So you’ve decided to take the plunge and become an Internet Marketer. Lured by easy money, or the ability to be your own boss, or a simple desire to be a part of the Internet that’s taken over so much of our lives, whatever the reason, you’ve decided that you want to make money on the Internet.
But Where Do You Start?
You’ve come to the right place! I’ll save you a lot of heartache and aggravation and let you in on a secret. If you want to make money online you must build a list.
What do I mean by a list? Easy, I mean either an email list, or an RSS feed list, or a twitter list….or SOME list or means of contacting people who are interested in your product or service.
Let’s pretend that you want to sell an eBook on gardening. The first thing you need to do is start building a list of gardeners. You need to get a hold of as many gardeners email addresses as possible. Ethically.
How do you do that? Well, the easiest way is to start a newsletter or blog like this web site. On your site, offer visitors something free if they will sign up for your mailing list.
You can offer a free newsletter, or free eBook, or free audio download, or a free video, or anything at all. The possibilities are limited. However you do it, you need to start building your list, because to make money online you must have the ability to sell to a list of people who know you.
There are many tools out there to help manage your email list. Aweber.com is probably the leader in email list management for the small to mid sized internet marketer. I suggest you sign up with them right away.
Twitter is free, and allows you to build up a list of Twitter followers. Of course, this is limited since you can only send them little snippet messages and there’s no real tracking like with email.
Further down the list is RSS, which is also free and probably built into your blog system if you run wordpress for your site. But again, like Twitter you lose some trackability and control.
Internet Marketing is not complex. Build a list of email addresses, then simply send them offers for products or services that you sell or get a cut of (like an affiliate program). Rinse and repeat.
Questions? Comment below….