Making a start
Last week I set the scene for this blog. This week I will explain how to make a start in Internet Marketing, but before I do so let me explain what I would like to achieve: quite simply, I would like my readers to earn £10,000 ($15,000) from my advice in 2009. That may not sound a lot to some of you, but I want to be realistic. So let’s make a start.
The most important thing about starting off in Internet Marketing is to actually start – do not put it off for another day. Then, treat it like a business, even if, to you, it is a hobby. Like all businesses, to make money you need customers and once you have them you must look after them – a common phrase in Internet Marketing is “the money is in the list” (your customer list). I will explain how to start building your customer list in a future posting.
Of course, you also need something to sell. These days a large proportion of legitimate Internet Marketers sell information products, i.e., products that can be downloaded or emailed to customers. Such products have the advantage that having been produced there is no marginal production cost and next to no delivery cost. You can sell your own products or resell something produced by someone else. Clearly, you will make more money in the long run by producing and selling your own products, but you may wish to start off by selling an existing product.
But before deciding what to sell, I suggest that you decide on a “niche”, i.e., an area of interest to a specific group of people. Your niche may be something that you already know a lot about or it may be something that you have always had an interest in. Niches vary in value and level of interest.
For example, money, sex and diets attract very large audiences, but those audiences are very hard to sell to because it’s difficult to come up with a genuinely new product. At the other end of the scale is something like maintenance of church bells – very small potential audience and not worth bothering with unless you are already an acknowledged expert.
More ‘middle of the road’ and recommended for those new to Internet Marketing is something like tropical fish keeping - quite a large potential audience, many of which are likely to be newcomers looking for information and willing to pay for it.
So think about your first niche – yes in due course you will have more than one. Next week I will start to explain what to do with it.
