, by determined work or good fortune, have found a way (or ways) to position themselves to make gigantic amounts of revenue online each day, month after month, year after year. Most of them are oriented towards selling you a small part of what they know about web marketing for a cost (but not all of what they know for fear that you will become their competition.) This is reasonable but, does not, in itself, help you to find your way through the mine field and to the entrance to the money vault.
There are a few Internet marketing gurus who have a better point of view and are oriented towards selling you their expertise for a reasonable price. They were once where you are now and they sincerely want to help. They know that your wallet is not brimming over with cash like theirs is now and so they will keep their charge within easy reach to just about any person who is willing to learn and work. You still won't get all the parts to the puzzle in one place (although their pitch pages will make it look like you can), but with some exploration and patience you will be able to find all the working parts and assemble them yourself into a coherent, workable plan.
Look for various friendly web marketing gurus. They are around and they will often have rapid ways for you to make money immediately on the Internet to start you off while you are studying all they have to teach you on the subject of Internet marketing. Be advised that a large number of so-called "gurus" are promoting outmoded schemes or computer programs that simply cannot work out for you in the long run. Slogging through this mire takes time, conscious awareness and persistence,
Nonetheless, you can find big bucks in the not-too-distant future as you take the time to learn and put into action the expertise you have attained. Knowledge is everything. Learn from individuals who actually know their stuff, who are actually making genuine money on the web themselves and can corroborate it and who are oriented towards helping you get started for a reasonable price tag.
I hope you realize the fact that, in this article, I have given you some very valuable information which I gained as I, like you, walked down the road to web success. It's a great road and it can lead to undreamed of riches, if you NEVER GIVE UP and if you are receptive to the idea of learning from all the wrong turns you are sure to make. Just keep your eye on the goal at the end of the road. When something doesn't work out, ask yourself why and learn from that. Each step of the path, you will be absorbing more and more, giving you the expertise you will have to have to get where you are headed. Best wishes for your success!
