If you run an internet business or home business, then you have to be a marketer. Internet marketing is crucial to getting website traffic, and/or having some kind of market to pitch your offers to. Without internet marketing, it is next to impossible to survive in the highly competitive internet business arena.

For the past few months I’ve been analyzing the plethora of email offers on what seems to be very innovative internet businesses, that inundate my mailbox daily. And let me tell you, I’m getting really jaded from reading about the same old ‘never released before closely guarded secrets’ on yet another incomparable internet business that is going to ‘take the world by storm’. Talk about over-worn cliches.

A lot of marketers try to sell you the business plan for the latest hot item (or sometimes not so ‘latest’ or ‘hot’), while they go on to the next miracle product which they package with their ‘never-revealed-before secrets’ that will cause an avalanche of money to roll into your bank account.

Playing on emotions.

Sales copies are constructed for one primary purpose - to incite your emotions. They spur you to fire your boss, holiday in the Caribbean, own flashy cars and ostentatious homes, work only 30 minutes then luxuriate in indolence, or simply enjoy the absolute euphoria of all play and no work.

Your visions of “instant internet riches” and fantasies of becoming “a millionaire overnight,” have been once again given a patina of reality. And, oh glorious day! To get all this without really having to engage the brain or tax any muscle. It must be possible after all.

Take a deep breath. It’s a mirage, a rainbow with no pot of gold at the end or anywhere near. An internet business is not some genie to put you on easy street instantly.

The ‘closely guarded secrets’ of instant wealth turn out to be either new or re-packaged marketing strategies that require a lot more time and effort to implement than you ever visualized. The word ‘instant’ is deliberately packaged to conjure an image of immediacy. And though you will certainly see profits if you work the business right and long enough, the millions may or may not invade your bank account.

You’re only getting opportunities.

What you’re really getting are the opportunities to make money, not a guaranteed commitment, so take time to properly evaluate the true value of the offer. Read the disclaimers that are the footnote of all spectacular offers [usually in small unobtrusive print] and see if you find any ‘guarantee there.

Is there a formula for success?

Yes. Patience, commitment, belief, tenacity, enthusiasm (even when the situation seems all uphill and futile), concentration, creativity and work…lots of it.

To succeed in running an internet business or home business you need to make your presence felt. You need to be on the map. And you need people who want to find you and your product or service. You need marketing. Getting completely submerged in the millions of web sites is easy. Positioning yourself in a visible position is what a successful internet business is all about. Hundreds of thousands of people attempt to establish an online business each year…and hundreds of thousands fail.

Sure, their products were useful, their ideas original, their websites beautiful and their offers without parallel.

So what went wrong?

Their internet marketing strategies bombed, never took root or were not even implemented. After all, the offer they bought into claimed they would make money so fast their banks couldn’t record the deposits fast enough - and all this without effort. Piece of cake. Nothing was mentioned about months of consolidated orchestrated marketing to get an internet presence first.

Truth? It’s not easy to get into the wings, let alone center stage, on the internet, regardless of how spectacular the product or service. Each year websites are born and die without leaving the slightest trace of their existence.

Invisible businesses precede extinction.

Here’s why. Just one reason.

Shoddy, slovenly, disjointed, fuzzy marketing.

Their business was as invisible as a snowflake in a blizzard.

Those who do succeed splendidly have one common trait; they first study marketing techniques, improve their writing skills (yes, there’s a lot of creative writing involved in running an internet business), are patient and involved, are organized and focused and are able to think outside the box.

If you have a large budget you can of course contract out the entire execution, from web page designing to search engine optimization; marketing and promotions; advertising and publicity.

If not, you’ll need to start at the shallow end, learn the strokes, then head for the high-diving board much later.

However, regardless whether you start up a zero-cost business or a multi-million dollar one, they will need to be marketed before they create a presence and start bringing in the profits.

There’s a lot of trumpeting about niche markets, niche products and niche websites. That’s the current buzz. I looked up the definition in The American Heritage Dictionary, and it read…”a crevice or narrow opening in a rock; a hollow in a wall for housing a statue.” Hmm!

I’ve been involved in internet businesses for some time and I know how challenging marketing a business on the internet is. I certainly don’t need the added weight of a narrow, restrictive market. I will admit that there’s money to be made from niche products, but the marketability of these products are very ephemeral. When the fad fades, you need to start the whole marketing process again for the next fad.

Are you willing to do this continually?

Niche v/s established markets

A much easier and more practicable method is to select a business that commands an established market, provides you a website or two, hosts the sites, offers marketing material that you can adapt to suit your personal taste, and has very low or preferably no start-up costs.

Start with the right kind of business. This leaves you free to concentrate on the one activity that can really put you in the money — strategic internet marketing.

Successful people are guided by their focus, not by their feelings.”

Please include author’s name and website link if reproducing this article.

Dan Jeremiah, www.vmsbonline.com

More than 95% of internet businesses fail, usually because of too narrow a market, spotty marketing, or offers with limited appeal.

Secure your position by affiliating with businesses that command a wide market, and appeal to a large cross-section of households, not just individuals. The bigger the market, the higher the demand and the better your success rate.

Hop over to http://www.vmsbonline.com/mallbiz.html and take precisely such a business for a free trial run. Links to useful and easy to use marketing tools are also featured, so you can get started today and see results faster.

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he major thing about landing pages, and we have seen people make this mistake over and over again, is that when you are testing your landing page and let us just say you are getting like twenty clicks you are getting like one opt-in or two opt-ins and you are trying to get it down lower. On your landing page, you need to, when you are changing a few things, do not do any major changes on your landing page, do minor changes, because we have seen people do major changes on their landing pages and they are getting two opt-ins out of every twenty clicks and then all of a sudden they are getting like two opt-ins out of every fifty or seventy-five because of some changes they did.And on top of that they did not save their landing page so they were unable to go back to the original one, so they were in a mess until they start tweaking it to get it back to where it was and then start back again. So make minor changes at one time to your landing pages. What we do is just tweak them, test them for a day or two or a few days and see if anything increases and that is how we do it. Your ads, test those too, you can see the amount of impressions you get versus the amount of clicks you get, your click through rate, which is your CTR. See what the response rate is. That is why Google, when you see our videos we talk about quality score, Google likes quality marketers with quality ads, that is why they will give you a higher ranking, it does not matter if they are bidding higher or not.

Test your ads, test your auto responder series, you can tweak your auto responder series. They have tools now for auto responders where you can make the urls clickable where you can track the click through rates. You can get third party services to do the click through rates, all types of testing that you can do. With third party audio services they have tools where you can check and see how many people listened to it, how many people listened to it through completion, the average listening time of the audio, all types of things you can look at. So it is all about tweaking your process. The reason that it is so important to tweak your process is because, not that you are going to do a bad job if you do not tweak it, if you are getting two opt-ins out of every twenty clicks, and let us just say your sales process is one out of every twenty-five opt-ins you generate one sale.

So you get two out of every twenty clicks, you are getting two opt-ins. We have people that tweak their sales process, their landing page, their auto responder series and their ads, and they are getting one sale for every twenty-five opt-ins. You are getting, like I said, out of every twenty clicks you are getting two opt-ins, we have been tweaking it for a while, like thirty or sixty days, and all of a sudden we are down to getting for every five clicks we get one opt-in. So that means out of every hundred clicks we get twenty opt-ins. And for every hundred clicks you get, you get eight opt-ins. So just over a hundred, we are already at twenty-five opt-ins, just over a hundred clicks. And like I said before, for every twenty-five opt-ins you get one sale, we have already made like four hundred bucks.

George Collins has been marketing on the Internet for many years. Discover how to develop tons of traffic to convert to sales, scope out our free report.
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