Part 2 of 3
We pick up where Introduction to Internet Marketing (Part 1) left off.
Let’s say you want to make money via a work at home internet marketing website and you have an interest in bird watching. Let’s further say you find out, there are people who make money selling information products on bird watching on the internet. So, you’d like to have a domain name that told people your website was about bird watching. “BirdWatching.com” would be an ideal domain name. Trouble is, it’s already taken, so now you will have to think of another one that isn’t taken but close in meaning to Bird Watching.
Once you get a domain name, now you have to build your website to make money. There are plenty of tools out there to help you. Many of them are free. But, just what do you build? Well, your niche is bird watching so your website would be your creation and it would be around bird watching. There are even website templates and skins available to simplify things. Of course you work at home doing all this.
For a product to sell, the easiest to promote would be an affiliate program on bird watching. Or, create your own info ebook on something about bird watching. Something people would be willing to pay for. It’s got to be quality work–you don’t want a bad reputation on the internet. You can always hire someone to write it for you too if you like.
You’ll also need to decide how you wish to go about getting visitors to your website. Getting visitors is a pro-active job. This is true on an eBay business too.
There are many methods one can use to get visitors. Many of these methods can be readily found on the internet, including this website, Earn Money Ways dot com. Some of these methods are free, like this article here, Getting Visitors to Your Website.
Once you figure out how you want to get visitors to your website (by the way, visitors are called “traffic”), that decision will also help you shape what your website looks like. If you strictly want to advertise to get your traffic, then you’ll need a sign-up page to capture visitor’s email addresses. You’ll also need a sales page, a thank you page, and maybe a couple more pages for other products you might like to offer for sale. And lastly, you’ll need a gift in exchange for the visitor’s email address. Or, you can go straight for the sale from the ad and skip the sign-up page altogether.
If you don’t want to advertise to get your traffic (visitors), then you’ll need to do something called “search engine optimization,” or SEO for short. This is where you make your website as attractive as possible to search engines, so when people search for “bird watching” for example, your site will be on page one of the search results. The more attractive your site is to search engines, the closer to the number one spot you could find yourself. The closer to the #1 spot, the more free visitors you’ll have and the more money you will make.
Now, to make your website attractive to search engines, they like to see a whole lot of unique information–articles on bird watching in this case. You’ll need about 25-30 or so unique articles. You do not want articles that are on other people’s websites–this is very important for SEO.
Then you have to optimize your articles for the search terms people use to find bird watching things. This means if someone plugs in “blue-jay habitat” in a search engine, you want to have an article or two on blue-jay habitats and have the search term “blue-jay habitat” in it and in the title of the article. In other words, the article has to be about “blue-jays habitat.” And you target in your articles the search terms people use in search engines so search engines will know the articles on your website has the information this person is looking for. This is called targeting your articles for keywords or phrases where a keyword or phrase is a search term.
You’ll have to do some research using some cool free tools to discover what keywords (search terms) people are using in the bird watching niche. Then you’ll use these terms exactly in your articles so the search engines can match up your subject matter (from these search terms) to what the person doing the searching is looking for.
But you aren’t finished yet. Once the visitor finds your website by whatever means, you’re half way there. Here now you’ll try to capture their email address as well as somehow make them an offer of something so you can make money and they can satisfy their need for information. So you both win.
A good reason why you want somebody’s email address is so you can email them additional information later, and also give sale hints on things they might be interested in and if so, you can make money from providing them that information.
At any rate, in order to make a sale, you need a shopping cart or some way of making the transaction. You need to be able to accept credit cards too, so you have to arrange for that.
You’ll also need an email service just for your internet marketing (IM) business that will help you manage your outgoing emails to your visitor list, and to capture your sign-ups.
All these things from credit card shopping carts to email services are all easily available for anyone venturing into internet marketing. Of course there’s a cost associated with these services; nothing’s for free, but it’s minimal considering the money you could make.
Let’s recap everything now about internet marketing in part three titled, What Is Internet Marketing All About by clicking here.
