Archive for June, 2009

June 29th, 2009

Introduction & Basic Rules of Internet Marketing

Internet marketing has emerged as a fantastic means of generating passive income. Internet marketing allows ordinary individuals to apply basic marketing techniques to the internet and ultimately generate a profit. In contrast to a brick and mortar business, internet marketing has very low barriers to entry and relatively little risk. However, in order to succeed with internet marketing it’s still necessary to understand the basic rules that govern the internet marketing process. Failure to grasp these rules could lead to total disaster.

While internet marketing has relatively little associated risk relative to other kinds of investments, it’s important to understand that there still is some risk involved. This is true even if you are following a ‘cookie cutter’ internet marketing strategy outlined in an ebook. Things on the internet have a way of changing very rapidly and what works extremely well one day could be completely ineffective the next.

With the internet marketing the risk of failure is actually very high. However, the costs associated with that failure are notoriously low (unless you don’t have proper adwords keyword advice in which case you may lose out big, should you use PPC). Generally though, it’s cheap to try and if you fail initially, you can try many different things without going completely bankrupt. Whatever you do, don’t let a single failure discourage you as there are arguably thousands of different internet marketing models to experiment with.

You can substantially reduce your risk and overall monetary losses by testing your business first before committing more resources. Suppose you were interested in selling wholesale physical goods on Ebay (a very good business model incidentally). Before purchasing huge amounts of merchandise and hoping that you sell them for a profit you should instead evaluate the market place and run several test auctions first. Ebay currently allows you to run an unlimited number of test auctions at very little cost. If you are planning on making a killing with information products, it would be a good idea to start by writing articles first and then testing to see how much traffic you are able to generate.

Knowing how to minimize your losses and leave a market is called an exit strategy. Even if your test marketing is successful, it’s still a good idea to have an exit strategy in place before you commit your time and resources. Returning to the example of the Ebay business, an exit strategy would consist of a plan to liquidate all merchandise if need be. In order to do this you would need to learn the minimum price you could obtain for each item which would in turn give you an idea of what your losses would actually be. Remember that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.