Most prospective online entrepreneurs are faced with the following scenario when they decide to dive into Web Marketing,  (and this happens with all kinds of marketing, to be honest): The first thing they are told to do is write a list of their “circle of influence”.

This so-called “circle of influence” list is really a list of all the people the new marketer knows. When this list is completed, the new marketer is told to go and present his/her offer to all these people at the earliest possible opportunity and repeatedly, regardless of whether these people are interested or not. I call this “Lame Marketing 101″.

This is a big part of the “training” that a vast majority of newbies in the marketing industry get, (if it can be qualified as such). When I entered the automotive sales industry, for example, the first thing I was told to do was to go and hound my friends and family relentlessly with new car pamphlets and ads about the latest sale at the dealership. Needless to say, a lot of friends and relatives still cringe when they see me coming their way today, and I can’t say I blame them.

At some point along the path I realized that this is EXACTLY the wrong way to go about marketing anything. Then I came to the Internet marketing industry, and I learned a whole new way of marketing that consists SIMPLY on finding your target audience, (the people interested in your product or service), and presenting them with your offer. Sounds very basic, but you’d be surprised at how difficult it is to get people to understand this very simple proposition sometimes.

I don’t do “Lame Marketing” now, haven’t done it in years, and will never advise anyone to do it, because it is counter-productive, time-wasting, irritating, stressful, and frankly, JUST PLAIN STUPID. Do you want to alienate a prospective customer in a hurry? Start trying to sell him or her on something that they haven’t expressed the slightest bit of interest in!

Today’s web technology enables us to find the people who are interested in what we have to offer through a variety of means, such as Pay-Per-Click and Search Engine Optimization to name a couple. This is the beauty of the Internet!

However, smart marketing can be practiced offline as well through the use of print ads published in the right publications and postcards sent to a reputable, appropriately targeted mailing list. The Internet has simplified marketing and made it more sophisticated at the same time, but it is by no means the only way to go.

So stay away from “Lame Marketing” if you want to be successful as a marketer on and off the Web. Stick with me and I’ll be happy to show you the do’s and don’ts, and share with you the knowledge that I have acquired from experience!

You’ve probably heard this before, and it could not be more true. Success in marketing does indeed depend on the number of prospects you can reach with your marketing message.

The commonly referred-to rule of thumb in the marketing industry says that for every 100 prospects that see your marketing message, only 2 will buy your product or join your program. This is especially true in the realm of online marketing.

This is why your main task as a home-business operator using the Internet as your main platform has to be marketing intelligently online. The advantage of online marketing is that it can be achieved virtually without the advertising expenses that a regular brick-and-mortar business is confronted with.

Many people get excited about this industry and decide to jump into it, but become very disillusioned and dejected when their first marketing effort doesn’t render gigantic results, and that is just the tendency we all have to underestimate the difficulty of life.

Success never comes without effort and perseverance, and this industry is based on those two concepts to a very, VERY large extent. You have to make every effort to learn the right ways to go about marketing your product or program online, and once you’ve learned them, you need to put that knowledge into practice and persevere until you achieve success.

One of my favorite quotes about success comes from Sir Winston Churchill, who said: “Success is nothing but the ability to go from one failure to the next without losing enthusiasm”. He didn’t know it then, but he was describing exactly what it is like to operate within the online marketing industry!

This is a mindset that you must adopt and master as a home-business operator. If you do, it will allow you to succeed and achieve your goals not only in this industry, but in life!

If you’ve been following this blog at all, you’re probably tired of hearing me say that the most important thing you can ever do for your business is list building!

That is why you have to be willing to consider every conceivable method of lead-generation out there. However, at the same time, you have to be judicious and realistic when it comes to the costs you are willing to bear.

What does that have to do with postcard marketing, you ask?

I want to share a story with you: Once upon a time, (and not that long ago), I used to be one of those happy souls who thought that a single mailing of postcards to a good mailing list would bring me sales every time, and needless to say, I was wrong.

I was wrong, because I have realized that postcard marketing is, for the most part, really just one more way to generate leads (so you can build your list). A VERY expensive way to generate leads. Yes, you can make the occasional sale using postcards, but the overhead is just way too high.

Let me give you an example of what happened to me, in order to illustrate my point:  I would purchase an opportunity buyer list with 1,000 names from a reputable broker for about $100. Then I would purchase 1,000 first class postage stamps for postcards, (postcards need 0.32 cents each, so my total for that would be $320), and the design and printing of my cards would set me back by about $75. So my total cost for reaching 1,000 targeted prospects with non-junk mail postcards would be $495.

My reputable mailing list would yield a typical 2.5% response, which amounts to 25 people going to my website to look at my offer. Invariably, out of those 25 I would get maybe one or two sales, (if I got very lucky), and to be honest with you, most of the time all I got was 25 subscribers to my autoresponder list.

Therefore, my cost for each one of these leads came out to be $19.80. That is criminal, and I stopped doing it a long time ago!

There are very effective lead-generation methods out there that will allow me to generate up to 4,000 targeted leads per month virtually for FREE. In view of that, I am sure you can understand how crazy and insane it is to spend almost $20 for each lead you generate!

Postcard marketing works great for those who have sizable marketing budgets that allow for significant volume, and for those who are willing to pay for the bulk rate instead of first class. However, they still have to deal with the tendency people have to throw bulk mail away, (better known as junk mail), without even looking at it.

So my recommendation to you is to stay away from postcard marketing in the beginning, and to start attempting it little by little as your marketing skills and your budget increase in size. For effective and very inexpensive  methods of lead generation, stay tuned to this blog.

In closing, as always, I have to stress that the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do, (which you need to start doing RIGHT NOW), is building a list of subscribers and followers who trust you. Do that and the money will follow!

(And please, PLEASE, don’t use any methods that will cause you to pay $20 for a single lead!!!)

The vast majority of those who decide to turn to the Internet for a source of income don’t know why list-building is the most important thing for them to start doing. I was one of those people until not too long ago.

Usually what happens is that someone comes across an ad for a home-business opportunity on the Web and clicks on it. Then the person gets taken to an attractive landing page where he/she is solicited for their email address and name. Then they enter that information and get taken to a presentation, (usually a webinar). Many budding webpreneurs start that way.

Most Internet business opportunities provide their affiliates with a replica of their sales page or their webinar, and tell affiliates to promote that page and drive traffic to it in order to generate sales. What the newbie affiliate does not know is that in order to have a shot at making money online they have to build their own list. This is vital!

If all you do is promote a replica of a sales page without collecting the information of the people who view it and opt into it, you are leaving quite a bit of money on the table. Yes, you might make some sales and collect your commission, but you won’t be able to build a relationship with the buyer in order to generate trust and the opportunity to market to them continually.

If and when you join a business opportunity, what you need to do is build an attractive and compelling landing page with a web form that captures your prospect’s information for you. This is not difficult to do at all, and will ensure that you start building a list of prospects that will trust you.

You will need some tools in order to achieve this, like autoresponders and a website like this one, but those tools are not expensive or hard to get. I can point you in the direction you need to go in order to get them inexpensively and efficiently. You do need to realize that making money on the Internet is like any other business endeavor though, in that it requires an initial investment of time, effort, and money.

It is possible to make a lot of money on the Internet. One of the people that taught me what I know about web marketing has a list of over 10,000 followers to whom he markets consistently. This gentleman makes an average of $25,000 to $30,000 per month working out of his home office, putting in no more than two or maybe three hours per day!

I’m nowhere close to that level, but I have learned quite a bit from people like that gentleman, and it will be my pleasure to transmit that knowledge on to you if you stick with me and keep up with this blog!

Many marketers seem to think that niche marketing is all about trying to sell your product or service to the entire world, when reality shows that they could not possibly afford the gigantic advertising budget that would require.

However, it is entirely possible to sell profitable items successfully to a smaller audience with only a computer, an Internet connection and a good idea. You can accomplish this by means of properly implemented niche marketing techniques.

Niche marketing is not about trying to compete. Competition is taken out of the equation when you do niche marketing. You are not out there in the world beside or behind a million other marketers who are selling the same thing you are selling. In niche marketing, what you are really doing is selling to a specific audience that you have created for yourself with your opt-in email list.

Niche marketing is not about selling to different people every day of the week. Once you have your list built, you can sell to the same people time and time again, because you have established rapport and trust with them, which is KEY.

Niche marketing is not about focusing on the big picture. Narrowing your niche down to a very specific part of a larger market allows you to gain a fair market share of that smaller part of the market. The world is a big place and there are billions of people. You only need an infinitesimal portion of the population to have a huge list of potential buyers of your products or services.

Niche marketing is not about seeing only the impossibilities. Niche marketing is only about looking closely at the possibilities. Small possibilities converted to sales can equal big profits!

Internet Marketing and autoresponders go hand-in-hand. In today’s online business world, you simply cannot succeed at Internet marketing without the use of autoresponders!

Autoresponders are used to achieve many marketing tasks that are essential to a successful online business, which can be very time consuming. Whether you do affiliate marketing or market your own products, an autoresponder is a big part of your marketing arsenal.

Autoresponders are used to keep in contact with your past customers, and to develop a relationship with potential customers. An autoresponder can be used to deliver sales messages to your opt-in customer list. It can be used to deliver email courses, to send reminders, and even to help you build an opt-in list if you don’t already have one.

There are many creative ways you can use your autoresponder to make more sales and to build customer relations. Any successful marketer will tell you that there are two tools that are vital to any type of online marketing – an opt-in list and an autoresponder. In fact, most marketers will agree that you could take away all of their other marketing tools, but they would fight to the death to keep the list and the autoresponder!

Suppose for a moment that you are one of the corporate executives of a large corporation, OK?

In a recent board of directors’ meeting, it was discussed that the revenues and sales made during the previous month were comparatively lower to the revenues and sales made several months ago. The decrease is larger than expected, and this trend might continue due to uncontrollable market conditions.

If the problem is not addressed, the revenue of the corporation will suffer and it may even result in a streamlining of the corporate organization, which will affect most of the employees. As a corporate executive, what can you contribute to solve the problem of the corporation where you belong? It is your responsibility to get the business back on track as well as ensuring the employees that they will still have their jobs!

At this point, what you need is to formulate effective marketing strategies that will address the problem of decreasing revenue and sales volume of your corporation. Such marketing strategies will serve as the main foundation of your marketing plan. They must contain well-defined actions that will be implemented to address the problem of the corporation.

For instance, you might use the strategy of offering low-cost yet high quality products or services to attract more consumers or convince potential clients to patronize your new product. By using such a strategy, there is a high chance that you will be able to compensate previous losses and get the business back on profitable status.

You can’t just go about creating strategies without any basis at all. In fact, your strategies must be based on and integrated with your corporation’s marketing objectives, policies, and tactics into a cohesive whole. Keep in mind that you are formulating marketing strategies to effectively carry out the corporation’s mission of providing high-quality products or services at the lowest possible cost, without sacrificing the profitability of the investment.

Marketing strategies are applicable in all types of investment, particularly on Internet marketing. Given the fact that the Internet is a marketplace with endless opportunities of creating your own niche and maximize any profit that you can earn from it, you need to have effective marketing strategies that will help you achieve your goal of earning more.

Keep in mind that there are millions of websites that are competing for success in this lucrative investment. Your Internet marketing business must stay afloat amidst this tight competition!

What are the Internet marketing strategies that will help you to get more potential customers, earning out of sales that you will make, and declare your Internet marketing career to be a successful one? Take a look on the following and learn how it will affect your Internet marketing business on a positive point of view:

• Begin with what you have. What are the possible edges of your product or your business as a whole compared to others? Does it stand out among other businesses with similar product? Does it come with its own Unique Selling Proposition? Being unique will help you get potential clients and eventually make your business a success. Nothing will beat your expertise of developing a product that will satisfy the needs of your target market.

• Bring your product and give it a unique image over the Internet. Use the power of words and images in expressing what you are really offering to the public. Make the description of your product as simple as possible yet straight to the point.

• One of the keys to Internet marketing success is the “click through” strategy where you will attract a customer to click on your ad and get through your product. The product that you will offer must be significant to the client looking for it, thus the use of online surveys that will help you determine the products that are “in” and “out”.

These are just some of the Internet marketing strategies that you can use in your online business. There are still lots of strategies that you can use, but the aforementioned ones are the most basic. All complex strategies root from the basic, thus basic Internet marketing strategies are as effective as the complex ones.

Keep in mind the purpose of marketing—getting close to or going beyond your return of investment within the least amount of time and the least financial spending possible. These Internet marketing strategies will help you achieve the purpose of marketing, as well as address any future problems that you may encounter along your Internet marketing career.

Starting an Internet marketing campaign is only the first step in the battle. Sure it is a good idea to start an Internet business venture, but your marketing efforts may turn out to be a complete waste of time if you are not diligent about evaluating the response to your Internet marketing.

This means each time you implement a change to your marketing strategy you should evaluate the results of the change in order to determine whether or not it generated a greater profit. This is important because it can help you determine what is working and what is not working for you.

Evaluating the response of your Internet marketing can be done in a number of different ways. Customer surveys and embedded HTML code are two of the most popular methods of evaluating the effectiveness of an Internet marketing campaign. Customer surveys can be as simple or as complex as you like, depending on the amount of feedback you would like to receive.

However, one of the most effective ways to find out how well your different marketing tactics are working is to include a question asking the consumer where they first learned about your products or services. This is important because if you find a great deal of your customers are learning about your products or services through a particular venue, it is a good indication this method of advertising is working quite well for you.

Embedding code into your advertisements for the purpose of receiving feedback is also a popular method of evaluating the response to your Internet marketing strategies. Advertisements can be coded so the business owner receives feedback each time an Internet user clicks through a particular advertisement. This is useful for letting the business owner know which of his advertisements are attracting the most attention.

If the business owner is using two different designs for his advertisements he may discover one design is attracting more attention than others and may make the decision to convert all of the advertisements to a more effective style. Similarly, a business owner who is running the same advertisement on several different websites may discover he is receiving more traffic from one website than others.

He may also discover some websites are not attracting much attention at all, and this would give the business owner an indication of which advertisements to cancel and which ones to keep running.

Finally, the response to an Internet marketing campaign can be evaluated by carefully reviewing website traffic statistics after implementing changes to the marketing strategy. This information is useful because an unusual spike in the amount of website traffic immediately after implementing a stage of the marketing campaign can provide positive feedback that the change was well received by potential customers.

While this method of evaluating the response to an Internet marketing campaign can be effective it is important to note implementing multiple changes at once will make it difficult to determine which changes were the most effective. Therefore if you plan to use website traffic as feedback for how well your marketing strategy is working it is important to only implement one major change at a time so they can each be evaluated separately.

If you plan to do some Internet marketing to promote your business endeavor, you should seriously consider email marketing as at least one tier of your Internet marketing campaign. Many business owners shy away from email marketing because they believe all email marketing campaigns are purely spam.

However, this is not true, and not partaking in this type of marketing can cause your business to lose out on a great deal of business. By not appealing to potential customers via email, your business may lose a great deal of business to competitors who are using email marketing campaigns to reach customers around the world.

The first step of an email marketing campaign should be creating an email distribution list. This article will discuss some popular options for doing this and should help the reader to learn more about what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to email marketing.

Internet users are very quick to delete materials they believe to be spam without even opening or reading the emails. In fact, some Internet service providers include spam filters which may automatically delete your emails if your messages are deemed to be spam. These filters run complex algorithms on the subject heading and content of the message to determine whether or not it is spam and are quite adept at weeding out spam.

Therefore, you run the risk of having your email marketing effort turn out to be a complete waste if the majority of recipients never even read or receive the message. A far better way to create an email distribution list for your email marketing campaign is to ask current customers as well as interested potential customers to register with your website to receive additional information and periodic updates about your products and services, as well as other information which might be of interest to them.

This provides you with a database of email addresses from current customers as well as potential customers who have a genuine interest in your products and services and who are interested in learning more about them. You might also want to include useful links to your website, along with other websites which may be of interest to your readers. Your content should contain language that urges the reader to take a specific action such as making a purchase or at least investigating a product further.

You could really build a phenomenal list by following these steps. Always remember….THE MONEY IS IN THE LIST!

I buy a lot of domain names! Some I choose to keep and others I let expire, but I do buy a lot of them. If you’re serious about Internet marketing you have to.

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, you make your own lead-producing web pages, or you work with marketing systems that provide you with their own product or webinar sites, having your own domain name gives you credibility and an air of legitimacy that you just can’t get from an affiliate URL link.

There is a big difference between marketing a short, clear, easily readable domain name that contains two or three words, and marketing a kilometric, unpronounceable hieroglyphic that happens to have a fortuitous “.com” at the end.

If you’ve been involved in the internet business industry for any amount of time, you have no doubt received countless emails from well-intentioned folks who are marketing all kinds of programs, services and products, (I know I have, and still do on a daily basis). Nothing makes me cringe harder than when I read a well-written, enticing promotional email from someone telling me to click on one of these kilometric, indecipherable URL’s. It’s very off-putting and unprofessional!

I should say that most people that come into this industry don’t set out to be unprofessional, (of course), but they do allow their enthusiasm to get the best of them before they have had a chance to learn anything, and this is the kind of stuff that happens. I’ve been there…Hence this article! };-)

The right thing to do when you are promoting an affiliate link is to come up with a domain name that reflects the benefits provided by the product or service that you are marketing.

For example, say you are marketing an automated business system that does most of the hard work of attracting leads and selling itself to them, but the URL your company gives you looks like this:

http://www.millionairemarketingmachine.net/members/armyvet101/default.php.

The last thing you want to do is go out and start marketing that monstrosity!

What you actually want to do is get a domain name that you can forward to that web page in order to conceal the ugly and generic URL you’ve been given. You can come up with something like http://www.nosellingnoconvincing.com, which looks much better and makes more sense to the brain as it tries to decipher the images it receives.

And something else you should do is include one or some of the keywords pertinent to your offer in that domain name, so that when it gets indexed by the search engines you’ll have a better chance at achieving a decent position in their result pages.

Buying domain names and using them to your benefit is actually a really easy process, which I will cover in a separate article. For right now just know that, for the sake of your credibility as an Internet marketer, the indecipherable affiliate URL your company gives you should never really see the light of day!