Kick start your internet marketing campaign

Recently, there has been a huge influx of new members into the forum and the question of where to start within IM has repeatedly come up.

I thought that I would share a plan on how you could begin to set up your internet business for all the people that are finding it hard to get started, so here we go...

1. Make time
To begin with, it is important that you set some time aside to work on your internet business. This could be a few hours each evening or at a time that suits you. By keeping your time organised and keeping to your planned working time as best as possible, it is far more likely that you will stay motivated on the project at hand and not get distracted.

2. Find a niche
A niche is a certain topic that a product or service is based around. When first starting, it is best to find a niche that you are familliar with and so have some experince with. For example, if you are a dog owner then a posible niche could be 'caring for your dog' or something similar. By choosing something that you have experience with, you already have knowledge in place to write about the subject.

3. Register a domain
To get your site online you will need a domain name. This is the web address that you type into your browser to visit a certain website. Your domain name should be based around your niche and should include key words related to your niche (to find out more about keywords then run a quick search in the forum - there are plenty of great threads on the sbject). When registering your domain name there are lots of companies to choose from. GoDaddy.com is highly recommded in this forum and a search for 'godaddy coupons' can get you money off a domain name.

4. Find hosting for your site
Once you have a domain name you need hosting so you can show your content to the world. Hostgator.com seems to be a warrior forum favourite and has a number of perks as well as being very reliable.

5. Where to go from here
It is now time to make the decision of what to do within your niche. I you are a keen writer and would like to have a go at writing and marketing your own ebook then take a look at point 6A. However, if you are not so keen on writing your own material and would prefer to promote products written by other people take a look at 6B.

6A. Your own product
When starting out, writing an ebook is usually the best place to start if you want to create your own product. Here you can provide valuable information for customers in your niche in an easy to understand format (usually PDF). When writing, use a friendly but informaitive style and then you can use a free PDF converter to turn your work into a finalised and distributable version. There are many resources on writing your own product out there that you could use to find more information on creating your product.

To market your product, you will need a sales page that grabs the reader and encourages them to purchase your product. This page will be under your chosen domain and will use your hosting provider to appear on the internet. Creating an attractive sales page and writing a decent sales copy will take quite a bit of work, but they are valuable skills to learn and can be used many times in future. If you find it hard to produce these, then they can be outsourced and there are many mini site designers and copywriters on this forum.

Once you have set up your sales page, you need to drive some some targeted traffic to this page in order to start making sales (see step 7).

6B. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the act of promoting products written by other people in order to get a share of the profits from each sale that has been referred by you. You will therefore need a site (set up on your domain name and hosting package) in order to promote the links to the products that you are an affiliate for. This site can be a number of things depending on what you feel comfortable creating (eg. a review site or a blog). Here you can provide your affiliate links and hopefully sell other peoples products for them to make money.

To find products to promote head over to clickbank.com and run a search for products that fit your niche. Once you've found some suitable products then you can sign up for a clickbank account and get promoting.

Once you have set up this site, then you need to begin to drive traffic to it in order to promote these products.

7. Traffic generation
Neither of the two methods in step 6 can succeed without driving traffic to your website. This thread gives some great information on generating traffic and I recommend you check it out http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...r-traffic.html


I hope this plan helps some of you out there, but remember, this is a just a simple guide to one way of starting out in IM and there many other methods that you can combine with this in order to increase your income.

Catherine