The Basics Of An Internet Business
The Internet is a tool, a highly effective tool for mass marketing. However, you have to understand the technology to make it work for you. Hopefully, you have had enough exposure to the Internet on your own to recognize some of the terms like forums, websites, blogs, and email.
Every day new technologies arise that can be helpful to you in your marketing campaign, but these will be the pillars of your campaign. You are going to take various elements available to create a network of marketing that brings in people from various places on the Internet to your offers. To do that, you have to be aware of each of these elements and how they work.
Niche Sites
The first thing you want to do is start to create niche sites. A niche site is one website that is targeting a particular product or market segment and is fully devoted to that enterprise. You don’t want a site that sells everything to everyone because buyers will become confused with all the different offers. You want a website that is carefully built to target the type of audience that buys your products or services.
How do you do that?
Again, on the Internet, this is a whole lot easier than it sounds. You have to remember that the #1 way people get to sites is through the search engines. Search engines like Google also have immense resources to help you generate copy that targets your niche and will show up as a result in the search when someone is looking for that particular product or service. So, you don’t have to control the person coming to visit your site at all!
You just control the copy you put on your niche site and it will control the type of audience that shows up at your door. And, the nice thing about using copy that brings the right audience is that you can hook it up to Google’s Adwords campaign and make money that way too.
Blogs-
Blogs that are hosted on your website make great marketing tools. You can create a blog on a third-party site, but that can limit your ability to addg Goole advertising to your entries and it gives the visitors one more hoop to jump to actually land on your website. You will also be limited in the types of affiliate advertising you can do if the blog is not hosted on your own domain and website.
If you have a website and want to add a blog, you can do it with products like WordPress.org. This is a free product that allows you to add a blog to your site if you have the right platform. You can always check with your web host too, to see if they have a way to add a blog to your site.
So, when you build a website, you can build it just to have a sales page that leads directly to your products or you can build a more robust site with some content. A blog can provide the perfect foil for sales offers because you can market it as informational and the Google search engine will see content on your site, ranking it higher in search results and thus bringing more traffic.
Of course, a blog is not much good if no one reads it. So, you will have to market the blog as much as you market your products, so as to bring in visitors. You can do this by making your blog easy to bookmark with the bigger portals like Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon, and more. See the Resource section for some good tools to help you market your blog on the Internet for a wider exposure. This includes adding information about your blog and website into relevant Internet directories. As with anything on the Internet, you want to set it up to be automatic so that when you publish a blog post, your subscribers are notified and major news feeds are updated.
Websites
A website can be a simple sales page with a way to capture people’s emails if they are interested in your offer, or it can be a more complex membership site. It’s really up to you what you choose to do to establish an Internet presence for a particular market niche. However, what you don’t want is to include all your offers on one site. You want multiple sites that are all finely tuned to the audience that is showing up there. This will increase your advertising effectiveness and help you to build a network of sites across the Internet.
You can host your site on one host or on many hosts. You want to make sure you do have some sites operation should one host go down, or a section of the Internet black-out for whatever reason. If you have multiple sites and all networked to different areas on the network, you won’t have to worry that all your income will go down at once. There will always be some offer up, regardless.
You websites should be simple to set up and you should make extensive use of templates and turn-key systems to help you set up a domain, a sales page, autoresponders for your offers, and even payment collection systems. The technology is there to make setting up an online business easy, but you don’t want to be the one fussing with scripts or endlessly fiddling with the look of a site. Instead, focus on the copy, use the templates, set up the system, and let it run. If you have to pay someone occasionally to add some feature, that’s fine, but try to keep your technology simple enough to implement over and over in rapid-fire succession to build an online empire.
Forums
More complicated sites can include memberships and forums. You don’t have to be a geek to set these up either. You can buy a forum that has already been developed by someone else through various sites for developers. They just transfer the domain to you and the hosting fees too and you can become the proud owner of a forum without ever doing a single line of code.
Forums have some pros and cons to them. You do have a captive audience where you can promote your products without being accused of spamming anyone. However, forums require more maintenance than a typical website because people do attempt to spam forums for their own agendas. So, you may be left either facilitating discussions or blocking certain users who abuse the forum rules. The payback is that you do end up having a direct connection to your customers and they are usually willing to buy from someone whom they trust.
One of the truly wonderful things about a forum is that you can bypass some troubles that you might get with email autoresponders. If you send large emails to your members often, the email provider can block you as a spammer. If you send instant messages on the forum to all your members, they can get your message right away and you aren’t competing with anyone else’s email or fighting their email provider for a right to land in their inbox. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t use email but that building a social network is becoming more the norm than mass email campaigns.
Email is still popular, but you have to use it with some additional caveats. You can’t just send out a mass email to people who have not given you permission to correspond with them or sign-up to your email list. This is called spamming and, in some cases, you can end up in legal trouble over this practice.
“Click Here For Email Marketing Tips”
So, on your website, you want a way to capture a person’s email. This can be done by putting up forms that capture, not only the email of a person who wants a specific offer (usually a freebie incentive), but also the physical address too. If you currently do not have a way for people to get some instant offer in exchange for an email address, you are missing the first step in funneling them into your community or sales funnel. Without the email and permission to contact them, you won’t be able to market them effectively online. So, it pays to get that email address somehow.
Research, And Choose A Hot Market
Always develop your market niche with the bottom line in mind. Don’t waste your time on dead markets. You want to be able to put up a website offer that gets instant return on the money, not something that may or may not be profitable in the future. You don’t want to have to try and create desire, that never works. Instead, you want to go where the desire exists already and is waiting to be satisfied with your offers. As long as you continue to do the research on what markets are hottest and what is selling fast, you can make some good money now and in the future.
Once you target your copy to those markets and start generating traffic from people who are attracted to this market niche, the rest is simple. You want to create a system that starts making those visitors customers, as quickly as possible.
Ok, so this was just a basic understanding of what it takes to get a internet business rolling. However, there really is a lot more to having a very successful internet business. If you are serious about setting up your own online business, I highly recommend you check out the extentsive training lessons we offer here at Lurnprofit. “Access To Newbie Lessons”
To your great success on your online business journey,Bob@Lurnprofit
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