With all the clutter and web pages scattered across the internet, it’s easy to ask yourself whether internet marketing is still effective.

Especially if your website has tumbleweed rolling across it and any paid adverts seem to either cost an arm and a leg or just don’t seem to get the traffic you always dreamed of.

My personal view is that internet marketing is very much alive and well but that it needs to be used properly in order to be an effective use of your time and budget.

You need to measure things

If you don’t measure what you do in your internet marketing then you won’t know how effective it is.

Keep a brief log of the time you spend – it doesn’t have to be much but if you’re spending even an hour or two per day then it’s worth keeping track of the time.

And if you’re only spending an hour or two a month on things that are actually likely to affect your website (content, emails to your list, videos, that kind of thing) then you can’t expect to get as much back as if you’re spending that amount of time – or more – per day.

You can easily track traffic to your website. Programs like Google Analytics give you a massive amount of information – too much for most people in my opinion – or you can use the stats from your hosting control panel or (as I do) a plugin like Jetpack Lite that gives you a quick overview of what’s been happening.

Checking your visitor stats every week or month and comparing them with the previous week/month as well as the comparable time period a year ago will give you a good idea of how you’re doing.

On top of those measurements, there are obviously sales stats and signups to your email list to check.

I don’t personally think it’s worth checking precisely where you rank for various keywords although I know some people who obsess about that. Google’s results are so personalised nowadays that you won’t ever get a true picture. But your website traffic will tell you whether you’re doing OK.

The old adage that what gets measured gets done is worth keeping in mind.

You need to keep doing things

The internet doesn’t stand still.

New competitors will arrive. Old competitors will either stay around or vanish.

Change and disruption in the internet marketing business model is a way of life.

Your competitors will be adding new content on their own sites, places like YouTube and SlideShare, social media, maybe guest posts and forums, anywhere people might spot it and react to it.

You need to do the same.

You can’t sit back and rest unless you want to go backwards.

I think that’s one of the big reasons that people get disillusioned with their internet marketing – it’s easy to start out with lots of enthusiasm but it’s less easy to keep that going in the weeks or months it takes for it to gain traction and start making money.

You need patience

It takes time to succeed.

Maybe longer now than it ever did when the web first started.

Part of the issue is the cost of entry is almost zero: around $10 for a domain for a year, a handful of dollars a month for hosting, zero upwards for WordPress and then the cost of your time or paying for someone else’s time to create your website content.

Which means near enough anyone can get started on the web for almost no money.

Which in turn means that lots of people do exactly that.

Google takes time to digest what’s happening.

Some of that is built in to their algorithm – it used to be fairly easy to get a brand new domain to show in the search results, now it seems as though it needs to be into its second year of being registered in order for Google to take notice because that’s an easy way for them to weed out a lot of the spammers.

Some of it is just bulk of numbers – it’s thought that it takes their back office computers over a month to re-crunch the data if they have a big update in their algorithm.

But, whatever the reason, you need patience to make your internet marketing effective and successful.

If you’re the kind of person who can’t wait, find something else to do because you won’t be cut out for internet marketing.

All those things mean that you’re best to concentrate on topics that excite you because otherwise you’ll get bored of a topic before it has a chance to prove its worth.

Keep testing

Testing is essential to effective internet marketing.

Things change fast and if you’re using methods that are past their use-by date and ignoring newer methods then you’re not making best use of your time or money.

Sometimes it’s easy to figure out what’s no longer working – sites like mySpace just don’t have the interaction you’d expect on somewhere like Facebook.

Other times sites face a prolonged death – EzineArticles springs to mind there.

And other times whole methods face a gradual decline – forum marketing for instance – where it might take you a while to notice the decline. I’m probably guilty of this one and have a kind-of folorn hope that some of the forums I’m a member of will suddenly be revitalised. But deep down I know that’s unlikely and I am gradually weaning myself away from them in favour of newer methods like Facebook.

If I didn’t test and pay attention, I probably wouldn’t notice.

It’s the boiling frog theory turned into practice on the web.

I think it’s a good idea to devote about 10% of your time to testing new things.

Dip your toe in the digital water and see what happens.

Maybe set aside an hour most weeks or months for testing so long as you don’t use that as an excuse to procrastinate and do nothing.

One of the most effective internet marketing methods I know and use is affiliate marketing.

It has a lot of upside potential because there are lots of products to market.

And even if you pick a dud product to promote, there’s no stock holding and there’s a good chance that you’ll still make a sale once in a blue moon which will justify the minimal (close to zero) cost of leaving the page on your site.

If you’d like to know more about affiliate marketing, you can pick up my guide on how to become a successful affiliate marketer here.