What is it Really Like to be a Top Internet Marketer? Can Anyone Do It?
There is a lot of misinformation, myth and downright lying floating about when it comes to internet marketing. Internet marketing is the process of using the web to gain access to a huge audience and from there, to promote a range of products, services and deals for profit.
There is a lot of money to be made here, make no mistake – and what’s best of all is that this money can be conveniently from home no matter who you are. As long as you have access to a computer and are somewhat business-minded, you can theoretically start making a huge amount of money ‘passively’ from the comfort of your front room.
The potential for growth is nearly limitless and what starts as a simple business model can be scaled nearly endlessly thanks to the reach of the internet and the various powerful tools at your disposal.
But while the promise of internet marketing is truly great, there are also a lot of people out there trying to exploit that promise and to use it to make even more money for themselves. It’s hard to go far on the web without coming across someone advertising a ‘digital nomad lifestyle’ or promising to share the ‘five secrets all millionaires know’. Normally these videos are filmed by people standing in front of Ferraris or on their own private yachts somewhere sunny. They’re promising the world and all you have to do is subscribe to their ‘magic money making scheme’.
These people are doing a dis-service to internet marketing though. These people are taking what is a genuinely fantastic opportunity and turning it into an overhyped scam. This puts off people who otherwise might have been interested in becoming marketers and leads to many more becoming quickly disillusioned.
But for every loud mouth trying to get your money, there are hundreds more internet marketers who have made their millions and retired to sunny islands. And there are even more people who have earned just enough to quit their day jobs and follow their passions, or who are making a nice supplemental income that makes their lifestyle that much easier to afford.
You can be one of those people, but in order to do so, you need to first understand how Internet marketing works and you need to put in the time and the work to make it work for you. This guide will show you how to do that in simple terms.
How Internet Marketing Works
The majority of us operate under the false assumption that the only way to earn a living is to trade our time for money. We think that in order to get paid, we need to put in 8-10 hour days and we need to climb the ranks.
We think that because it’s all we’ve ever known. That’s what our parents did and that’s what most of our colleagues are still doing.
But who says that that’s how it has to be? In the last couple of decades the rules have changed thanks to the web – and most of us are just catching up.
With the internet as a tool, one person can accomplish what used to take an entire team. It’s now possible for anyone to reach a global audience on a budget and you can use tools to automate much of the work on your behalf.
Thanks to the internet, anyone who has an idea can now find an audience for that idea and they can get rich. Hence the Mark Zuckerberg’s of this world – and all the people who came up with far lesser-known apps and websites that nevertheless earned a million dollars.
It’s not the idea though that made these people rich: it was the ability to market that idea. What makes someone rich is the ability to reach and inspire a gigantic audience who are willing to pay for the experience being offered. In other words, it’s the marketing that makes the big difference. And digital marketing makes it possible again for one person to do the work of an entire agency – to reach a truly gigantic number of people through the web, through Google and through Facebook.
And this is where the big opportunities come in. As a marketer you’re simply someone who knows how to connect the ideas with the buyers. You don’t even need to have your own idea – you can take something that’s already out there. Something that’s already selling even and just give it a nudge in the right direction. You can then automate this and you can profit. Big.
In this book you’ll find a complete guide to doing just that and you’ll find out how anyone can use the tools at their disposal to start earning passive income.
Is Internet Marketing for You?
The ins and outs of digital marketing will depend on the type of product you’re going to be selling, the type of audience you’ll be selling too and the methods you’re going to use to do that.
In some cases, internet marketing can be as simple as placing some PPC adverts but in others it might mean building a mailing list and a website and setting yourself up as a thought leader in the field of fitness.
Sometimes it can feel ‘dirty’ being a marketer as you find yourself selling products you don’t believe in or that don’t deliver value. But it doesn’t have to be – you can just as easily make money as an ethical marketer and promote products that you are truly passionate about.
This means that internet marketing is always going to be very adaptable and you can alter your workload and the nature of your work to suit you.
A few things that will help a great deal though are:
- A general understanding and appreciation of business
- An ability to write
- A knack for selling and persuading
- A decent understanding of human psychology and buying behaviour.
You’ll also need to be comfortable working with computers. This means you need to be someone who is happy to spend most of their time sitting at a computer and working online and it also means you have to be able to work with web apps and digital tools – this probably isn’t a job your Grandma would feel comfortable with. Unless she’s a tech wiz…
As for the amount of money you can make, that depends partly on luck, partly on the work you put in and partly on your smarts. As a very rough guide, you might expect it to take about a year before the big money starts coming in but you can begin to see profits much sooner than that. The smart approach is to wait until you see a steady income stream before you quit your day job and to stagger the process so that you’re able to bootstrap yourself. Early on, cash flow is a very important consideration.
As a bonus gift, download this book for FREE: http://RagsToDotComRiches.com
With all that in mind, let’s dive in…
Getting Started and Deciding – What to Sell
Any successful marketer will essentially be using the same business model to make profit. Specifically, they’ll have to find a product or service that they can sell at a profit and then they’ll want to connect that product with an audience and compel them to buy.
A good place to start out then is to decide what it is you want to sell. And before you do this, you might want to consider the niche you want to work in.
A ‘niche’ is basically a subject matter combined with an industry. This is the topic that you will write about if you have a website or a social media account and at the same time, this will dictate the type of audience you have and the kinds of products you’re able to sell. Fitness is a popular niche for instance and gives you a range of things you can sell potentially – such as protein shakes, eBooks or fitness gear.
Likewise, dating is another niche. Here you can once again sell eBooks, courses or dating sites. In all likelihood, you’ll probably target men or women specifically.
You may choose to pick an even more niche subject matter however – for instance something like ‘stage lighting’ or maybe ‘sewing’. In this case, you’ll have a smaller potential market but you’ll also have considerably less competition.
Another option to reduce your competition and make it easier to stand out, is to target a smaller cross section of a larger niche. For instance, you could make your fitness website for diabetic individuals, or you could make a dating website for vegetarians. Some sites also combine niches in imaginative ways to come up with something new.
Before you choose your niche, have a long think about where you would advertise your products and whether that would be likely to be met with success. If your niche is bodybuilding, you’ll be lost in a sea of marketing ‘noise’. If your niche is sewing though, you might be able to get an article in ‘Sewing Weekly’, or perhaps to be noticed on a prominent sewing forum. Your chances just increased! These are your ‘routes to market’ and if you identify some before you even begin setting up your business model, you’ll be setting yourself up for success.
Either way, make sure that there’s a clear audience for your site and that there are products you can sell. At the same time, make sure it’s something that you will enjoy writing about and that you know about. This will make a huge difference to your enthusiasm and the effectiveness of your marketing.
Types of Product to Sell
With your niche/industry chosen, you’ll next want to start thinking about the type of product you’re going to sell and thus the form of monetization you’re going to be relying on.
Now some internet marketers will opt not to sell any product at all and will instead focus on building a website or a brand and using advertising on that website earn money. Going this route however is slower and has a lower potential for profit. Whenever someone pays you for an advert on your website, it means they are earning more for your visitors than you are. Perhaps they’re paying you 20 cents per visitor (this is going rate for CPC advertising) but making on average $5 per visitor by selling a big-ticket item.
In other words, you’re at the bottom of the pyramid until you start selling. As a marketer, selling is what you should be focussed on.
This means you might want to consider creating your own product. Indeed, some of the very biggest internet marketers on the web will make their millions selling eBooks or selling digital courses and this is a very viable option if you know how to write and if you have valuable information to share.
Creating your own eBook is a good goal to aim for as this way you’ll be able to keep people engaged with your brand, you’ll be able to keep 100% of the profits and you’ll have full control over things like pricing and branding which you can use to increase sales or alter margins.
Keep in mind when you create your own product that you want to keep your overheads as low as possible. Digital products are highly popular among marketers because they don’t require any physical materials, any delivery or any storage. That means that every sale is 100% pure profit.
But if you’re not someone who is confident to create their own product, then this might not be an option. At the very least, if you’re just starting out and you’re objective is to start making as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, then you may not have the time or money to invest in creating a product from scratch.
In these cases, the better decision will be to sell an affiliate product. This essentially means that you’re selling someone else’s product for commission. But before you think that this puts you at ‘the bottom of the pile’ again, consider that affiliate products often offer as much as 60% commission. That means you’re earning more than the creator per sale. The creator is happy to offer this of course, because they have twenty people like you selling huge volumes of their products.
The Benefits of Being an Affiliate Marketer – And How to Choose the Right Product
This is a win/win situation then. As an affiliate marketer, you’ll get a large amount of profit for each sale, while the creator will earn far more than they possibly could have on their own.
What’s more, choosing an affiliate product means that you can pick something you know has the potential to be successful. You can 100% guarantee this in fact by choosing a product that is already selling very well and that has demonstrated itself to be a hot seller.
This is what is called ‘verification’ in internet marketing. It means that the product has already proven itself, ensuring that you don’t risk wasting your money on something that no one wants.
Better yet, some affiliate products actually include their marketing material and let you use it for free. So you can find a product that is selling thousands of copies a day and then you can sell the very same product, with the very same marketing pitch – all you have to do is to find that waiting audience that will eat it up once they’re introduced.
To find these kinds of affiliate products that offer big payouts, you need to look at an affiliate network. There are a few of these but some of the big ones include:
- JVZoo
- Commission Junction
- Clickbank
- Warrior Special Offers
These are all good options but a good one to start with is JVZoo. JVZoo has a great interface that is very easy to use, it has low fees and it has a wide variety of different products available. What’s more, it is highly flexible making it easy for you to create your own sales pages or just to embed a simple link into an e-mail or the body of an article.
Most important at this stage is to ensure you’re choosing the best product with the highest potential for success. Other than looking for what’s already selling and looking for products that will work with specific ‘routes to market’ you already have in mind, you should also look for something that:
- Delivers great value – Where you would be happy to buy it yourself (this is especially important if you want to sell to the same people more than once!). Software is great because it’s not something people can find for free online (unlike information). If you do sell an eBook, make sure it is in-depth and provides lots of extras and bonuses.
- Solves a simple problem – The easiest product to sell is something that solves a simple problem. Look for ‘pain points’ in your life and in the lives of your audience and then try to find products that address these in simple ways.
- Has a clear value proposition – We touched briefly on this idea but to go into a little more detail, a value proposition is basically the way in which your product promises to make life better for people. The saying goes that you don’t sell hats, you sell ‘warm heads’. Having a warm hat makes life better. Likewise, you don’t just want to sell a book, you want to sell abs, a hot girlfriend/boyfriend, riches, style or confidence. This will give you your emotional hook which you can use to really close the sale.
Other Options
If you’re not sold on affiliate marketing and don’t have the means to create your own product, then another option is to look for a PLR product. This stands for ‘Private Label Rights’ and means you buy a product in order to resell it. Often these come with marketing materials as well. They’re a bit more of a risk than affiliate marketing because there’s an upfront investment but you’ll have full control over the way you market and sell the item.
Otherwise, you can consider outsourcing the creation of a product. This is possible through the likes of UpWork or ELance which are sites that connect clients with freelancers.
Creating a Sales Page, Writing Sales Copy and Pricing Your Item
Once you have your product and you know who you want to sell it to, the next thing to consider is how you’re going to sell it. No matter what strategy you end up using, selling your product will require you to create a page where people can buy it (unless you are just sending users to someone else’s site).
There are two kinds of pages that fulfil this function available to the internet marketer. One is the ‘sales page’, the other is the ‘eCommerce store’.
An eCommerce store is a website that sells multiple items and lets you browse through them as though you were in a shop. Amazon is an eCommerce store for instance.
In order to create an eCommerce store that will be successful, you will need to be selling more than one product. At the same time, you’ll also want to ensure the store looks highly professional so that people feel safe paying you for goods. If it looks like a kid put together the website, no one will be confident enough to click the buy button.
If you go this route, then you can use a number of tools to quickly create a professional and secure eCommerce site. These include: Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce and Volusion. Volusion is a particularly interesting option for internet marketers because it gives you tools akin to a landing page and lets you do things like split tests and even set up your own affiliate system if you’re a product creator (or if you want to run some kind of revenue share system).
More often though, internet marketers will use a sales page, also known as a landing page, which is a single page that is entirely dedicated to selling just one product.
How to Create a High Converting Sales Page
If you visit any sales page online, you’ll likely notice a few consistencies. For starters, these pages are almost always long and narrow with text in very short paragraphs. The reason for this, is that the creators want you to scroll down the page. The more a visitor does this, the more ‘invested’ they will feel in what they have been reading and the more they will want to click buy to avoid having wasted their time. Once you’ve been scrolling for ten minutes, it’s incongruous to then just click ‘back’.
Another common feature of these pages is a complete lack of navigation. In other words, there’s no ‘home’ button, no ‘about us’ button and certainly no links to any external sites. You want to create a scenario where clicking ‘buy’ is practically your audience’s only option and to do this you need to keep them locked in to your content with nothing distracting them.
Lastly, you’ll notice that these websites are almost always red or orange. This is because these colors increase our heartrate and make us feel anxious – thus encouraging us to buy faster!
If you are looking for a tool to help you build a landing page, then OptimizePress is a great choice.
Sales Copy and Pricing
Being able to write good sales copy is one of the single most important skills that any marketer of any kind needs. When combined with a savvy pricing strategy, this can be highly effective.
The first objective of any sales copy is to bring the reader in and to prevent them from leaving the site. This can be very difficult in a world where everyone is always in a hurry and where there are a hundred things vying for our attention at any given time.
A good option then is to start with a rhetorical question (‘sick of weight loss programs that don’t work?’) or to use a narrative structure. The former forces introspection and engagement, whereas the latter makes it very difficult to stop reading owing to our natural inclination to tell and listen to stories.
Throughout the text you need to very clearly and simply explain what it is that you’re selling. At the same time, you need to place a heavy focus on your value proposition, such that people can really imagine and feel the benefits they’ll get. People buy things based on emotion, not logic. Make sure you acknowledge and allay the fears of the readers through the text (“this isn’t just another scam!”) and try reading it through a few times looking for break points. At every stage through the text, your reader should be absolutely compelled to keep moving to the next line. To gain trust, you can try appealing to facts, to statistics and to authority figures.
Finally keep in mind your objectives by remembering the acronym ‘AIDA’:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
As for pricing, here you need to ensure that your product seems like a good deal while also making it as desirable as possible. Make your price too low and people will think it’s not a good product!
You can also use your pricing to create ‘urgency’ and ‘scarcity’. Urgency is what encourages a buyer to act fast and thereby act on impulse and a good example is simply to use a limited-time discount. Scarcity means making something seem rare, which not only creates urgency but also makes your item seem more exclusive and desirable as a result. We want what other people can’t have!
One more trick is to use something called ‘contrast’. Put a cheap item next to a very expensive item in your eCommerce store and it will look twice as cheap!
PPC and SEO
Now you have your landing page and your high profit item to sell, the next thing to do is to start selling it!
The quickest and easiest way to do this is by using PPC. PPC stands for ‘Pay Per Click’ and is a type of advertising where you only pay if someone clicks on your ad. This is good news for you because it means you don’t have to pay anything if your campaign isn’t successful!
PPC advertising also lets you tightly control your budget because you say how much you’re willing to spend in total a day. What’s more, the two main platforms – Google AdWords and Facebook Ads – both provide you with the means to highly ‘target’ your audience. That means that you’re going to be reaching the precise demographic your product is aimed at.
Through Google AdWords, you advertise on Google and your ad shows on specific pre-determined search terms. This means someone selling an eBook on dating can have their ad show only when someone searches ‘dating eBook’. On Facebook you can target someone by their hobbies, interests, marital status, age, location and even their job description.
You only pay if someone then clicks it to go to your landing page and if your page has been well designed and written this should convert to a high degree. Ideally this means your conversion rate will be high enough that you’ll make a profit overall. So if you pay 10cents per click and your book sales give you $50 profit, you will breakeven as long as one in every 500 visitors buys something. That’s good odds!
With CPA you can actually make those odds even better – here you are paying per action (it stands for Cost Per Action) and in some cases that means you’ll only pay if someone actually buys your product. The big sites that do this include Max Bounty and Ascend Media, though it’s a relatively young industry and the platforms aren’t quite as robust or user friendly as Facebook or Google.
SEO
Of course there’s another way you can get to the top of Google for a specific search term, which is to use something called ‘SEO’ or ‘Search Engine Optimization’. This means creating a website that is optimized for Google and that in turn means creating a blog to go with your landing page and filling it with lots of great content.
Likewise, the blog content you provide should occasionally use your keyword or related terms (about 1-2% keyword density is advised) and you should try to build as many links as possible from other websites. The best links will be those that come from highly relevant sources to your own which also have a great reputation and user base.
The key to good SEO is to focus on delivering quality to the end user – because that’s what Google ultimately wants to see. The most successful posts tend to be longer in service of this and the optimum length is often cited as being around 1,800 words. Make sure your site loads quickly and that you are linking out to high quality resources. Using a big vocabulary and terms related to your keyword is also advised, especially now that Google uses something called ‘LSI’ or ‘Latent Semantic Indexing’. Post your content regularly and maintain quality at all times.
The ‘other key’ is to go after just a few amazing links, rather than trying to spam the web. If you can get one link on a top blog, that’s worth a thousand directory submissions!
Social Media, Influencer Marketing and Content Marketing
Once you have a blog and you’re creating amazing quality content, you can branch out to start doing social media marketing. If you can build a following on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram then sharing links to your blog will help to bring more visitors to your site and thus to your landing page.
How to Succeed on Social Media
How do you success on social media? The key is to provide quality and value again. In other words, don’t use Facebook as a place to post adverts for your own business, instead use it as a platform of entertaining and informing fans of your niche. Otherwise, why would anyone choose to follow you?
You can do this by sharing popular content from around the web (try looking at BuzzSumo, or Reddit for ideas) and by posting tips and inspiring images. Remember the ‘value proposition’ and try to promote a lifestyle that people can get excited about.
At the same time, focus on interacting with the community. Talk to people, respond to comments and join relevant communities. This way you can demonstrate your knowledge and people will be inclined to ad you. This is particularly important if you want to promote yourself in a forum – don’t go in and start posting links right away, spend time building a reputation and making acquaintances who will then be happy to support your projects. A strong brand (logo, mission statement, design language) will make all of this much more effective.
Content Marketing
Content marketing means creating such great content on your website that you not only bring more people to your brand but also encourage people to subscribe to your website and to start trusting your opinion on your chosen subject.
At the same time, it’s great content that will succeed on social media, so invest some real time in creating things that will get read and that will get shared.
How do you do this? You make sure that what you’re writing is unique. Don’t write another article on ‘The Top 10 SEO Mistakes’ – we’ve all heard that a million times. Instead, how about writing something a little more hard hitting and unique ‘The Psychological Impact of Digital Success’. Always ask yourself: would you read it?
Likewise, create content with a very specific reader in mind. This will encourage sharing as people use sharing as a form of self-expression and communication.
Influencer Marketing
Finally, recognize the power of social media to connect you with key ‘influencers’ in your niche. These are people who already have a big audience and who can thereby give you access to massive marketing opportunities.
If you look at your Twitter analytics for example, you’ll actually be able to see which of your existing followers is engaging with you the most and which has the biggest following. If you can find a highly engaged follower with a big network, then you can use this to your advantage by getting them to promote you. Retweet something they say or comment on their post and often they’ll reciprocate in kind!
Another good way to get even bigger influencers is to network in person. Go to networking events and share your e-mail around – then use Rapportive to turn those e-mail contacts into LinkedIn connections. Don’t be afraid to pick up the phone either and if you’re really struggling to get noticed – hire their services! This will create a relationship you can later use to get a link or a shout-out.
Conclusion
This book has hopefully provided you with a brief overview of the world of digital marketing. But by keeping things simple, hopefully you’ll understand how easy it is to make money as long as you’re hitting the key beats. The simple formula is:
- Find a high profit product with a good value proposition
- Ideally pick an affiliate product with 60% commission or greater and that is already selling well
- Create a landing page and use persuasive writing to emotionally encourage people to buy
- Direct people there by using social media, blog posts, PPC and influencer marketing
Then, once you’ve got this working there’s just one more step… do it again!
This business model is so simple, so easy and so repeatable that you can scale it indefinitely and be highly successful as a result. So what are you waiting for?
