Internet marketing is an interesting mix: some things almost never change yet others come and go with amazing speed (remember when everyone was using Myspace?).
Check out these 5 internet marketing tips that will help you focus and grow your internet business:
1. Pick a niche and stick to it
Far too many internet marketers have the attention span of a goldfish.
They flit from idea to idea to idea without giving any of these ideas time to come to fruition.
You need to keep with your chosen method – I’d say for at least 3 to 6 months before re-evaluating whether or not it’s worth continuing. Rather than 3 to 6 days, not seeing any instant results and deciding that “obviously isn’t going to work”.
If you need variety, pick a few niches – I do that and find I can stay fresher on the content i create if I swap between internet marketing, product creation and self help during the course of a content creation session.
2. Create content
Content is king.
It’s not a cliche – it’s fact.
Google delivers links to content every time you search for absolutely anything.
Facebook has content, even Twitter does (albeit within a handful of characters).
Content can take many forms. My favourites are written content like this post and videos like the ones I put on my YouTube channel. If it’s more appropriate – usually inside a product I’m creating – then I’ll also use audio. And bigger amounts of written content get wrapped up inside a PDF or a Kindle ebook but they’re still words.
If you’re stuck for ideas, check your stats/analytics or set up a Google news alert to give yourself a daily batch of ideas.
3. Create your own product
Creating your own product gives you expert status almost automatically.
And it’s not actually difficult to create a product.
In essence, it’s just a bigger version of the content you’re already creating for your website or elsewhere.
So you have the opportunity to talk about things on your website and naturally lead people on to your product without it being a hard sell – they already know your style and the quality of the information you deliver from browsing round your website.
You can then sell it via Paypal or through one of the specialist markets like Clickbank or wherever.
4. Spread your net wide
Whilst there’s a lot to be said for specialising, there’s also quite a bit to be said for spreading yourself a bit wider every now and then.
My personal preference is to use a few places very regularly – I’m posting on this site near enough daily, doing the same with articles on EzineArticles and creating videos on a regular basis.
But I’m also contributing elsewhere: there are a couple of forums I use quite regularly, sometimes I’ll create a podcast (it’s on my list to do more regularly and that may or may not happen), I get interviewed occasionally, I put things on LinkedIn every now and then, and so on.
I’d suggest that you use the 80/20 rule for this. Spend the majority of your internet marketing time on the things that you know work, day in, day out. Then some of the remaining time experimenting with a few of the things you rarely do or that you’ve been meaning to get round to doing.
5. Measure your results
This doesn’t just apply to internet marketing but it’s done less often than it should be.
There’s an old saying that what gets measured gets done.
The thing with measuring your results is that it means you’ll actually need to check what’s happening. Whether your YouTube videos are getting watched – really watched, not fake views. Whether your articles are getting read and the resource box is getting clicked. Whether people are sticking around on your blog or website or whether they’re clicking the back button immediately.
Then continually tweak and improve what you’re doing. The Japanese call this Kaizen and it works on the basis of continuous yet small improvements. On the same basis that if you improved whatever it is you’re doing by a seemingly miniscule one third of a percent every day for a year, you’d have a 100% improvement.
Which would be well worth doing even though the daily change would be almost imperceptible.
Feel free to add your comments below!
Nice article Trevor. I still have to grab myself by the tail end every once in awhile and pry myself from the SOS, Shiny Object Syndrome. It takes focus in this industry to even begin thinking about success.
It also takes work. The big names in internet marketing did not get there in a week or two. They spent tons of time devoted and focused in one area of there business then built that one area. Once it was going great some decide too focus on another area and build that part of their business until they have that part perfected. You can never perfect anything in a few days or few weeks.
You choose a niche then figure out your brand and begin delivering valuable content.
Creating content is something I need to get more active about. I have let myself get lazy lately and that is big no no.
A lot of people are flat out scared to death of those two words product creation and I don’t know why. If you have a blog or a website, if you don’t you need one, you’re creating content to put on these sites and that is basically what product creation is. An information product is nothing more than finding a problem people have. Then deliver a solution to that problem. Your already doing this. Or you could convert some PLR. The possibilities are endless.
There are many ways to get the word out about your brand. In fact that would be a product if someone wrote an ebook on this subject.
If your not measuring your results then I would suggest to start. Split testing your opt in forms, squeeze pages, sales pages and so on is very important so you can tweak things in order to get optimal performance out of these components. They are an integral part of your business.