BizFractals

“Solidly” speaking - in this world of hypes and promises, does someone out there make money by marketing on the Internet?

The truth is, yes. It IS possible to make money on the net if you take the right direction.

Imagine that you are at a crossroads, and do not know which way to turn to if you want to go to, say LasVegas. You look for directions, and if you don’t see directions, you ask people. In the Internet Marketing world, there are many people who can tell you which way leads to LasVegas, and what is the shortest way to reach there. And, if you have enough time and money, almost all of those ways can help you reach your destination.

So what’s the problem? Because your goal as an Internet Marketer is to reach your destination before you reach the level of frustration and lose all your money.

This is true about internet marketing. You can make money, you can make a “helluvalotta” money! But you need to know the best way to get there.

For a start, there are some things about Internet Marketing which you should keep in mind - things for which, if you have been on the net for long enough, you may have received a lot of contradictory answers.

1) Is it easy?

No - it is not! Any seasoned Internet Marketer can tell you that. And if someone says otherwise and tells you about “overnight riches”, it is something worth NOT looking into.

Remember what I told you - there are many ways to succeed if you have the time, money (and also patience). When it includes money, it also involves a lot of competition. Only the ones who put the right time and the right effort reaches success at the end.

There is one easy part though - starting up your business - if you already have a product, that is. To buy or sell online on the internet, you don’t necessarily need to set up your own office. You’ll need a website and good enough hosting space. Then comes the work part of it, where you need to write content for it, get people to notice it, get it to the search engines, and make your site famous to a lot of people (and they would in turn bring in more business for you).

2) Marketing on the internet is not free

It is not free - but it doesn’t cost a big bundle to start.

As I said above, if you already decided on the product that you want to sell, all that you would need to do is to buy a hosting space from a good hosting provider, and set up a website (I personally recommend Hostgator’s $9.95 monthly package, which comes in with a 600GB webspace, own control panel and Fantastico, site builder tools and all). With most of the service providers around, it is easy nowadays to set up a website, blog or a shopping site in no time. And you don’t worry about infrastrucure, office space, furniture, production environment, etc. because your website works as your interface to the customers.

3) So, shouldn’t I have started off early because now most of the others are ahead of me?

Actually, you can start tomorrow, next week, or even next month - or maybe even 3 months later. All you need is a good enough plan - finding or having a product to sell, understanding your customer base, knowing all the good places they go to, and finding ways of letting them know (without annoying them or spamming them) about your product - that should sum it up. If they need it, they will surely buy it. And if there are no users for your product, simply find another one. Of course, it would be harder to “make” a new product, because then you’ll need to do a lot of research and find out what people need. Unless you are passionate about creating a new product (such as a new software, an ebook, etc.), there are a lot of products which have already been made and you can just find the right market for them and sell it for affiliate commissions.

Either ways, it’s all about doing something and loving doing it.

4) Is the “Get Rich Quick” thing true?

You will find a lot of “overnight success” stories on the internet. When I started looking at Internet marketing, I used to see things like “this guy make $167,428,000 in just 24 hours without lifting a finger” - followed by the punch line, “find out how he did it, click here”, and that lead to a sales page of “How to laugh all the way to the bank overnight” or some cheesy name like that, which sold for some couple of hundreds of dollars only for the “first 25 customers” - after which the prices would go up. Ten days later, I happened to see the same pages with the offer still in place for the first 25 customers.

Overnight success is, unless you win a lottery or something, pretty much baloney! You can get rich quick, but you need to understand that “quick” means “lesser amount of time”. How fast you get rich depends on how good your plan is, and how good your research is on the subject or your product.