There are many, many more aspects to internet marketing and we have only really just scratched the surface. That said, you should now know all of the basics and have a deeper understanding than most people regarding what is actually likely to work vs what ultimately amounts to spam.

Before we go though, there are just a few more concepts you need to familiarise yourself with…

Email Marketing

If someone lands on your site for the first time and you try to sell them a copy of your ebook or a service, then you should expect to find that this is more likely than anything to just drive them away. Think of it a little bit like asking for someone’s number before they’ve even had a chance to get to know you!

Much more successful, is to spend some time establishing that trust and familiarity – but you do need to ensure that they come back in order to do that. This is where a mailing list comes in: it gives you a way to contact your visitors directly and represents permission to message them more importantly.

Your objective is then to ensure that your members actually keep reading your mailing list rather than ignoring your messages and in order to do that, you need to ensure that you are – you guessed it – providing value! Emails can be lessons, they can be exclusive updates, or they can be full articles but just make sure that they are providing value!

In order to start collecting emails and sending them out, you will need a tool called an ‘autoresponder’. This is what will enable you to create forms as well as letting you manage new subscribers, people who want to leave your list etc.

Good examples of autoresponder services include: Aweber (Aweber.com), GetResponse (GetResponse.com) and MailChimp (MailChimp.com). Don’t ignore this aspect of your marketing – many gurus suggest that it is the most effective tool in your arsenal!

Press Releases

Press releases are short documents you send out to big bloggers and websites. The idea is to make your website or your product sound like news, so that they will consider writing about it. The mistake that a lot of marketers make is to think they can just promote their product and that a news outlet is going to be happy to write about it and essentially provide them with free exposure.

That is not how it works. Like you, magazines and websites are predominantly interested in providing value to their readers. So, they’ll only tell your story if it is genuinely interesting or exciting. So, ask yourself: how can you make your brand something people will be interested in reading about? A publicity stunt is one answer. Doing something completely unique is another…

Rather than targeting big blogs though, why not consider targeting the smaller influencers? These are individual bloggers, YouTubers, social media stars and the like who have thousands or even millions of followers. If you can convince them to give you a shout out (you can sponsor them to do this, give them something for free, or exchange ) then that can give you instant access to a gigantic audience and potentially transform your business overnight!

Analytics

Finally, no matter what strategies you are using in your internet marketing campaign, it is absolutely essential that you are regularly checking your stats and analytics to ensure that you are actually making progress. Look at how many visitors you are getting daily, look at which activities are bringing you the most customers and use this information to hone and improve your campaign over time.

There are several different tools you can use to do all this but by far the most popular and capable is Google Analytics. If you’re serious about internet marketing, then the two of you need to get acquainted!

Conclusions

This book has thrown a lot of information at you all at once and there is still more to learn. Unfortunately, that is the nature of the beast; internet marketing is a huge subject and you will never have learned everything. Moreover, it is also a subject that is constantly changing and evolving, so you’ll never know absolutely everything there is to know.

But what this book has hopefully done is to a) give you a solid foundation of knowledge to get started with and b) help you to make some smart decisions and avoid some of the biggest mistakes new marketers make.

The biggest lesson I want you to take home from all this is that you should work smart, not hard. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to be putting out dross though – far from it. The key to getting easy wins is to create things that people actually want to see and want share. Content that Google wants its users to find and content that will build trust and authority with your followers.

That means writing about subjects you’re passionate about, it means bringing something genuinely different and unique to the table and it means creating a stunning website with glorious images and a strong brand.

Good SEO and good marketing means telling amazing stories and creating amazing content.