I don't want to waste your time or insult you in anyway, so I want to warn you this section of my site doesn't contain much fluff and baby talk, its all straight talking and no beating around the bush. So if you decide to read on be prepared to see how this crazy game we call Internet Marketing really works.

Quick Quiz - Let Me Ask You This

Before getting into it, let me ask you a few questions. The idea behind these questions is to help YOU honestly find out if you really want to be an internet marketer or not.

Are you prepared to put in long hours, in the beginning to make it happen?
Most people are not prepared to do this.I know this for a fact. I often get emails and phone calls from people new to internet marketing whether it be in an MLM or an Associate Program or selling their own products. Understandably they are all excited about their new business, all of a sudden I hear from them that they are not making any money. I reply by asking them what have they done (precisely) to make their business work...guess what? I never hear from them again. So, don't kid yourself, if you think you can make money by simply signing up for something and then going and watching TV, you're fooling yourself. Tatoo this on your forhead "Wages are made 9 to 5, Fortunes are made after hours".

Are you prepared and capable of investing in your business?
Its quite hilarious (to me) how many people indignantly tell me they don't believe they need to invest in a business...I'm really not sure what planet these people live on. EVERY business on this planet needs investment. If you think I'm mistaken about this, please give me the details of the business that doesn't need investment and you can count me in!

Do you have a credit card that works?
Please don't get me wrong here, I'm not looking for your credit information. The reason I ask this question is it will be virtually impossible for you to purchase the tools and information you will need without a credit card or a visa debit card. It will also be virtually impossible for you to join any money making programs. If you do not have a card, you need to make it a top priority. You should also have a PayPal account.

Are you prepared to be a leader?
Most internet businesses need associates, affiliates or partners of some kind. For a lot of people you will need to provide leadership and training. This can be as simple or complex as you want but they will look to you for leadership. This is a good thing. Those people that you provide good, honest advice and leadership will become loyal followers and hopefully, they will begin duplicating you. This is particularly important in the world of MLM.

OK! Lets Move On.

What YOU Need To Be Successful in Internet Marketing

1. You need some sort of money making program or website.
I know this is obvious but I'm trying to cover all the bases. Basically it boils down to this, you need to be selling something. What this is doesn't really matter. Actually the more niche your product is probably the better you will do as you will have a lot less competition. Perhaps something like velvet saddlebags for cats? Just joking but you get my drift. I'm sure you have seen many many spam ads for getting rich, mostly from MLM'ers. Lots n lots of competition but proof I guess that they work. If you are looking for some businesses, please see the ones I recommend personally in the box below. Of course, if you join any of them from my links, then you get to work with me on a personal level.

Business Program	Click Below
Golden Keys (Excellent)	Go There Now
Success University	Go There Now
Free Store Club (Join At The Gold Level)	Go There Now
Apache Leads (I Own This Business)	Go There Now
Step 1, You need a business	Select From Above

 

2. You need traffic or visitors to your website
When I first started on the internet in 1995, which seems a long long time ago now, things were very different. I had a site that needed traffic so I went to a search engine, typed in my keyword. Then I looked at the HTML source of the top ranking site. Then I just cut n pasted his keywords into my site...um twice. So I had twice as many keywords as his site. Then I submitted my new site to the search engine. Presto! I was the top raking site in that keyword search. How amazing is that, of course thats not how it works anymore. But it did work that way for a few years and so I enjoyed millions of visitors for free. Then came the golden age of email advertising. I built an absolutely huge list of optin leads and blasted them every day with ads for whatever program I was promoting. This actually worked incredibly well for awhile. Those days are also gone now. Simply blasting a list does not work as well as it used to. Everyone gets so much spam these days and so much email is blocked it has reduced the viability. Building a list by providing good quality, honest advice does work. So thats certainly one of the things I recommend you do. I'll cover how to do that shortly.

The best methods for getting traffic to YOUR site are:

Search Engine Listings: Honestly, there really is no better traffic to your website than the traffic that comes from the search engines. The reasons are obvious: Its like the yellow pages, the people that visit from a search engine SEARCHED for the information or services you provide. Therefore, they really do want what you have to offer, its then up to you to convert them to a sale. The other obvious reason is, the traffic is free (unless you are using pay per click). For details and step by step instructions on how to get a top ranking, please see my article here

Why Pay Per Click IS Right For YOU

Pay Per Click Search Engines: This is an excellent way to get instant traffic to your website. I suggest that you spend time determining which are the best, most economical keywords for your site. By the best I mean the keywords which will get the highest qualified visitors to your site. For example, if you owned a backpackers hotel in Waikiki, you would be wasting money to buy rankings in the keyword "Hotel" or even "Waikiki Hotel". Its way to general. What you would consider is buying ranking in the keyword phrase "BackPackers Hotel Waikiki Hawaii". See the big difference? This keyword phrase will not have anywhere near as many competitors driving up the price of listing PLUS it will bring much more highly qualified visitors to your site. See here for more information on PPC Search Engines. A very good thing about buying traffic from search engines is you are only paying for "click thrus" that is, you are only paying for each visitor to your site. Thats why its called Pay Per Click :)

If they will only accept payment by wire transfer, walk away

Email Advertising: Don't get me wrong with what I said earlier about email advertising, it can still be very effective but there are some traps which you must be aware of. There are tons of scammers out there wanting to take your money. Trust me on this one, I was burnt in one day for $10,000! I really don't want you to find out the hard way. Heres my first rule of thumb when dealing with people that want to provide me with email advertising. If they will only accept payment by wire transfer, walk away. This shows me they are scammers. If they were legitimate they would accept credit card payments.

Why don't they accept credit card payments? The reason is simple, its because they are not going to provide a satisfactory service, they know this, they also know that if you paid them by credit card, you would call your bank and get a chargeback against the charge. You cannot do that with a wire transfer, once the money is gone out of your account , its gone for good (or bad in this case). Who can I trust? Well, I own Apache Leads, we do email advertising and we accept credit cards and paypal, so you could try us, we even provide a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. As for anyone else, you will need to search them out and make your own decisions. Whoever you deal with, make sure they are able to give you full reporting on the email campaign. You will want to see, how many emails were sent, how many were opened, and how many click thrus to your site there were. This is the only way you will ever be able to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Apache Leads provides that reporting upon request.

Big Tip: Something else you need to understand about email advertising is this, the ad copy you use is paramount to your success. This includes, most importantly, the subject line. You need a subject line which will cause people to open and read the email, without it, you're simply wasting your time and money. I strongly recommend reading some good ebooks on this subject before investing in email advertising.

 

Bulk Email: This can be considered very close to spamming. As long as you can determine the provider is legitimate and is sending to an optin list you should be fine. All other comments I've already said about Email Advertising apply here as well.

Newsletter Advertising: This can be a very effective way to advertise. Be sure to pick newsletters that target your audience. Promoting your backpacker hotel in a webmasters newsletter probably is not going to get the results you would like. Promoting your hotel in a backpackers newsletter could on the other hand be extremely good. With newsletter advertising, try this, write an interesting article which could logically have a link to your site in it. Sticking with the backpacker example, you could write an article about the many unknown "low cost" tourist spots in your area which would be of interest to backpackers. You could also include special discounts for anyone booking via the newsletter. This would also give you great statistics on your advertisements effectiveness.

Buying leads is excellent

Leads: Buying leads is an excellent and generally inexpensive way to build a list for you to promote your products to. There are thousands of lead sites on the net. Simply go to Google and type in "leads" As of writing this there was 18,200,000 results! Staggering. So are they all good? Of course not. Some are excellent of course and some you should stay away from. Some of the things to look for when selecting a lead supply company are:

Do they have a full range of leads?

Do they have an affiliate program?

Can they show you samples?

Do they have a satisfaction guarantee?

Do they accept credit cards?

The sites we recommend in the box below met these criteria.

Traffic Source	Click Below
Apache Leads (leads)	Go There Now
Step 2, You need prospects (leads)	Select From Above

 

 

How NOT To Get Your Site ShutDown

Big Tip: If you're going to do email advertising of any sort, you need to have a bullet proof landing page. This is a page where you want to direct all the traffic. Try and avoid sending the email advertising traffic to your real page. The reason for this is simple. It will only take a few spam complaints to have your ISP, host, associate program or MLM to shut you down.

 

Banner Ads: I honestly have not had a lot of recent experience with Banner Advertising. I used them extensively in the late 90's to very good effect. Personally I think the thing to go for here is payment based on "click thrus". Payments based on "impressions" can quickly turn out to be a very expensive exercise with no results. Once again, anyone you deal with should be able to provide you with real time statistics. Also, once again, only pay by credit card. Also , select sites to show your banner which are likely to have visitors that would be interested in your product.

 

What to do when you have traffic coming to your site

OK, so now you have traffic coming to your site from your advertising efforts and search engine listings, now what?

Well first thing is you need your very own newsletter.

Why do I want this? Good question! This is an extremely important part of your ongoing marketing effort. Its able to be shown that not very many people buy on the first visit to your site,some will for sure, but the majority will not.

The biggest percentage of buyers will make their purchase on the 7th visit to your site!

That simple secret to success is amazingly important, don't you agree? So as you can appreciate now, its very important to collect the name and email address of as many people as possible who visit your site so you may email them with enticements to come back and visit.

Did you see the pop up when you came to my site? Pretty nifty. It will only pop up once per session so as not to annoy you. I built it with a fantastic program called "Dynamic PopUp" You really should consider this product. It includes lots of examples, advice and a little program which automatically tests your popup and then gives you the code to cut n paste into your site. It will make popups with a very wide range of options including pop under, exit pop ups and heaps more. They have a money back guarantee as well, so give it a go.

 

 

The Best AutoResponders

Following are two autoresponders I use. Aweber is very good and allows 2,000 imports per day, which is not bad if you're building a list from buying leads. QuickPayPro is considerably more than an autoresponder and I'll be discussing it in the section Automating Your Site

Email/AutoResponder	Click Below
A1 EBiz AutoResponder (Both FREE & Pro Accounts)	Go There Now
Royal Responder	Go There Now
Aweber	Go There Now
Step 3, You need to email your leads	Select From Above

 

Automating Your Site:

Its smart to automate your site and your business as much as possible. Remember, the internet operates 24/7 worldwide. You don't want to be needing to handle enquiries and order processing all hours of the day. You can automate most of the work. This is very smart as it minimizes the hours, support and staff needed to operate your budding internet empire.

I love this service and use it extensively everyday. Some of the things it does are: Shopping Cart, all my products are handled by the 1ShoppingCart Shopping Cart. It can dynamically generate pages which is nifty. Adding new products or editing existing ones is a breeze. 1ShoppingCart also handles all the transactions for me, it allows you to accept credit cards as well as paypal. Unlimited Email Lists comes standard with 1ShoppingCart. So its easy for you to include you popups on your site and automatically send followup emails to everyone in your lists.

Heres something it does which is really great. It will automatically remove a person from a list and place them in another list triggered by an event. For example, if you joined my list above, it will also place you in my customer list if you were to buy something from me. Now thats nifty. This allows me to manage my customers very easily and to make special offers to them and no one else. 1ShoppingCart also gives you full statistics on emailing, sales, profits. It includes Unlimited Tracking so you can get full feedback on how your campaigns are going.

What about this inclusion?!? 1ShoppingCart comes with the ability for you to operate your very own two tier affiliate program! Now this type of software normally is very expensive, I know, I've bought it for some sites. A major part of your internet marketing should be an affiliate program.1ShoppingCart has everything to operate the backoffice of any internet business. You think I'm pushing this hard? You bet I am, 1ShoppingCart is the very best value for money investment you will make in your business, and I know you are prepared to invest because you said so by reading down to here.

Yes you do need one!

Affiliate Program:
Yes you do need one. There are a number of reasons. First by having an affiliate program you are encouraging ,by reward, other people to promote your site and your products. The best part is you do not pay a cent until they sell something! The other good thing about it is, you get links to your site from their sites which gives you a higher ranking in the search engines. So its a real happy win-win situation.

Accepting Payments:
If you're going to sell products you need to be able to accept payments. This is a lot more straight forward than you might think. You can go to your bank and get a merchant account but its not really needed. There are plenty of credit card processors who for a small fee allow you to use their services. This is by far the simplest and quickest way to go. A couple of processors.2Checkout , ClickBank and PayPal.