Internet Marketer's: Everyone Says Stick with the Fundamentals ... So, What are They?

Not adding but expanding No. 5 Brainstorming

It is important that we do brainstroming alone and in groups. With groups, a lot of insights, views, ideas will emerge and hence creating a richer session.

Hence, it is also very important to be networking. So, I want to add
No. 8 Networking
No. 9 Team Work

I just have three ...

1. Sales Basics -- Learn what to sell, who to sell it to, where to sell, when to sell, and how to sell ...

2. Business Development PPTs -- People. Processes. Technologies ...
Learn how to build, test and improve backend and frontend systems that can execute your plans through the right manpower resources for implementing your plans, through the right backend and frontend workflow processes for improving the efficiency and work output value of your manpower resources, and through the right technologies for improving the cost-effectiveness, productivity and overall work output value of your manpower resources and processes ...

3. Six Scientific Principles of Persuasion -- Reciprocity. Authority. Likeability. Exclusivity. Social Proof. Commitment / Consistency ...
Learn how to integrate these scientific principles into your entire business development, product development, value-added service support, backend and frontend sales, advertising and marketing campaigns ...

1) Know your audience. Research them inside and out to ensure that every blog, tweet, landing page and product description talks to your ideal customer.

2) Write awesome page copy. If your writing is average, then your conversions will be below average, so never settle for "okay". Find a great writer and make them a part of your team.

3) Learn search optimization....which is mostly just a combination of mastering #1 and #2 in this day and age. But you also need to understand backlink strategies, keyword research and hitting the key metrics Google looks for...and you can't do that if you don't know SEO.

4) Great communication with your leads, customers, strangers and everyone else is also essential. People will have questions....and how you answer them will play a critical role in your early success. If people are not asking questions (or just buying without asking questions) then you failed in steps 1, 2, and 3.

5) A solid email marketing strategy. Over 90% of all IMers have no idea how to write an email that sells or how often to send it, so they end up burning their own lists before they even have a product to sell. So study email marketing.

6) Build a revenue plan that just makes sense. The best products and services are the ones where a person will look at it and say, "Hey, I really need that!" Those sales are as smooth as silk. So you shouldn't have to be constantly selling to make ends meet...pick products that your traffic actually wants to buy.

7) Learn how to use social media to market your brand. This is a lot like tip #5...spamming links and product photos will only produce dismal results. So learn how to engage your audience and create interest with everything you share.

Note that I didn't list PPC marketing as an essential, even though we all know that it really is. The reason I did that is because if you don't truly know your customer and your copy is not speaking directly to them, then pay per click marketing is virtually useless. You'll end up burning through your entire budget in record time and end up with a site that could never convert in the first place....so work your natural leads through steps 1-7 first and don't even think about PPC until all your channels are producing.

I hope that helps.

1. Determine Your Skill Sets

2. Layout a Business Plan around those skill sets

3. Build upon those skill sets within the business frame (how will you be making money with your knowledge? )

4. Begin to build you're business

5. Reinvest into your success.


This is a general fundamental way to realize your options/potential. Evaluation, Organization, Execution.

Making money online is not that complicated, at first as a newbie its information overload, but there are only two fundamental things if you focus on will make you all the money in the world, you never have to get in to content writing, blogging, website building, product creation...ETC, Seriously I own membership sites, my own products, blah, blah, blah...I have been doing this since 2003 and their is one thing, I am going back to very soon, is just being an affiliate and selling others people stuff..You can make as much money as you want selling other peoples stuff, let them have all the headaches, remain an affiliate if you truly want the dot com lifestyle..

Simple easy..

Generate traffic, send it to your squeeze pages (opt-in pages), then have your autoresponder direct that traffic after opt-ing in to the offer. Then follow up with them via email, very easy to make $100,000 a year doing this if you only focus on two things.

The two things you should be focused on is

1. Traffic, and using that traffic to build your email list as large and as fast as you can.
Everyday do some traffic building activity to increase your number of subscribers to your email list a day.

You should use both free and paid traffic. If you only trade your time for traffic it will be a looooooong haul! Start with a small budget and reinvest your profits, there are many very inexpensive traffic sources. If you do this right, you should be able to add over 300 subscribers to your email list in just your first thirty days. You scale this up as you make money.

2. Send at least 1 broadcast email message to your personal email list everyday (YES EVERYDAY).
Encourage them, share whats working for you, tell them about you, ask them to reply to your emails. Connect with them by giving them your email, skype or facebook page. Tell stories to sell your products, services or affiliate programs. Use special offers, or discount. (how you handle this part is all dependent upon your niche and what you are trying to sell, but you still should try to make a connection.) In my retail stores I once owned my best customers were the ones I got to know the best..make sense?

So if your sending traffic to your own website, blog, or affiliate offer, make sure that your traffic first lands on your relevant opt-in page and then gets redirected to your offer or sales page. Most people never buy the first time they see something, so using a opt-in page to send your traffic to and using an autoresponder, allows you to follow up with the people on your list. The follow up is where I make 95% of my own income. Do the work once and build customers for life.

If you dont have a process in place like this you are wasting your time and your traffic, this is how you simplify internet marketing.

There is no tricks, no shortcuts, no secret formulas..........The reason email marketing works is because you can follow up with people, thats it, its that simple do not over complicate it, unless you want a full time job.

You do not need to own your own products or programs, I know people who make over a million dollars a year, and they are only affiliate marketers who promote only other peoples stuff, the worst thing I ever did, was create my own membership sites, I make great money online and am free, but would be making ten times that amount had I not done so.

Internet marketing is foolishly simple..When you have the right process in place!

I forgot to mention this, there are only three things you really need to have in order to make money online.

1. An autorespnder
2. Traffic
3. A product or service to sell

Thats it!

And if you follow the process I outlined in my first response you could sell ice to Eskimos!!

My opinion is Email marketing is a great way to be present and increase visibility. Your website products or service can be effectively targeted by narrowing down to a list of the targeted population who can mailed in time or on regular basis, be it , daily, weekly or monthly.

At the risk of sounding trite, I think the most basic fundamental is marketing. That's a broad brush stroke but it's all right. I recall reading something written years ago by Clayton Makepeace, ultra successful copywriter who has since retired as far as I know.

He made a case that the most important part of any business, especially offline since that was his primary market, was the marketing department. And the most important daily activity for any business was to engage in marketing.

Of course that activity can be broken down to the specific type(s) of marketing a business engages in, etc.

So you can imagine a pyramid with marketing at the apex. Underneath are all the components that comprise a particular type or area of marketing. Any fundamental activity has its unique components that must be developed in terms of quality and execution.

Ken

Offer something people want. This can be a report, article, software, game, video, affiliate program, etc.


Be able to answer this question SPECIFICALLY: Where EXACTLY will you find people interested in your offer?


Networking. One tip is, instead of asking for a free mentor, seek out successful marketers and ask what you can do for them, not what they can do for you.

Hey Roy,
I appreciate the fact that you separate List Building and Email Marketing. As time has gone from my own experience I think there is an important distinguishable difference in the two.

Just because you build a HUGE List doesn't mean you are going to be successful in email marketing. It is just one ingredient in it.

next comes..
strategic email followups/ broadcasts, managing your List, promotions etc..etc..


- Robert Andrew

I've always believed in boiling things down to 4 simple steps, so here goes:

Learn copywriting, build/foster relationships with other successful internet marketers, keep an eye on what others are doing and learn how to generate traffic.

My quick 2cents.

Seven? Easy.

1. Know what you do
2. Tell people what you do
3. Make a list of people who want that done
4. Offer to do it for money <- That's a business. You don't have this, you got nothin'.
5. Cultivate a relationship with your customers
6. Offer to do a bigger better job of it for more money
7. Teach other people to do what you do for a LOT more money

There are subtleties, but these are the basics.

The biggest fundamental is to always realize no matter what niche or business model you're building is that you are a problem solver.

Always focused on what the problems are for your niche, and deliver them solutions.

Everything else is extra to allow you to do this faster for more people in a more helpful way. This fundamental works for affiliate, mlm, your own products, services or whatever it is you want to sell.

you know, i actually think this thread illustrates exactly why its so hard for most people to actually create a profitable and sustainable business online or offline for that matter.

the truth is there are a lot of "fundamentals". you dont have to do every single one of them perfectly, but you cant get too many of the wrong or your business just wont work.

there are a lot of moving parts to a successful business and you gotta get them all working together in just the right way to make it work. and just when you do, someone will through a wrench in your plan with a panda bear from google or just good old fashioned competition.

i personally think most people should be required to read a couple of offline business books before they ever head online to try to start one of these instant millionaire businesses.

most of the fundamentals of successful businesses have been discussed in much greater detail in offline publications than they are by the "gurus" of internet marketing.

very few business fundamentals change when you add the word "online".

For me, the most important thing is to not give up. I was active in 1999-2001, received some checks and then I gave up, mostly because my mother passed away and I started working full time.

Had I known what I know now, I would have persevered and continued with my passion, working online.

So, I still know the fundementals, but I have to take action to make it work.

I think a lot of what google says, just be yourself and make a site that helps others, can do the trick.

i guess from my point of view, having run successful businesses for closing in on 20 years now, i just realize there are a lot of things that make a business work.

there are in fact, quite a few that i would say if you take that aspect away would quickly make me have to buy lots of red pens instead of black ones.

to me, your statement is more of a mission statement than a fundamental of business. although i can certainly see where you can argue that it is THE fundamental.

i just realize how many other fundamentals or sub-fundamentals if you want to call them that are wrapped up in that statement.

if you tell a newbie just that single statement there is a near 100% chance thats not enough info to help him much. it may help guide their thinking if they plaster that on the front of their notebook,but they are going to have to fill in some of those notebook pages with other "fundamentals" before they have much....if any success.

Dispense what doesn't work and ramp up what does work.

Never forget that what goes around comes around. Be sure to help others in your online marketing efforts and others will help you.

I have to go with:

1) Creating a basic website
2) Setting up a lead capture form on your blog/site
3) Copywriting
4) Where to search for paid advertising opportunities
5) Learning how to make money without money
6) Knowing how to work an autoresponder
7) Free traffic generation

My fundamental for achieving success in making money online would be summarized into one no matter what method of delivery you use:

Help other people get what they want in life.

I have seen this to stand the test of time. You may use free or paid methods of delivering help to other people. It is just that when you use multiple tools or strategies, the faster and the more people you would be able to help and the bigger the returns.

like me and CD were talking about last night in this thread, there are actually somewhat different fundamentals for many different types of business.

if you run an eCommerce site your fundamental things that are required to bring in a profit are going to be somewhat different than if you run a fiverr gig business. and if you run a solo ad business, your fundamentals are different still.

i guess a big part of being an entrepreneur is to be able to actually decide which are the fundamentally important things to the success of your business.

if we were to list all the fundamentals of all the online business models a person could start it would be a pretty long list.

i only have one do
do what is best for me..thats all..

Here's a couple of fundamentals that are rarely brought up:


Ethics
Basic business law

Finally someone's talking about #3 consistency... This seems to be a problem in the modern world.
It's a lot about discipline... like in the army.....
Just waking up every morning at 7am and keep getting effective things done...
You'll have to find what's "effective" at what you do. But pick one thing and kill it... Do it till you are very good at it.

1 delayed gratification, i.e. patience
2 creating offers that convert on frontend to be able to reinvest into traffic
3 follow up, i.e. email marketing
4 copywriting
5 creating jvs
6 ability to focus
7 stop buying, start selling

My 2c

In my opinion - 100% list-building as #1.

With it opens up MANY options for you.

Sell traffic, product launches, self-promotions, you name it...

Plus your list becomes your biggest asset - you have on-demand marketing potential and you can change the lives of the ones on your list. It's up to you how you market, I'm sure people want to hear what you have to say, and others will love some of your promotions.

Build a relationship and you'll have a healthy, active community of people who read what you have to say!

So here's my list:

1. List-building
2. Copywriting
3. Email marketing
4. Networking
5. Follow/learn from product launches (not necessarily join them)
6. Social media
7. PPC/Paid traffic sources

1. Work from a list.
2. Use a Pomodoro timer.
3. Don't break your streak.

I've got a podcast full of fundamentals at RED - Real Entrepreneur Development | Make More Money. Work Less. Live a Life of Freedom. you might like.

At the end of the day: You're a marketer.

Give the people what they want.

Building a system for actions that can be automatic.

To have a successful online business these are the two main skills you need to master:

1.) Traffic Generation (a.k.a. Getting Website Visitors)
2.) Converting Website Visitors into Buyers

There are many other related skills required to get these two fundamental skills right. Skills such as writing ad copy, ad design, purchasing ad units, ad targeting, split-testing, etc. are all related skills that branch off of these two main fundamental skills. All of the skills required to run a profitable online business come back to mastering traffic generation and conversions.

I think the reason why everyone has a different opinion on fundamentals is the fact that there is no one size fits all recipe that you can apply and obtain success! It's the beauty of IM, it's so diverse!

For me among other things the major one to highlight is

Help other people as much as you can, with best of your intentions. Always jusdge yourself whether you are providing any quality, any value addition in your services to your team/customers or not.

Funda is, do good to others and you will be rewarded.

who are you targeting

how can you help them

There are only 3 basics:

Targeted traffic -> converting front end offer -> back end monetization venues.

You master those 3 (in order) and you WILL make money online. All the rest is noise.

It seems that everyone has a different idea of what the fundamentals are. Here are mine:

1. Create a blog and/or vlog and provide value. Do not hide all of your value behind a price tag, be generous, for you want people to invest in you, not just buy a product once, opt out of the email list they tentatively subscribed to, and never return. Get yourself a rabid fanbase and community going!

2. You need a list. A list can be people who are subscribed to your blog, YouTube channel, follow your Facebook page, or opt into your email list. All of these things are lists, but don't just spam them or you'll see the number of subscribers you have drop like leaves in the fall.

3. If you're into MLM, then you'd better have a way to train your recruits. Unless your team is compromised exclusively of heavy-hitters, you need some way to teach those beneath you in your downline how to be successful. If they don't make money, you don't make money and have to do twice the work. Sure, they may stick around just because they love the company's product, but then they still aren't recruiting for you.

Well, that's it for me.

In my 15 plus years online I've learned to make my life easier by keeping things simple, my take on the fundamentals in terms of doing business online is as follows:

• You must know your outcome.
• You must absolutely take total control of your own thoughts
• You must absolutely make a real decision (burn your boats off the shore so to speak).
• Find a problem
• Get inside the mind of those that have that problem(s)
• Find several solutions to that problem based on market research
• Find someone or a group that having success solving that particular problem
• Find a mentor OR a coach
• Be teachable, be a student (never lose the student paradigm).
• Learn the basics of copywriting
• Learn the basics of selling and expose yourself to different philosophies
• Learn how to obtain traffic (free and paid)
• Learn how to convert that traffic.
• Test, tweak, and test some more, always try to beat your control group
• Build your own network (i.e. list buiding, registered members, social media followers, etc.)
• Understand what positioning is and how to use it to increase your perceived (and real) value
• Master customer service before and after the sale and many of your customers can and will become your BEST affiliates.
• Do not limit yourself to one distribution channel
• Find out what you're passionate about and pursue it IF market research shows that it can be profitable.
• When life becomes too comfortable, find a way to push yourself outside your comfort zone - that's when new personal and professional growth will come your way.
• Build relationships with other people.
• Once a relationship is built with a person in XYZ, don't be afraid to ask them to introduce you to one or two other people.
• Be a person of your word and have integrity, you'll get MORE longterm profits that way.
• Explore meditation if you haven't yet, it's already been scientifically proven to help you heal faster, think better, improve health, and many other benefits.
• Be very careful who you habitually spend time with, they are affecting you in ways you might not be aware of. Make it point to surround yourself with people that are like-minded, action-minded, and will PUSH you outside your comfort zone.
• Realize that you're going to have many failures along the way, it's part of life and part of doing business. The only way to not fail is to get back up and keep on going.
• Once you've obtained success, pay it forward.

There are many other fundamentals, but these are at the heart of what I've learned at being in business, not just online but offline as well.


RoD

Good post. I think internet marketing can be divided into following steps:

1) Select mode - affiliate marketing/selling your own products

2) Build Content

3) Build List

4) Learn how to communicate with your reader and subscribers

5) Learn the ways to drive targeted traffic

Well NicheMan,

People have brought up positioning before in the Main Forum, but it's not something that's usually brought up. When Jeremy Kelsall used to post here, he used to bring up frequently. Many of the old timers that used to post here (John Reese, Mike Filsaime, Marlon Sanders, etc.) have brought up before (yeah, I know I'm dating myself).

Positioning goes hand-in-hand with your USP (unique selling proposition). It spells the difference on charging $15 per hour for your time and $500 per hour for your time (as one example).

I know many authors that are part of my sphere of influence, one them makes a pretty good living at it and he charges about 2 to 5 cent per word for things that he writes for others.

The second author does charge per word, she charges people an hourly rate or per project and she has positioned herself in such a way where she outearned the other guy by more than four times over.

Both are solid writers with impressive backgrounds, but the second author is a better marketer. She has invested the time and money to promote herself and her work in such way that she has positioned herself to being the go-to person for the type of writing that she does.

Positioning is huge and is very much intertwined with the rest of the fundamentals.

This will probably never change, but I still see a lot of newbies come to this forum, asking for which niche is the most profitable or what's the "easiest" and "fastest" way to make money online. The problem with that question is that it neglects the most obvious answer......

If you want to make a lot of money online (or offline), you've got to learn the fundamentals. That increases your chances of making a lot of money by at least tenfold.

If I had to start all over again, I would have stopped focusing on the "easiest" and the "fastest" and would have made more of an effort to learn the fundamentals that I listed in my bullet points above.

RoD

Short one but I'm going to throw in project management...

You don't have to do everything (you can outsource copy for example) but you do have to make sure everything gets done (and in a timely fashion).