If you don’t have a strategy for your internet marketing, you’re immediately at a disadvantage versus almost anyone who does.

Even if their plan is merely written on the back of a napkin, it’s still further advanced than yours!

Creating an internet marketing strategy doesn’t have to take hours or weeks or months. It’s enough to have a good idea of where you want to go and fill in the gaps later.

Whilst I’m personally a fan of the law of attraction and have even created a product on it (you can get the product and the whole process of creating it here), I’m also a strong believer that you need to actually do something to help the law of attraction work well.

Which is where a strategy comes in.

These points are in no particular order – I don’t think you have to do one before the next and you may well come up with an overall strategy that sums them all up in one sentence.

Decide what to sell

You don’t have to sell your own products although that’s the route I take a lot of the time.

You can sell products created by other people – usually via affiliate marketing.

The plus point of selling other people’s products is that you don’t have to create them.

So you don’t have to buy a kiln to make the ceramic photo mugs or whatever else it is you want to sell.

That suggestion is actually a hybrid – you could sell photo mugs as an affiliate but use them as a medium for your own photos. The same goes for things like t-shirts, books, CDs and lots of other products. Sites like Cafe Press make this easy to do.

Other ideas for things to sell include:

• Amazon products – relatively low commission per sale but a trusted brand. Unless you choose evergreen products, you’ll need to check regularly that the products you choose are still available as Amazon won’t notify you.
• Clickbank products – if it can be sold digitally (and sometimes physical products as well) then there’s a good chance that Clickbankhave it listed. Quality varies so check it first. And check regularly that the site hasn’t expired or decided to no longer use Clickbank – things change.
• Commission Junction and other similar sites. A much wider range than Amazon or Clickbank, sometimes with an approval process before you can sell the product you hoped to sell. With Commission Junction you need to be selling regularly otherwise the individual merchants or even the whole system will delist you. Other networks vary in this respect but individual merchants do leave occasionally due to a change in corporate direction.
• Ebay, Etsy, etc – usually physical products that you’ve made or bought and then offer for sale. You need to take into account any commissions charged by the sites and their payment processors.
• Freelance sites – a cheap way to start as you’re selling time for money. These include Fiverr and iWriter as well as larger sites like Freelancer. Even though they’re relatively easy to join you still need time to build up a reputation. They can also work well for buying-in skills that you either don’t have at all or don’t want to do.
• Your own products – potentially the highest margin and easy enough to make once you know how. You’re in control which can be a plus or a minus of course!

Decide on the medium

The internet is sufficiently big that you need to decide on the medium you’re going to use.

For me, that’s usually videos but can sometimes include audios or PDFs. And for my own site, simple blog posts like this one.

The main medium you use can be one of these options and it can be supported by others where they are more appropriate – for instance, the slides you used to create your video.

• Video – seems to be the most popular method to deliver internet marketing products and is easy to create either with software like Screencast-o-matic or the methods outlined here. You could also make video your primary marketing method and develop your own YouTube channel.
• Audio – this has the advantage that your purchasers can listen to it anywhere – they don’t have to be at their PC. You can create top quality audio with a program like Audacity, which is free and available for Windows, Macs and Linux machines. You could set up a podcast channel on somewhere like iTunes to complement your products or even make them available for purchase.
• Written content – this can be in the form of PDFs but they don’t tend to be valued as much by customers, so typically command a lower price than videos or audios. One way of overcoming that prejudice is to put your written content up on a website so that the pages of the PDF are pages on your site. You can get membership plugins for WordPress or just use plugins like Exclude Pages from Navigation and Search Exclude together with non-guessable page names. Or a simple post password protection such as Global Post Password. When I last checked, all those plugins can be found from a simple search inside your WordPress dashboard.
• Coaching/consulting – very much the buzzword at the moment. Partly because once you’ve got over the initial “Eek” response, it’s easy to set up. Especially when you follow a procedure like this one. Also because you don’t need much traffic to start generating sales.
• Software – anything from WordPress plugins and themes through to bigger software packages. If you’re not a programmer yourself, you can team up with one or hire one on a freelance site. Not for the faint hearted – there are support issues with even the best written software – but there’s also less competition.
• Apps – similar to software but they’re designed for specific types of phone. Again, you’ll probably need specialist help to create them and it’s likely that you’ll have to create separate versions for Apple and Android devices.
• Probably other ones I’ve forgotten about!

Any or all of these methods could be used to support a strategy of selling affiliate products or your own products.

Getting traffic

Getting traffic is the lifeblood of any website.

You can drive traffic with lots of different methods including:

• Your own blog or website – ideally one that you own rather than piggy-backing on a free site. You need to create content regularly otherwise the search engines will gradually forget about you.
• Articles on sites like EzineArticles. Not as effective as they were a few years ago but they still send targeted traffic. And once you know the right techniques you don’t have to spend forever and a day writing an article.
• Guest blogging – another twist on article marketing where you get yourself invited to post on other people’s blogs. It can be difficult to gain traction and it definitely takes more patience and persistence than I’ve got but people do report success with this. Personally I prefer the easier option of paying to guest post as discussed here and if you can write good quality content it’s definitely worth considering.
• Videos – much the same as above. I prefer to create my own but you can outsource their creation if that suits you. Be careful about buying views – YouTube are getting wise to this. Instead, work on the SEO for the video itself – title, tags, description, annotations, captions – and at least embed the video on your blog and maybe somewhere like Facebook or Pinterest for extra social proof.
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. All these can help build up a following and provide a way to drive traffic that doesn’t rely on Google or other search engines.
• An autoresponder list. When you build a list, you can email them regularly including details of any new posts you’ve made. Weave in affiliate links to those posts and you can give information to your list as well as sell products to them. Much like I’m doing on this page.
• Pay per click. Not my area of expertise and the default settings are designed to transfer the contents of your wallet as effortlessly as possible from you to Google or Facebook but if you’ve got the budget and the systems to make that traffic pay then they can be worthwhile. Start by completely reading a decent course such as this free one and then starting small and testing lots.
• Solo Ads – all the rage in internet marketing at the moment but not my area of expertise. And my gut reaction is that there aren’t many sellers that I’d use. If you go down this route, join the list of any seller you are thinking of buying clicks from and see how they treat their list. Or get hold of a properly tested list of vendors – much easier to do in the internet marketing world than other areas.
• Various other methods that get discussed from time to time – just be careful to keep within whatever rules a particular site has and be aware that results vary over time so what works today may not work in a year’s time (any business that used fax marketing will know that!)

The important part

All this may seem a lot of work and it is.

But then internet marketing is a business and contrary to the fairy tale land of a lot of sales letters it’s unlikely that anything will happen overnight.

The important part is to start.

Then spend some time on your internet marketing on a regular basis – this can be as little as an hour a day, less if you’re really time pressured.

Keep your strategy close by and refer to it on a regular basis to make sure that you’re on track. Much the same as you’d glance at the sat nav on a long car journey.

Don’t be afraid to revise your strategy if it’s not exciting you but don’t switch course every few hours or days or even weeks.

Internet marketing takes time – even though it’s not sexy or salesy to admit that.

But persistence does pay off.

So start your internet marketing strategy now.

Then start implementing it!