The reason many of us jump onto the Internet Marketing speed wagon (myself included) is because it is possible to make big money on the Internet. There are lots of money -making opportunities available on the Internet for us to get rich. Having said that, many of us will be stuck with questions like “Where should I start?”, “How do I get started”, “What should I do first?” when starting off with Internet Marketing.
If you are having problems in answering the above questions,
don’t fret. Let me give you the 3-step formula you need to get started with Internet Marketing:
Step 1: Research Your Market, And Decide What To Sell Online
One of the first things you should do to get started is to take a piece of paper and start writing down a list of everything you are good at and have a serious interest in. The reason why I asked you to do so is because if you try selling something that you do not have good knowledge in, chances are you will not do well.
If you are stuck in identifying the things you are good at and have a serious interest in, let me help you out - You can ask yourself questions like:
- What am I interested in? - What am I passionate about? - What are the things I do during my spare time? - What subjects / topics do you know a lot about? - What are people always coming to me for advice about?
I hope you’ve managed to write down something.
After you have identified the list of things you are interested in, you need to do a market research. You can go to Overture (http://inventory.overture.com) and find out how many people are looking for information on your area of interest. If the number is high, it means that the chances of you making money in that area are high as well. You can also sign up for online forums to find out what people are looking for specifically (People go online to find solutions to their problems. Therefore, the products we sell must be specific to their problems).
Step 2: Look for Products To Solve People’s Problems
After you have done your research, you need to look for products that will solve people’s problems you’ve identified.
You need not create your own product to sell (its very time-consuming and tedious). You can sell products as an affiliate (selling as an affiliate means you’re selling someone else’s products in return for a commission. You need not worry about handling transactions, product delivery, etc. The product owner will do it for you. All you need is to get people to buy their products) in the following:
- Click Bank – Deals with electronic products such as ebooks, audios, videos, etc. (www.clickbank.com) - Commission Junction – Deals with physical products, i.e. products that need to be shipped physically to the buyer. (www.cj.com)
Signing up for both Click bank and Commission Junction is free. You also need not pay anything to sell as an affiliate.
Step 3: Create Product Awareness
In order for your product to be able to sell, you need to first let people know about the product that you have. There are several ways you can do to create product awareness – both free and paid methods.
Let me first talk about some of the free methods you can use – you can write some articles on the product you are selling and post of article directories such as Ezine Articles (www.ezinearticles.com), Articles Factory (www.articlesfactory.com), Idea Marketers (www.ideamarketers.com), etc. You can post an advertisement about the product in free classified advertisement sites, such as US Free Ads (www.usfreeads.com). You can also advertise on your website, blog, or even in your Friendster or MySpace account. There are many ways to advertise for free. The above are just some of them.
For paid advertising, you can advertise the product you are selling in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
For Google, your product link will appear under the “Sponsored Links” column (To see picture, please visit my web at http://www.think-rich-grow-rich.com). You only pay Google when someone clicks on your link to visit the product page (this is called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising).
Once you are done with the 3 steps I’ve listed above, you can now sit back, relax, and wait for your commission checks to come in. J
If you like to find out more on how you can advertise your products on the Internet, you may want to grab a copy of Derek Gehl’s Insider Secrets 2007. It covers everything you need to know about selling as an affiliate – from identifying the products you can sell to the various methods of advertising your products on the Internet to tracking the number of people going to your product page, etc. It is a very comprehensive guide and I would suggest you to order your copy of “Insider Secrets 2007” if you want to do well in affiliate marketing. Click here to find out more.
To your success Jun Yuan
