It’s easy to get lost in all the hype of IM even if you’ve been around for a while. There’s always some new hot product that makes everything else no longer relevant, your life will do a backflip and money will flow out of your bank account like the Niagra Falls. But it’s important especially when new to set a plan and stick with it.
The best place for new people to start out is in affiliate marketing. If you’ve been reading the posts I’ve made this week, you know what I’m about to say next… NOT in the Internet Marketing niche! Please don’t try to help people make money online when you haven’t made any yourself, and have no idea about it.
Instead, start in another niche in a low competition keyword, and start promoting a page with your link on it. I recently wrote How To: Keyword Research, which will help you choose a great low competition keyword. After you’ve chose your keyword it’s as “easy” as setting up your website/article/squidoo lens or whatever method you choose, and promoting that page.
The immediate, fastest, and most cost affective way is through PPC, Pay Per Click. The most common place being through Google, but Facebook also has a great ppc program, which is really affective at target marketing specific audiences.
But if you’re like me when I started out I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on advertising that I wasn’t sure would work, on a system that I was unfamiliar with so I decided to take another route. Though not the cheapest like setting up a Squidoo Lens with an affiliate link, I chose to set up a website of my own, on my own domain. This way I had more control over the look and layout, and was able to test different approaches.
I then wrote content, added a few clickbank affiliate links, and started promoting the site through article marketing. Just article marketing alone. About 50 articles and 2 months later I was in the top 10 on google for my low competition keyword, and averaging a sale a week, as I worked my way into #1 .
I had probably spent $15 on the entire setup, and would only “work” once every few days writing a few articles at a time, just testing the waters of it. I saw a return on my investment, and I’ve been hooked ever since. If you’re wanting to get started in Internet Marketing and you’re just not sure about where to start, just do it. Invest $20 or whatever in yourself not for a new ebook, but for a domain and hosting, and start promoting using articles, and other link building methods to get yourself ranked for a low competition keyword.
Trust me, they pay off. And once you’ve seen for yourself how the whole process works, you’ll be in a much better position to start taking on larger more profitable projects.
And if you’re too cheap to invest $20? Then don’t set up a Squidoo Lens, or write an article that allows an affiliate link, and promote that page. The conversion rates aren’t as good as having your own site, but you can still make money with them. Once you see some money coming in, reinvest that money into a domain and hosting for a new keyword/product/project.
