How to Succeed in Internet Marketing by Mastering Just Two Major Skills
How to Succeed in Internet Marketing by Mastering Just Two Major Skills
By Doug Champigny
How difficult is it to make money online with your own work-at-home Internet marketing or affiliate marketing business? While no one will dispute it takes time, money and laser-like focused action, the plethora of tools, strategies and advice being passed around the Internet makes that a very hard question for newer marketers to answer when they first start to research the possibilities.
In truth, most successful online business owners can attribute the bulk of their success to two skills - building mailing lists and driving targeted traffic. Almost everything else you see is either refinements of one of these skills or tools to use to further one, or usually both, of these vital skills.
And this is true whether the person is competing directly in the Internet marketing field, the niche marketing areas or working strictly as an affiliate marketer promoting other people's products. In fact they're especially important in affiliate marketing, since the products, salespages and much of the promotional materials have already been provided by the merchant.
It's important to recognize the symbiotic nature of this pair of activities too - you have to drive targeted traffic to your mailing lists' opt-in forms, and your resultant list is often the fastest way to drive targeted traffic to your sites, blogs, salespages and affiliate links.
Set your pages with those opt-in forms, called 'squeeze pages', up first, writing or buying a small report or video to use as an incentive to get people to join your list. Once those are in place, start driving targeted traffic to those pages via every means available - blog posts, podcasts, videos, Web 2.0 sites like WikiDot, Google knol, Squidoo and HubPages, submitting articles to the biggest directories, offering guest posts to blogs within your niche, blog commenting, social sites like Twitter and Facebook and the whole realm of available promotional methods.
This trickle of traffic, if promoted correctly, will build to a stream, then to a torrent of signups for you, getting your list started. Once it's around 1,000 or more subscribers, start doing some e-zine swaps (also called ad swaps) with other marketers within the niche. Put simply, you send out to your list offering them the other person's enticement while they do the same for you.
Done right, and done consistently, this process will build both of these skills quickly, giving you control of the two biggest weapons in your Internet marketing arsenal - list-building and traffic generation. Once you have a firm handle on both, then you can consider everything else. But stay focused on just those two til you master them and you'll be well on your way to your own successful Internet marketing business!
Doug Champigny is a world-famous Internet marketing coach, mentor & speaker and the creator of the PowerStart Marketing 4-week Internet Marketing Crash Course. To learn more about Doug or to book him to speak at your next event, contact him through his blog at http://DougChampigny.com.
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