Best Internet Marketing Strategies

“Set yourself an affordable monthly budget and don’t be tempted to exceed this budget until your business starts to grow.”

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!

You must discipline yourself with a budget, especially when you are setting up an Internet business and have no sales… no profits… and no experience! Most people fail on the Internet because…

1. They do not set a budget…
2. They spend far too much money…
3. They don’t learn the proper IM success techniques…
4. They run out of money before they have even made a single sale….

On the other hand, many people also fail because they try to do everything free of charge.

The important points to understand about Internet marketing are,

1. You must set a budget and stay within it.
2. While you can do many things free, there are some things that you need to pay for.
3. There are also some tools that, while not strictly necessary, are very useful if you buy or subscribe to them.
4. Your budget should therefore cover all of the necessary items as well as your chosen affiliate
   programs and as many of the useful items as will fit comfortably within the limit you set yourself.

Ask yourself how much you can afford to spend on your business every month before you start to see a return…

$100…? $150…? $200…? $250…?

I have set up this course with a monthly budget of $100 in mind, but you may want to set your personal limit higher or lower.

However high or low you set your budget, stick to it until you start to earn a solid income from your business.

You should only consider expanding your budget when you are making a profitable return on it month after month and can be sure that your new budget will reap larger rewards.

Things You “Must Have” To Succeed On The Internet

1. A Web Hosting Account – I use Midphase Web Hosting because it offers a professional hosting platform and comes with a great affiliate program ($100 per sale). Best of all, you can host a single website for just $2.95 per month.

Budget: $2.95 per month.

2. An Auto-Responder – I recommend List Wire, which I use myself. List Wire is a fantastic professional autoresponder service and yet it is 100% free.

You need a professional autoresponder to do business online if you are to build a relationship with your clients, and List Wire is the place to be. Try it out and then come back and post a comment here with your feedback…

Budget: $0.00 per month.

MONTHLY EXPENDITURE = $2.95

That’s it folks!

Yes, the good news is that the only two things you absolutely must have for online success, a reliable website hosting platform and a professional autoresponder.

You’ll also need to get a domain name (approx $10-$15 a year). By the way, when you set up your hosting account with Midphase you get a domain name free with the hosting package.

Punch Above Your Weight With These Powerful Marketing Resources

The most important area you need to budget for is business promotion. Without advertising, your online business is a dead duck. You can do a lot for free, but you can do much, much more if you pay for a small number of carefully chosen promotional tools such as:

• Article Marketing Services
• Safelists
• Traffic Exchanges
• Social Media Services

What about Pay Per Click? I have excluded PPC promotions as they tend to eat through shoestring budgets very, very quickly with no positive result if you don’t know what you are doing. Before you start experimenting with Google Adwords and other PPC programmes, my advice is to have someone like Perry Marshal teach you how to do it properly.

Let’s look at some of the options available on a shoestring budget of $100 per month or less…

Article Marketing Services

1. Article Submission – You need a good article submission service and Steve Shaw’s SubmitYourArticle.com is simply the best article submitter by a long shot.

Budget: $37 per month.

2. Article Writing Services/Private Label Rights Packages – For the busy Internet marketer, or for those who lack confidence with writing articles, outsourcing could be the way to go. Getting individual articles written for your website or blog will cost anything between $3 and $30 per article. That gets expensive. Another way to go is to find a source of good quality “private label rights” articles which you can modify and publish under your own name.

Budget: $9.00 per month.

Safelists

A safelist is a membership program where you have the right to email the other members about your business opportunity. How many people you can reach in a single mailing Depends on how big the safelist is and also your membership level. Usually, you can also win mailing credits by opening email sent by other members, so even free members of safelists can reach several thousand people in a single mailshot.

The safelist I recommend is Adchiever.com because it has a good response rate in my experience. There are several membership levels:

• Free = Email up to 1,200 members every day using credits earned from reading ads.
• Platinum = $4.48 per month: Email 1500 members every 3 days.
• Diamond = $147.75 per year: Email 3,000 members 4 days.

Traffic Exchanges

A traffic exchange is a website where members earn credits by viewing other members’ web pages. The credits can then be spent on promoting your own web pages to other members. This is a very quick and easy way to get free or very low-cost traffic to your web pages. Note, however, that the traffic is not highly targeted.

One key to success with traffic exchanges is to concentrate on the most popular ones because that will get your web pages seen by a much wider pool of people. The biggest traffic exchange by far is EasyHits4U – it currently has around 470,000 members (compared to just a few hundred for the smaller traffic exchanges). There are two membership levels:

• Free: 1/1 surf ratio (view 1 site for 20 seconds to earn 1 credit) and other benefits.
• Premium: $7.95 per month for 1/1 surf ratio (view 1 site for 15 seconds to earn 1 credit) and 500 bonus credits /2000 banner impressions / 2500 text ads every month.

Social Media Services

Recently, several social media services have sprung up to leverage the enormous potential marketing power of Twitter, Facebook and other social media and blogging sites. These leveraging services are worth researching as they let you tap into the power of hundreds of participating members so you can send your message across the entire network.

One example is Totally Tweetable – a service that leverages Twitter and gets people to voluntarily tweet out your message to their followers. You send a promotional email to the membership and they can earn credits by (1) opening them and (2) tweeting them to their followers. TotallyTweetable is free to join, with a couple of big upgrade options:

• Free: Email 200 members every 7 days.
• Diamond: $47 per month. Email 1000 people every 5 days.
• Elite: $67 per month. Email 3000 people every 3 days.

Internet Marketing Training

While it’s true that you can learn a lot for free by researching on Google and watching YouTube videos, an expert coaching service will get you where you want to be much faster.

Provided you budget for it, an expert coaching service can be accomodated within a shoestring budget and the training you receive will more than make up for the monthly investment. Ideally, you should opt for a fixed-term training course so that you know how long it’s going to take to get the skills you need to succeed online.

But only invest if you are determined to do what it takes to build a REAL, CONSISTENT, and SUSTAINABLE Internet business that will provide you with LONG TERM WEALTH, not just one off sales here and there.

My recommended coaching service – Welly Miura’s Gold Coaching – offers outstanding value, including personal coaching via the members site, and runs for just 4 months. Before you even decide to join, you can download $488 worth of powerful training materials and try out the coaching service for just $1 for 14 days.

Cost: $19.95 per month for a maximum of 4 months

$100 Per Month Budget Scenario

With careful budgeting, $100 per month can go a long way. Of course, you will have to make some compromises; in the budget scenario below, for example, there is no room for an upgraded membership of Totally Tweetable, so we shall make do with the free version for now. Even so, by selectively investing our $100 we have been able to get Webhosting, a professional quality autoresponder, and a suite of powerful promotional tools and services as well as top class coaching and $488 worth of free internet training videos and ebooks.

Right from Day 1 we will be able to get our message out to thousands of prospects and start building our list and promoting our products:

• Midphase = $2.95
• List Wire = $0.00
• Submit Your Article = $37
• PLR Articles = $9.00
• Adchiever = $4.48
• EasyHits4u = $7.95
• Totally Tweetable (free) $0.00
• Gold Coaching (with $488 worth of free training materials) = $19.95
• TOTAL = $81.33 per month.

As you can see, you can utilize a wide range of services and resources on a relatively low budget each month. With my example budget of $100 per month, I spent $81.33 and so have $12.77 to play with, or to set aside and allow to accumulate month by month.

Obviously, office expenses, capital purchases and so forth have not been included in these calculations. One of the advantages of starting a work at home business on the Internet is that you probably already have most of the equipment and facilities you need to get started.

Use A Budget To Discipline Yourself!

By working within a budget, the Internet marketer will be forced into a discipline of work that will reap rewards over time. Remember, most people fail because they do not set or keep to a budget but throw their precious money away on “quick fixes” – or never spend any money at all.

Both extremes are recipes for failure.

Having fixed your budget, the next thing you need to decide is your NICHE MARKET.

That is the subject of the next lesson.

Until then,

Best wishes

David Hurley

P. S. If you like the idea of setting up an Internet business but don’t know how to get started, you may be interested to know that I make Free Business Websites for my clients and train them to succeed online. Click here for full details.