People often ask me this one question, and it’s a slightly odd question but I can see why people may be interested in it so I thought I would discuss it in a little bit of detail in this article today.

What’s the question? It’s this… if you had to focus on just one thing in Internet marketing, what would it be?

It’s an academic question because you’re never really going to focus on ONLY one thing, but still it’s an interesting exercise so here’s my take on it.

First things first; we have to determine what kind of an Internet marketer you are. There are two main types of Internet marketers and each one has its own main focus. Don’t worry, I’m gonna talk about both of them today.

The first type of Internet marketer is the person that sells their own product or service. For this person I would suggest that the main thing for them to focus on is list building. Building your e-mail list is incredibly important when it comes to selling your own product or service, because if you don’t have a list of people to market to, it’s going to be very hard for you to make any kind of sustainable money.

One of the reasons for this is because most of the money that businesses make, is made on the backend. Sure you make a little money when you sell one product, but the real money comes from selling lots of different products on and on and on- year after year to the same people who bought your first product. In fact, many marketers sell their first product at a loss (called a loss leader) simply so that they can qualify a person onto their mailing list in order to sell them more things on down the line.

It’s this sort of behavior that separates the real marketers from the wannabe marketers. It’s a stamp of professionalism to be able to discuss your backend as opposed to the front end.

The second type of Internet marketer is an affiliate marketer. These people sell other people’s products, and not their own. Building a list is important for them to, but not as important because usually speaking they don’t take advantage of the backend… the original manufacturer of the product usually gets to reap all the backend products, not the affiliate marketer.

The most important thing to focus on if you are an affiliate marketer is traffic. How you get traffic is the most important aspect of your business. In fact when you come right down to it it’s the only factor of your business. Affiliate programs come and go and on any given day you may market a dozen different products… and those products may change tomorrow making it hard to maintain a list for such a diverse potential product line.

No, the most important part is how you get traffic and how you funnel that traffic to the affiliate offer. The affiliate offer is irrelevant, it’s the traffic that is your bread and butter. So building solid traffic models is crucial if you are an affiliate marketer. You may focus on spending money on advertising in Google adwords, you may focus on buying banner ads across the Internet, you may focus on viral marketing in order to build up traffic through word-of-mouth like funny YouTube videos and things like that. However you do it, building traffic is the most important thing for you to focus on.

So there you have it! The most important thing to focus on in Internet marketing depending on your specialty!