3 Things You Must Do If You Want to Be an Internet Marketing Success

So you've got the vision. You know that with this thing called 'the Internet' you can earn money and get better and better at it as time goes by until one day you'll be able to fire your boss. With so many people online and more and more getting online all the time, somehow you know you'll be able to get enough of them to buy stuff from you for you to make a living, but how do you get started? What are the essentials to making money marketing on the Internet? Below I've listed what I believe are the 3 most important essentials to Internet marketing and the good news is, they're all within your reach!

1. Have your OWN website.

Don't be discouraged if you think you cannot successfully accomplish this because you probably can. This Internet marketing essential is listed first because it's the most important. If you think you can't afford it or that learning to design your website will be too difficult, then you're probably mistaken. Hosting can be had for between free and extremely cheap, and there are free templates and free html editors readily available on the net as well. Now that I've quelled your fears somewhat, let me tell you why having a website is so essential.

If you intend to be successful at Internet marketing you need a foundation upon which to build. Having your own website accomplishes just that. With it you have a base of operations on which you can build a reputation and a customer base akin to your brick and mortar counterpart. In this way your success can (and probably will) start out slow and increase over time as you become more and more well known and build traffic and a reputation. Which brings me to the second essential of Internet marketing; traffic.

2. Get qualified, targeted traffic to your website.

Everyone knows what Internet traffic is even if you've never considered marketing on the Internet, but not everyone knows how to best obtain traffic. If you're just starting out in online marketing, you probably have little hope of gaining traffic by getting listed on page 1 or 2 of Google (or any search engine for that matter) without paying a lot of money to contract the job out to an SEO (search engine optimization) company.

So, how do you do it on a shoestring budget? In a word, 'articles.' Simply put, you write short articles (400-700 words), put your name and website URL in the resource box at the bottom and submit them all over the net. The search engines will eventually index them, so you might get some traffic that way, but what you really want to try for is getting an online publisher to pick up your article and publish it on their website with your resource box included.

3. Build an ever-growing list of prospects.

Having a list is about equally as important as having your own website and traffic, the only reason I listed it last is because you need to have the others before you can begin to build a list. When I say 'list' what I'm talking about is a list of people who are going to be more interested in buying YOUR product than the general public.

How do you build a list? Again, to put it simply, you get an autoresponder (which can be obtained for free) and you exchange something that a person interested in YOUR product would highly desire for his email address. This thing must be of high perceived value, but need not cost anything. Excellent freebies to give in exchange for email addresses are free reports, e-books (which can be as short as 10 pages) and e-courses. All of which you can create by yourself for nothing more than the time it takes you to create them.

To summarize, when you have your own website you can better reap the fruits of any labor you put into your marketing efforts by building on past successes. Any traffic you may have had in the past may return and you'll be able to increase the chances of that happening by getting them to subscribe to your list, which is another way you can build on past successes. When you put these three things together, you have the makings of a solid long term business that's potential is almost limitless. The bounds of your imagination and the time and effort you put into it are the only things holding you back, so get out there and make it happen!