Online Marketing Secrets

For those of you looking to make a livelihood 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 net. You have to have persons who know what they are talking about, who actually make serious revenue online, to guide you through the mine field of errors to success.



There are literally hundreds of self-anointed web marketing "gurus" out there just waiting to vend you their counsel, schemes, classes, software and the like. Once you buy a service or product from one of them, you will be overwhelmed by email solicitations from many of them urging you to get the latest e-book, class or software that purportedly will guide you straight to the vaults of Fort Knox.



I am not insinuating that these so-called web marketing gurus are not earning big bucks online but most of them are just marketing you bits and pieces of the puzzle or old, obsolete information that no longer works. The Internet is a fast-changing marketplace with mammoth competition for whatever you want to push. Locating a small, unique marketing niche means less competition but it also may mean that not many people are actively looking for what it is that you are selling.



The trick is to locate 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 open the Google Adwords Keyword Tool from inside the Google system, although you can also access it from without. When you open it from the inside, you are given all of the possible keywords, not just the top 100. If you re-sort (in an external search) in ascending order in an external search, you will be shown only the bottom 100. If there were 300 possible keywords, you would never see the middle 100. Your best keywords are often in the middle, so always take the trouble 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 number, look directly under the Google search box (less than 5 million pages is an acceptable amount.) If you can come across a keyword that passes the test in both categories (high search and low competition), you may have discovered a satisfactory 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 vend to your web marketing place. You can make your own item or find one to market on the net. You can locate drop shippers of physical products at drop ship directories like Salehoo.com or you can find information and software products to plug on ClickBank.com. On ClickBank, you can either become a vendor and push your own product(s) or be an affiliate and market other people’s products.



If you aspire to be a vendor, you will need to construct 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 juncture, you are only partially there. You still have to publicize 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 discover all the things you can do for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) including creating articles for article submission sites in order to create one-way, inbound links to your site. You can also register yourself on various web sites, forums, blogs and educational (.edu) sites and leave comments and links there.



You will learn the pros and cons of paid vs. free ads to promote your site. You will learn about utilizing "squeeze pages" to develop lucrative targeted email lists. You may also want to fabricate a blog on blogger.com or on WordPress.com and post links from that back to your web site or affiliate page.



You will have to find major ways to herd online traffic to your web site, blog or to an affiliate landing page and you will discover that pertinent, highly-targeted traffic is the only online traffic that is worth attracting. Highly-targeted traffic means people who are very interested in the very kind of things you are selling and are looking to purchase 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 stopped running and who has to have a new fridge before all his food spoils?



At this juncture, you are probably beginning to grasp that web marketing success requires more than converting your computer to an ATM 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 significant number of individuals who, by determined work or good fortune, have found a way (or ways) to position themselves to make massive 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, assist you in finding your way through the mine field and into the interior of the money vault.



There are a number of Internet marketing gurus who have a better mind-set 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 bank account is not exactly spilling over with cash like theirs is now and so they will keep their price tag 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 advertisements will make it look like you will), but with some exploration and patience you will be able to find all the working parts and assemble them into a workable system.



Look for various supportive web marketing gurus. They are around and they will usually have quick ways for you to make money right now on the net to get you started while you are studying all they have to teach you on the subject of Internet marketing. Be admonished once more that the majority of so-called "gurus" are promoting obsolete plans or computer programs that they already know cannot work out for you in the long run. Wading through this swamp takes time, conscious awareness and persistence,



Nonetheless, you can find big money in the not-too-distant future as you take the time to learn and put into operation the information you have come by. Knowledge is everything. Learn from people who actually know marketing online, who are actually making genuine money on the Internet themselves (and can corroborate that) and who are oriented towards helping you get started for a reasonable cost.



I hope you realize the fact that, in this article, I have given you some really useful information which I acquired 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 the wrong turns you are most certain to make. Just keep your eye on the goal at the end of the road. When something doesn't work out, find out why and learn from that. Each step of the way, you will be absorbing more and more information, giving you the experience you will have to have to get where you are headed. Bon Voyage!