Internet Marketing for the Newbie

Start by identifying potential niche markets for your product or service. For example if you’re going to sell gifts, you would want to narrow down that market to perhaps t-shirts. T-shirts is still a large market and you can narrow that even further by style, gender or age group. Brainstorm and make a list of all the potential niches you can come up with. Next to those niches write 10 – 15 words or phrases that describe or are associated with each niche.

Once you’ve completed your list, it’s time to begin doing some research on those markets. There are basically two types of research you’re going to do. The first type is obtaining some demographic data. You’ll want to know who your clientele will be. What their likes and dislikes are and you’ll also want to know who your competition is in that niche. If you can find a similar site, study it and try to identify some keywords that you can add to your list that you made above. The second type of research is keyword research. Review the demand for each keyword you wrote down using a site like Overture or WordTracker. Google has a free keyword tool as well. Review the words to see how many sites are competing for those keywords. You should also check and see if there are any other similar word choices that you can use. You will basically be studying three places for keywords – your brainstorm list, your competitor’s sites and your keyword tool site. Keep refining each keyword until you find a niche.

Decide on your internet marketing strategy components. There are so many to choose from: pay-per-click, private label (PLR) article submission, linking strategies, social media networking strategies as well as using internet marketing products and more. Decide which will work best for your product or service and begin doing it.

The last step of your internet marketing strategy is to be in a constant state of improvement. That means that as a guru reporter, you’ll have to have a way to measure your site’s success. You’ll want to find out what strategy works and what doesn’t. For the things that don’t work, you’ll want to tweak and refine the strategy a little (optimize it) until the strategy is a success. Keep going until you see the success you’ve always dreamed of!