At its heart, internet marketing is simple: connect potential buyers to potential products that earn you money.

But how can you join the dots and make that happen?

When I was younger, marketing was much easier (but much more expensive). Here in the UK, we had one TV channel with commercials so if an advertiser wanted to reach a customer on TV, there was only one place to go. No videos or computer games competing. And no sign of the internet.

Things have changed – advertising (which is essentially what internet marketing is) has fragmented tremendously.

Which has made it cheaper to reach people – rather than spending thousands on a commercial, you can spend a few cents or dollars per click or you can produce “free” content like this and hope the search engines will send visitors.

That’s the problem – there are probably too many ways to do things now.

Back when it was a TV commercial or a print advert or direct mail or sampling, those were near enough the only options. Almost all of which were nastily expensive.

Now, the options are almost endless:

• Content on your website – free (like this page), paid as part of a membership or product, behind some other kind of fence like a newspaper “pay wall”, maybe with a free trial or a limit on the number of articles you can view per day if you don’t cough up some money.
• Content on other websites – a similar deal to content on your own website but with extra hurdles as to whether or not you can get your content added in the first place. Some sites are essentially open access once you’ve registered – YouTube, SlideShare, those kind of sites. Other sites get you to qualify yourself first – EzineArticles does that, as does the Open Directory if you want to become an editor there or some of the other user contributed sites like Huffington Post and LifeHack.org. And the fact that I’m giving you more examples here than there were TV channels when I grew up tells you how much diversity there is.
• Promoting other people’s products as an affiliate. In addition to the main content ideas you can do this with forum posting (another form of content), emails to your lists, maybe blog commenting, Pins on Pinterest, Tweets on Twitter, posts on Facebook, messages to your connections on LinkedIn and Google+, and all the other substitutes for word of mouth that the internet has spawned. Or you could put up bandit signs, distribute flyers, use direct mail, cold call prospects or even create your own TV advert. Because with the proliferation of channels (real and internet based) even that has come down in cost. Whatever advert you produce will be better than the local “videos” that were in cinemas when I was young – they were essentially slide shows with some tacky music and maybe a voiceover.
• Creating your own products and letting affiliates promote them for you. You can create these from scratch or buy “done for you” packages that promise that they’ve done all the hard work of creating the product and that you just need to sell it. Whether or not that’s as easy as the sales page makes out is open to debate – I’d suggest that the product creation side of things isn’t the hard part, it’s the sales pages and promotion. But others would disagree with me.

And that list is just scratching the surface.

I doubt that anyone could come up with a definitive list. Partly because the list is forever changing.

So how can you make your internet marketing happen and start working for you?

As with most things, the trick is to dumb it down.

Don’t try to start a million and one projects in a million and one ways.

You know before you start that won’t happen but you do your best to fool yourself and try anyway.

Instead, pick a method.

A bit like a close up magician tells you to pick a card.

You don’t know what the card will be and the magician may or may not know.

But the trick works.

And weirdly that’s almost always the same with internet marketing.

Any of the methods and ideas in that list earlier can and do work.

They may not work for everyone.

Much the same as that card trick wouldn’t work first time for an amateur, they’d need practice.

But if you drill down and pick a method that should work (any of the ones listed above and lots more) then it’s usually a matter of putting enough effort in to make it happen.

Of course, that’s not what the sales pages want to tell you because they know most people prefer to take the push button, lazy, option.

And then the next push button, sure fire, option when they get the next email.

And so on.

Your personal plan to make internet marketing happen:

Pick a method – either from the list above or elsewhere.

Choose a method that you’re reasonably comfortable with. So if you like typing, go for written content. If you prefer the sound of your own voice, choose audio or visual. If you’re a geek, maybe create some software or a theme or a plugin. That kind of logic.

Then doggedly pursue it.

Don’t pick one method this morning, a different one tonight, yet another one tomorrow.

That’s why most internet marketers fail.

Put all your efforts into the one method you’ve chosen.

Do that on a regular basis – maybe an hour or two most days for at least a month, preferably longer.

Then take a step back and check whether there’s a glimmer of light.

Unless you’ve got an almost bottomless pit of cash it takes time for things to happen.

Even paid methods take time – testing adverts or messages to solo ads or whatever else.

Free methods usually take longer but the main cost is time so if you’re at a loose end (or can contrive to be) then you can do them and experiment until you find something that works for you.

Once that happens, do more of it.

I’ve lost count of the times I’m explaining something and say “I used to do that, the method worked but I stopped doing it” and can’t really figure out why I stopped.

I think it’s human nature.

We’re trained to seek out the new and exciting and ignore the old, boring, stuff that works.

Maybe that’s why we’ve progressed and it’s almost certainly why we keep creating all those must-have new shiny objects everywhere.

But if you can keep nudging yourself back to the basics, you’ll have an incredible advantage over near enough all your competition.

They’ll have moved on – no longer creating as much new content or whatever else they were doing.

You’ll have plodded on, much like the tortoise in that race.

Keep at it!

Seemingly minor things like creating two or three or more new pieces of content a week mount up.

Two pieces a week is 100 in a year.

Five pieces a week is 250 in a year.

If each of those only gets you one new visitor most weeks, that’s quite a few visitors. And I know from my experience that a website getting a couple of hundred page views a week can get a very pleasant amount of commission from promoting affiliate products.

If you’re still not sure where to start, that’s normal.

Go to this link, put your email in for the free download and follow the instructions. You’ll be a lot clearer by the time you’ve done that.