Internet marketing is a big subject and it’s often the case that beginners (and even more experienced internet marketers) struggle to know where to begin.

The trouble is that internet marketing is a big market – the lure of making money without leaving your home helps with that – and no-one in the world knows even a fraction of everything there is to know.

Big markets also attract big marketers. Ones who know exactly which of your “buttons” to press to get you to spend big money in the hope that their system will make you even bigger money.

So where to begin your internet marketing career?

Pick a market.

It could be a big market like health or it could be a small, specialist market.

If you pick a big market, you’ll need to niche down – find a sub-section that you can reach and deliver value to – because there’s no way you’re going to immediately be able to compete with the bigger players overnight.

There are lots of ways of picking a market.

Some involve expensive keyword research tools but I don’t like that route.

Almost all the paid-for keyword tools on the market ultimately use the free Google keyword tool as their basis.

That tool is primarily designed to get people to spend money with Google’s Adwords program. At best, the figures are guidelines. At worst, they’re just plain wrong. But we have a tendency to believe figures we see when they’re presented by an authority figure like Google, so we believe them anyway. Even when we’re more experienced at internet marketing and should know better.

I like to do my research using the same “tool” that I use when I do a regular search – the suggestions that come up as you type.

If you’ve got instant search switched on, you’ll usually see 4 suggestions. If you turn it off (highly recommended), you’ll see 10.

They’re shown in order of popularity and can quickly turn up some gems.

So I’d say use that method to work out your niche.

Don’t spend forever on research. It’s easy to get trapped in that. Set a time limit (and a timer to make sure you stick to that) and then sleep on your ideas overnight.

The idea that leaps out at you from your research tomorrow morning is probably the best – your subconscious mind takes care of that kind of detail.

Once you’ve picked a niche, it’s time to start work on it.

Pick a web platform

It’s tempting to use free platforms like Hubpages, Tumblr and Blogger to start your internet marketing empire.

After all, money isn’t (yet) flowing relentlessly into your bank account.

But whilst those methods have the advantage of being quick and cheap, they also put your whole business plan in someone else’s hands.

If a policy at your chosen site changes, you run the risk of your efforts being removed from the web overnight.

Or if Google’s algorithm takes a dislike to the site you’ve chosen, your page sinks with the rest of the ship.

Or another player could buy the site, raising all sorts of uncertainty (like the recent purchase of Tumblr by Yahoo).

This kind of thing happens, way too regularly to make it worth the risk.

It’s far better to buy a domain and some hosting.

Keep them separate – the two skills involved in those businesses don’t mix.

Then install WordPress using your host’s control panel and do a few tweaks to get it ready for the search engines. You can get a cheap tutorial on how to do that here.

Start something!

Yes, that’s the one “secret” most internet marketing guides assume but don’t emphasise.

If you don’t start, you don’t get anywhere.

It really is as simple as that.

And despite what you may get told in the sales letters, that’s going to involve effort.

Google and the other search engines work best with words – the old phrase “a picture is worth 1,000 words” definitely isn’t the case on the internet.

If you’re not a writer, you can do one of several things:

• Speak and use your computer to transcribe (it’s been built in to Windows since XP)
• Write anyway – you’re almost certainly better than you think, your voice will come out in what you write and the spell checker in your word processor will take care of most spelling errors
• Outsource the writing. If I’m outsourcing articles, I’ll use iWriter or GetArticlesDone. Both are reasonably priced and, with the right instructions, even iWriter can produce decent quality articles or be used as a “first draft”.

Don’t strive for perfection. Good enough is good enough. And only you will notice the couple of tweaks you agonised for hours over.

It’s far better to produce an article in about 30 minutes and see whether or not internet users even look at it than it is to spend hours or days or weeks creating the “perfect” article. In that time, you could have lots more content created.

While we’re talking about articles, a lot of beginner internet marketers are tempted to use either article spinning or PLR (private label rights) content rather than write their own material.

Don’t fall into that trap!

Article spinners claim they can create hundreds or even thousands of articles that are sufficiently different that the search engines will treat them as unique and also that they’re as good as if they were written by a human.

Neither statements are true in real life.

The search engines may see the articles as being different (so they’ll pass a Copyscape test for instance) but if they reach that stage of the algorithm, it will then treat them as plagiarised instead. So they’ll suffer the same fate as if they were just duplicate content.

With a few notable exceptions, PLR articles are usually written outside the main English speaking countries, typically by people who know nothing about the subject outside what they’ve just “researched” on EzineArticles.

If there’s a sample, read it. Out loud. And ask yourself whether it is something you’d want to be associated with. Unless it was written by someone like Tiffany Lambert (one of the few PLR writers I’d trust) then it’s unlikely it will pass the human readable test.

There’s a reason that sites like EzineArticles, HubPages, etc don’t like PLR content: it just doesn’t pass muster.

I proved this very quickly to someone recently. They were asking why their site wasn’t getting any traffic. I picked on one of the articles at random and started reading it out over Skype. About 2 sentences in, we both agreed it was utter garbage and even if they’d paid a couple of cents for it, they’d have been overcharged.

So take the time to write your own content.

In your own voice.

Pick a low volume search phrase like the multi-word ones Google suggests as you type.

You won’t get much traffic – maybe one or two clicks on a good day – but it will be hyper-targeted and your visitor will be relieved that they’ve found something worthwhile in amongst the rubbish they’ve previously found.

Keep at it and monitor results

Keeping at your internet marketing – persistence – is something a lot of internet marketers aren’t good at.

But it can mean the difference between making money and not making money (we’ll talk about monetising in another post).

Of course, you also need to monitor whether or not what you’re doing is worthwhile.

It takes time for anything to happen in internet marketing – overnight successes are rare and there’s usually a lot of preparation beforehand to make the “overnight success” happen.

What I like to do is spend a week or so putting content up on a new site – so that I’ve got between 10 and 20 pages of content, each targeting a slightly different area of the same topic – and then let it rest for a few weeks so that Google has chance to index it and put it in the search results.

I’ll then go back and look at the stats – I normally use the Jetpack Lite WordPress plugin – to see what (if anything) has happened.

That usually gives enough data to work with.

Some of the posts will have had no views, others a handful. I’ll then write more on similar topics to the ones that have had some traffic.

I’ll also do some external promotion – usually a 2 – 3 minute video on YouTube – for some of the topics that are showing signs of life.

Anyway, that’s more than enough to keep you going for a while.

Remember – keep at it!

Do your best not to get distracted by the next toy.

And be careful with automation – it doesn’t always help.

If you’ve got any comments or questions, please add them below.

And if you’d like some help, take a look at this page.