For serious Internet Marketing newbies, starting an online business from the comforts of your home is easy. All it takes is a good mentor to show you the ropes. Online marketing isn’t hard work once you know what to do, how to do it and when to do it.

1. The one thing you don’t want to ignore when starting your Internet marketing business is having a simple business plan to follow. Make a few notes about your goals, desires, and finances for the next 12 months. Don’t make it more difficult than it has to be. Just keep it simple and get it done.

2. Profitable niches – these are ones that Internet Marketers are willing to spend money to advertise in. It must have a sufficient amount of targeted traffic and a limited amount of competition for a novice, or even an experienced online marketer to make money in.

3. Email Marketing – though there are many ways to generate online money, email marketing, also referred to as lead generation, is one of the most powerful internet marketing tactics that can be used for any niche and any online business.

4. SEO or Search Engine Optimization – is using keywords or phrases within your site that relate directly to your site’s topic. It used to be common practice to stuff the content and meta tags (within the HTML of the site) with tons of keywords to trick the search engines but doing this today will likely get your site banned. Using your keywords sparingly and wisely throughout your site and within your meta tags will help to get your site indexed quickly and in good standing.

5. Affiliate Sales – this is when you sell other merchant’s products online for a commission. If you are selling hard products such as dog toys or cameras, you will likely find merchants willing to pay from 5% to 12% commission on each sale. If you are selling information products through Clickbank, you can make commissions averaging 55% and higher. You set up a site or blog and add some content, and then promote the products with an assigned affiliate id within your links.

6. Tools Available for Internet Marketing – thousands of tools are available today which makes online marketing so much easier than just a few years ago. If you want to research a niche there are free and paid tools out there that save you lots of time and effort. If you want fast and constant content you can use tools that automate the process by bringing other peoples content automatically into your site. You can automate article submissions, pinging and even social bookmarking which all lend a hand in getting backlinks coming to your site.

7. Outsourcing – to ease the overload of working online, especially for newbies, you will need to outsource some of the work allowing you to concentrate on the more critical internet marketing aspects of the business. Unless you have your own team of workers, outsourcing will become a necessity in order to get everything done. Most anything can be outsourced such as article writing, blog posting, and blog and website design.

8. Blogging – most Internet Marketers today are blogging as much if not more than building and maintaining websites. Blogs are free and they allow you to interact with your visitors helping to create a relationship and trust. Unlike the beginning days of the Internet, folks today will not buy from just anyone. They are looking for someone who will provide outstanding customer relationships along with their product. Blogs also allow you to display Google Ad Sense ads, banners and other marketing tools.

9. Article Marketing Online – the purpose for writing articles and submitting them to directories is to build quality backlinks to your blog or site. If the search engines see high ranked sites linking back to you, it tells them that your site is popular among authority sites and this will help get you ranked higher and faster.

10. Online Marketing Strategies – having a plan to strategically market your online business is critical. There are many paid services, as well as many free ways to market your site. What you choose will depend on your ability to pay. Free marketing methods include submitting articles, pinging rss feeds, creating multiple Web 2.0 properties linking back to your main site, and social bookmarking. Paid strategies may include pay per click ads or other advertising methods that charge some kind of fee.

With the 10 steps above you will be armed with all you need to begin your online marketing business. Focus on one project and all of the aspects of marketing that project. Don’t get discouraged and move from one project to another.

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