There’s lot of internet marketing advice around.
After all, everyone has an opinion!
Some advice is evergreen, other advice is untested and other advice is out of date. The advice below is as close to evergreen as I can make it and as easy as I can make it as well.
Follow it and you should keep yourself on track.
Get the basics right
So often we go off on tangents or follow a bright new “sure fire” idea and, in the process, neglect the basics.
By basics I mean things like:
- Creating new content on a regular basis
- Getting new people to join your email list
- Maintaining a good relationship with your list
- Checking that nothing has broken since you last checked – are the products you’re recommending still in existence, is the advice you’re giving still current, are all your links to other sites still working as expected?
It’s easy to overlook basics – we often tend to assume that we know them or that they’ll take care of themselves.
But in a lot of things, it’s the basics that make up the majority of the process.
Think about when you last went shopping in real life rather than on a website.
Did the sales assistant acknowledge your presence or did they ignore you?
Did they smile and say please & thank you?
Those are basics but how often do they get missed and how much does it affect whether or not you go back?
The same applies with your internet marketing.
Get this one piece of advice right and it could transform your internet marketing business as you start to attract people from word of mouth.
Simply because you’re doing what you should be doing in the first place but so many people don’t.
Be helpful – even if it doesn’t directly lead to a sale
Email enquiries and forum messages often don’t lead directly to a sale.
Sometimes I’ll even suggest to someone that the product is not for them based on what they’ve said in their email.
And not all the products and solutions I suggest are ones that lead to a commission. They’re just “best fit” for the needs of the person.
Whether you answer emails yourself or outsource some or all of that task, I think it pays to treat each reply in exactly the same way as you would if you were answering an email from a personal friend.
Often I find that a relatively brief reply turns into the basis for content for my website – I do that with emails and forums. The reply is the basis for a long post on a site like this – I find it’s easy to type a reply that’s around 100 – 200 words even though I’m not counting words when I’m replying (I tend not to anyway) and almost without knowing it I can get to those kind of figures.
It’s then relatively easy to go back and expand on the reply to get it to the 500+ words of content that I aim for on a post like this one.
Above all, be genuine
This is maybe the piece of internet marketing advice that gets ignored more than anything else.
You read about trolls on forums and places like Twitter and then read comments when they’re uncovered that the troll is mild mannered and would never say anything so offensive in real life.
Some people adopt a Jekyll and Hyde persona.
Make sure that’s not you!
If you wouldn’t say something out loud and face to face, don’t write it on the web.
Follow that simple piece of advice and you’ll almost automatically do everything else right.
Keep working at your internet marketing
That’s the other place that people fall down.
They believe the hype that you can work for a handful of hours a week or a month and make big money.
Well, yes, maybe you could. But you’d need support staff around you and all sorts of infrastructure to be able to only put in those promised 4 hours a week.
The rest of us need to be reasonably consistent and actually do things on a reasonably regular basis in order to get the traffic and the leads and the customers.
If you’d like help with doing that, take a look at my Affiliate Marketing Road Map here.