There are so many different ways to make money online that it is difficult to focus on just one when writing about Internet Marketing for Beginners. If you want to read about Google AdSense strategies, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, offline internet marketing, directory sites, niches, etc. I would say that the best thing you could do would be to join The Warrior Forum.

On the Warrior Forum you can find lively discussions on just about every facet of making money on the Internet that you could imagine.  I have to say, I spend more time reading the discussions on the Warrior Forum that I’d care to admit.  I’ll also say that I have received a thorough education in Internet Marketing on the Warrior Forum.

The single most important thing you can do in your quest to make money online is to take action.  As I mentioned in my first Internet Marketing for Beginners post, you need to make a plan and then stick to it.  Take an hour and write down what you want to do and then how you are going to do it.  Then write down every step needed to get to where you want to be and start executing against your list.

Inaction is the one thing that will keep your dreams from being realized.  Quit looking for the shiny object because no matter how good they sound, without action on your part you are just wasting your time and money.  And let me tell you, I’ve wasted plenty of both in my quest to find an alternate source of income.  I’ve purchased numerous “Warrior Special Offers” from the Warrior Forum and most of them are collecting digital dust on my hard drive.

I finally purchased a 30 day Internet Marketing Training program from this fellow named John Thornhill.  In the training program, he sends you a list of tasks each day for 30 days and at the end of thirty days you have a fully functional website and methods for getting traffic to it and converting some of that traffic to money.

The Internet has really changed the ways that people can make money.  It is absolutely fascinating to me that I can sit here writing down my thoughts and experiences and I can actually make money from the people who come to read it.  Now, with that in mind, making money is not my primary motivation for having this site.  Yes, I do hope to make some money from it, but more than that I’d like to build up a solid fan base to whom I can relay what has and has not worked for me in Internet Marketing.

I think Internet Marketing for Beginners is an interesting topic to write about because there are so many people out there looking to make money online.  Whether you’re unemployed, retired or you just want to have an alternate source of money there is a way to make it happen on the Internet.  Please stop by The Intelligent Marketer frequently to see what has changed and I promise that you’ll be entertained and you’ll learn a lot about Internet Marketing for Beginners.

No discussion of Internet Marketing for Beginners would be complete without talking about backlinks.  Backlinks are another part of the SEO formula that the search engine’s use to decide where to rank your site.  You can think of them as another site’s vote of confidence in your site and unfortunately, backlinks are necessary if you want your site to rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Backlinks are probably my least favorite part of internet marketing because it seems like the recommended “dose” of backlinks is always changing.  For example, some will tell you that backlinks from .edu sites are the “Holy Grail of backlinks,” while others will tell you that you need profile backlinks from Web 2.0 properties or social networking sites.  Others will tell you that they’ll blast ten’s of thousands of backlinks at your site and you’ll see you site rise in the SERPs immediately.

I’ve tried them all and I can honestly say that I don’t know which ones work best.  What I can tell you is this: you do not want backlinks from link farms or spammy sites.  Back to the vote of confidence analogy, this would be like one crap site recommending another.  Also, I’ve had a site on page one of Google for a medium difficulty keyword and in an attempt to get it to move from spot 5 to the first position, I purchased some backlinks and my site almost immediately plummetted to somewhere on page seven or eight.  Looking back on it, I think it is likely that all of the backlinks came from the same IP and did not look natural.

Google is not stupid.  If all of a sudden they see a bunch of backlinks coming from the same IP to your site, they are going to suspect that you purchased a bunch of backlinks in an attempt to game the SERPs and your site will be penalized accordingly.  I’ve also heard that Google will not penalize you for backlinks to your site (because someone could theoretically attack your site by aiming a bunch of low quality backlinks at it) but my experience has been that questionable backlinking practices lead to lower search results.

So where does an internet marketing beginner get backlinks if he\she doesn’t have a bunch of friends with numerous highly valued websites? Unless you have copious amounts of free time in which you can do your own backlinking, my recommendation to you is to search for a backlink provider that does nothing other than provide a backlinking service.  You want to make sure that you can verify this person’s claims through references or customer reviews.

In my forthcoming free guide to Internet Marketing for Beginners, I will tell you the service provider I use for backlinks with much success.  Before you start thinking about backlinks, remember what I said about content being king in my previous post about Internet Marketing for Beginners.

Make sure that your content is rock solid and provides value to your readers and the backlinks will find you.  That will have the most positive impact on your search results because it will look natural because it is natural.  As a testament to that, I am not purchasing any backlinks for this site and I am targetting the keyword phrase “Internet Marketing for Beginners.”  So, if my hypothesis holds true, one day you’ll be able to Google “Internet Marketing for Beginners” and find the Intelligent Marketer high in the search results.

Content is king

Regardless of the method you have chosen for promoting your product or your affiliate offer you need to continually update your site with fresh content.  Unfortunately, the search engines, Google in particular, rolls out updates to its algorithm on a routine basis.  One of the more common updates is a “freshness” update that looks for sites that have update their content regularly.

Can’t I set it and forget it once my site is ranking?

A set-it-and-forget-it strategy will definitely not work in Internet Marketing.  You have to have a plan for continually updating your site with fresh content.  There are a number of ways you can do this: you can create the content yourself; you can buy articles or you can subscribe to a PLR service.

If you’re a good writer and you have the time available, you might want to try creating the content yourself.  This is a good strategy because it will keep you intimately familiar with the content on your site and you will always be thinking of new topics to write about.

Fiverr and PLR services = time savings

If you’re not a good writer or you don’t enjoy writing you can find plenty of people who writer articles or create content for websites by doing a simple Google search.  You could also look on Fiverr and hire someone to write some articles for you for $5 each.  If you do this, you might want to touch up the articles that you buy because I have heard that they often contain grammatical or spelling errors. For $5 it’s still a good deal, you just have to make absolutely sure that the articles are free of errors and that they read well.

It’s still a good strategy because essentially all that you have to do is edit someone elses writing and then use it for your website.  This could save you a lot of time. One other way to save a lot of time is to subscribe to a PLR (Public Label Rights) service.  PLR services blast the same article out to all of their subscribers and then it is up to the subscriber to re-write the article before using it on their website.

PLR services are another good way of saving yourself a lot of time because all that you have to do is edit the already created content.

Fresh content leads to search engine rewards

Regardless of how you obtain your content, you need to make sure that you are continually updating your site with fresh, well written content.  Another thing to be sure of is that it is written for people and not for search engines.  Sure, you want the search engines to find and like your site, but you don’t want to have a keyword stuffed blog post.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried reading a keyword stuffed page but they’re pretty obnoxios, i.e. “the best way to make money on the internet is to write some stuff to make money on the internet by making money on the internet.”

Unfortunately, making money on the Internet is not that easy.  Were it just a matter of throwing up a whole bunch of keywords with some affiliate offers laced in there everyone would be doing it and we’d all be rich.  If you can put together content that is well written and provides value to your readers, the search engines will like your site and reward you buy bringing readers and their wallets to your website.

Internet Marketing for Beginners: Make a Plan

The first piece of advice I’d like to give you for getting started in Internet Marketing is that you need to make a plan.  There are so many different ways to make money with Internet Marketing that it is virtually impossible to get started without making a plan.  To name a few of the many you’ll run into when you are looking to make money online, there are:

• Google Adsense
• Search Engine Optimization
• Adwords
• Pay per click (PPC)
• Local SEO
• Directories
• Affiliate Marketing
• Local services
• Facebook pages
• Mobile sites
• etc.

And the list goes on.  If you want to have any chance of being successful in any of these areas, I recommend that you first make a plan for which area you’ll target. In my first post on the site, I told you how quickly the money can add up with intelligent internet marketing.  With affiliate marketing that is definitely true because you get paid for each sale, yet you are holding no inventory.  So, with the exception of your webhosting fees everything is profit.

Let’s suppose that you want to promote affiliate offers by way of Search Engine Optimization.  The goal being to get a buying keyword for the affiliate offer to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).  The first thing you’ll want to do is decide on an affiliate offer to promote.

Deciding which affiliate offer to promote can be quite the challenge because there are so many good looking affiliate products.  I don’t know which is the “best” way to select an affiliate product to promote, but I first learned by using Clickbank.  Clickbank is a digital products retailer and they have thousands of downloadable digital products (information products) that you can promote.

If you log on to Clickbank and then review the “Marketplace” you will see the categories containing the various products that you can promote.  Select a category and then sort the products by “Gravity.”  In Clickbank, Gravity is a measure of how well a product is selling and the number of affiliates promoting it.  Look for products with a gravity of around 100.

Welcome to The Intelligent Marketer.  My goal with this blog is to inform you of some of the mistakes that I have made in my internet marketing journey so that you can benefit from my experience.  I hope to provide you, the reader, with insight and value from someone who has been there and is trying to make this internet marketing thing a reality.

My foray into to internet marketing began in approximately 2006 when I completed a master’s degree and subsequently sold all of my textbooks on Half.com.  The speed with which they sold amazed me and made me realize that I was exposing my wares to a very, very large audience.  So fascinated was I with internet marketing that I purchased a book by Scott Fox called Internet Riches.

In Internet Riches, Fox describes various methods for making money online and a very interesting equation.  I can’t remember the exact name of the equation, but it went something like this:

Small number (price) x Large number (buyers) = a very large number
as in:
$9.97 x 1000 = $9970
or
$39.99 x 10,000 = $399,900

Ever since, I have been doing calculator exercises and producing some very interesting results.  For example, let’s assume you had a membership site that charged $27.00 per month and you had 500 members:

$27 x 500 = $13,500 per month
$13,500 x 12 = $162,000 PER YEAR

$162,000 per year for running a website!  That’s easy money….or is it? Probably the most important question you have to answer before launching your membership site is “what value will I be providing my subscribers?”

I have found that building a nice or decent looking website isn’t all that difficult.  What’s hard, though, is getting visitors to your website and converting them to buyers or members.  I think a successful conversion rate sits somewhere around 1.5% of your visitors.  So in order to get 500 members you would have to get between 50,000 and 75,000 visitors to your site and take it from me, that is no easy feat.

Getting visitors to your site is a big challenge and there are a variety of ways for accomplishing the task…SEO and paid advertising (think Google Adwords) being among the two most popular.  But how do you do this and how long does it take?  In this blog, we’ll review some strategies for SEO that have worked for me.  One word of caution though, SEO takes patience and a lot of it.

I have been the impatient marketer, checking my stats hourly and being disappointed when my site is not on the first page of Google within hours of launch.  Trust me on this one, you’ll drive yourself nuts if you do not take a patient approach to it.  Getting your website to page 1 of Google for even a mildly competitive term takes time and that is just something you have to live with.

Intelligent Marketer warning: BEWARE OF ANYONE WHO PROMISES PAGE ONE RANKINGS!  If this person approaches you, makes promises in exchange for money run away….fast.  He\she may be able to pump your site up to page 1 briefly (day or hours) but it will not be there for long.

Getting your site ranked on the first page of Google (where the money is) takes persistent effort both from a content and backlinking perspective.  Rarely is it a set and forget strategy that will keep your site on page one for long.  That being said, as with anything there are exceptions and you’ll find examples of websites on page one of Google for no apparent reason.
So, thanks for stopping by The Intelligent Marketer.  I hope you’ll bookmark this site and will come back to see all of the discussions and updates.

BTW, did you know that if you created 100 small websites that spin off $84 per month, you’d have over $100,000 at the end of the year?  That’s the kind of thing that keeps me going.