Newbies: The Biggest Online Marketing Secret & How You Can Profit From It Today

The biggest secret is this: online marketing is just direct-response marketing and if you apply the principles of direct-response marketing to the web you are going to be successful if you select the right market and know what the market wants of course.

Direct-response marketing is different from traditional advertising, it asks for a response.

There are two basic responses you can get:

1. getting a lead (getting someone to your direct sales funnel)
2. getting a sale

There are three elements in any direct-response marketing to be successful:

1. a relevant offer (what the market wants)
2. a relevant list
3. relevant copy
4. traffic

An Offer

That is the affiliate product you are promoting or your own product. In order to make a good living my recommendation is to promote quality products that exceed expectations, it's a win-win solution.

A List

Can be your own list or someone's else list. In case you don't have a list and have a website go to Email Marketing Software, Email Newsletters and Autoresponders by AWeber and signup for getting to use their software. After that you need to create a squeeze page.

The squeeze page is just a webpage that do one thing only: to collect the name and email address of every visitor.

If you are using someone else list it's called a Joint-Venture. It means you do a deal were the JV partner has a big list of people who trust him and you offer the product. The JV Partner endorse you to his list and you split the profits of the sales.

Copy

Copy as in copywriting (not copyright). Copywriting is salesmanship-in-print. It means knowing how to persuade people to click, buy, signup, etc...

You need to learn this craft if you want to become successful with your emails, products or affiliate promotions.

Here are some good resources:
Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples
Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz
Web Copy That Sells 2nd Edition by Maria Veloso
The Ultimate Salesletter by Dan Kennedy
The Robert Collier Letter Book by Robert Collier
How To Write a Good Advertisement by Victor O. Schwab
The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman

Because copywriting is such an extensive subject, I recommend you read some of these books.

Traffic

Traffic is the most crucial step if you don't have yet a list and you want to grow a list.

I think this has been really covered so if you are starting on a low-string budget here are the best traffic strategies:

1. Article Marketing: promote by writing quality articles with low competition keywords.
2. Videos: use the same SEO principles and promote to the big sites like youtube.
3. Forums: provide quality information to forums in your niche and use your sig file to promote quality offers to your audience.
4. SEO: provide quality content on your site and build back-links in order to get high google rankings and get traffic.
5. Social Media / Yahoo Answers: Add people who are interested in what you offer on Facebook (search niche groups or people who are authorities and add people) and Twitter (follow people who follow authorities in your niche) and answer relevant questions of your niche in Yahoo Answers and provide a link back to your site.

If you have a marketing budget you can invest in:

1. PPC: That means pay-per-click advertising in the search engines or sites. You pay if someone else clicks on your link and you get relevant traffic.
2. Media Buys: Banners are still alive, search for relevant sites and look for their "Advertise with us" link, ask for their media kit and never pay the media kit rates, you'll get relevant traffic.
3. PPV: Be careful with these one, it's called pay-per-view, you basically pay when someone views your ad, it can be very cheap, but ineffective if you don't know how to do it right.

Bonus marketing strategies:
1. Build relationship marketing: Go out there and contact people who have authority in your niche, offer them your services and a way of helping them, you can build future JV partnerships these ways.
2. Write a good ebook that is useful and give it away in JV giveaways in order to get traffic and build your list.

And one more thing, remember that your prospects and customers list is your most important asset you'll ever had.

Provide them with good quality content and they'll buy from you. After that it's just a numbers game.

Hope it helps,

Juan Saldivar