Next Step – Identify A Problem or Opportunity
After identifying your niche, your next step is to identify the problems that are faced by the people in that niche market. Your role as a marketer is to know the problems, identify the needs of the people and provide a solution to their problems and needs. Remember, their problems are your opportunities!
Final Step – Find a Solution!
(1) Create Content Websites (Content Publishing)
Content websites are basically websites that are targetted at a specific niche. They should be rich in content and information on the niche that you want to target. By offering free, useful and relevant information, your aim here is to attract traffic and get a good customer database which will come in handy when you decide to promote an affiliate product or your own product.
To monetize content websites, you can place ads/ banners on your own sites so that when a reader of your site clicks on the advertisement or banner, you get paid. (Think of this concept like renting out a space to people who are advertising their products/ services and you are collecting rent. After all, your website is your virtual space!).
The most popular and easiest way to place these ads is by using Google AdSense as Google has a complex and smart algorithm to identify the content of your site and place targetted and relevant ads on your site to increase in the chance of people clicking on the ads. You can read more about Google AdSense here.
As you can see, creating content websites is time consuming involve a lot of hard work and effort in the initial phase but this is the tool that you really want to focus on if you want to achieve passive income in the long run. A well written and properly optimised site will enable you to earn income and get customer leads easily in the long run without much effort on your part.
(2) Promote Other People’s Products (Affiliate Marketing)
This is one of the most popular tool, especially for an internet marketing newbie because it is the easiest and fastest way to start for internet marketing and if properly done, you can even see results and achieve your first online sale/ income in 24 hours!
Basically, affiliate marketing refers to you being an affiliate (or marketer) of someone else’s product and you earn a commission when your promote and have successfully sold the product. You are acting very much like a middle man, except that the sales is done online.
Currently, there are many good and reliable third-party affiliate "agents" or network where they bring merchants and affiliates together. These third-party agents/ networks are popular as they greatly reduce the conflicts and disputes between merchants and affiliates with regards to the number of sales or the commissions to be paid. These are a few reliable and popular affilate agents/ networks that you can sign up and start with:
- Amazon (http://www.amazon.com) – has mainly physical products. This is a good place to start because of their branding and their wide network of merchants in there.
- Clickbank (http://www.clickbank-signup.com) – has mainly electronic products like EBooks and softwares. This is a hot favorite with many because of its high commission payout (usually between 50% to 75%) but it is also highly competitive because of this.
- Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com) – has mainly physical products too and also a wide variety familiar merchants with them. The signing up process to be their affiliate is a little troublesome though.
After signing up as an affiliate with these agents/ networks, you may wonder how you are going to advertise the products that you are promoting. There are many ways in advertising online but we are going to focus on Pay-Per-Click marketing (or PPC as it is commonly known on the internet marketing realm).
PPC marketing is where you put up ads in search engines where these ads will appear when the keywords that you have purchased for the ads (which are relevant to the product you are promoting) are entered and search by a user. The best thing about PPC is that unlike traditional ads that you see in newspapers where you have to pay a fixed advertising cost regardless whether people read your ad or not, you only pay your advertising fees when people read and click on your ad. We will cover more on the various PPC search engines in Module #3 – Traffic Generation.
Product creation should be the ultimate goal of every online marketer. After understanding the basics of how internet marketing works, you should proceed to create your own product, especially if you have a particular skill (for e.g. write an EBook on how to improve photography techniques).
To create a product, you must first identify a niche with a strong market need. Do a research on the competition in that market. Thereafter you develop the product specification, features and benefits. Finally, you create the actual product.
Once done, you need to have a sales copy for your product and to decide how you want to sell your product (e.g. Clickbank, CJ, direct sales) and the payment system (e.g. PayPal, 2Checkout, WorldPay). When you have settled all these, you are ready to launch and promote your product.
To further boost the sales of your products, you can consider an affiliate program for your products so as to get more affiliates to help in promoting your product. You can also look into joint ventures with other marketers, especially if your products are similar in nature.