Getting Started In Website Marketing

The Internet is a fantastic way to put a message out to a lot of people and repeatedly present your message automatically without any effort on your part. This is because of the concept of the world wide web and the use of search engines to locate pages of interest. This can be used to an advantage in marketing materials for sale on the internet.

By creating a website, presenting your articles for sale in an attractive and informative nature, and displaying that website to people who are searching to buy what you are selling, you can be successful at website marketing.

It is the challenge of doing both of these things cost effectively that presents the biggest obstacle to selling products on the internet. First, you have to have a website that gives the user some reason to visit it, and second, you have to create it such that when a search engine is used to search for the products you are selling, it finds and displays your website near the top of the list. And you have to spend less amount of mone accomplishing these two things than you receive in the sale of your product.

Website marketing can be broken down into these three steps:

1. Selecting what products to sell

2. Creating a compelling advertisement for those products and placing it on the internet.

3. Drawing visitors to that site where the advertisement is who want to buy that item.

What To Sell

This can be difficult to decide. Choosing something that is in great demand is one strategy, also choosing something you know a lot about is a good idea. On the other hand, if you choose something in great demand, you will probably have a lot of other competitors advertising the same product and will have to spend a lot of money to get your ad displayed before theirs.

You can decide to sell basically three types of products on the internet:

1. Physical goods.

2. E-books and software.

3. Either of the above which are other people's products. In this case you only place advertisements for the products and receive a commission when a sale is made. This is referred to as being an affiliate.

If you want to sell physical goods, you don't necessarily have to stock them and ship them yourself. You can use a drop shipper. This is a manufacturer who agrees to ship his items for you to your customer when you make a sale.

An E-book is an electronic book, a document, usually in PDF format (See www.adobe.com) that you sell on the internet. A good guide on creating your own Ebook without ever writing one word is Create Your Own Ebook The references table below describes how to obtain this book.

If you decide to sell the goods yourself, you can set up an online store. There are many sources which sell prepackaged solutions including your web hosting and the store itself and tools to manage it.

If you decide to sell other people's goods, one good affiliate program is www.clickbank.com. There you can advertise other people's products and get paid a commision up to 60% of the sales price. You can also place your own products on clickbank and have other people advertise your products

Placing your advertisement on the Internet

You can either build your own website and put ads for the affiliate products you are selling there, or you can use Google AdWords to advertise on the Internet. The Google search engine (See www.google.com) returns paid search results first before the other results it finds. So you can pay Google to return and ad for the product you are selling when people search for certain key words you choose. You bid on the keywords, like example you bid to pay $.10 if someone searches for e-book and they click on your ad for your e-book. Several good reference guides to using Google Adwords are Google Cash, Google Profits, Google Made Me Rich, and Mastering Google Adwords. The reference table below explains where you can obtain these.

Drawing Visitors To Your Website

Whether you have a website that just lists other people's products for sale or is an online store, you need to have a way of bringing people to visit it on the web. The most common way that people find things on the web is using a search engine, like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, or www.msn.com.

All of these search engines have ways of finding your website and ranking it to determine how high up on the list of found sites it will be shown. Ways that they find your sites is by finding links to your site from other people's sites. Ways you can get links to your site from other people's sites are by placing your site in online directories, or joining a link exchange program where you place a link on your site to another site in exchange for them doing the same for you.

Some directory sites you can try are www.linketeria.com, www.abilogic.com, www.searchsite.com, www.siteinclusion.com, www.siteranking.com.

Another way to get the search engine to find your site is something called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. What this means is building your site in such a way that the search engines consider it a valuable resource for the keywords people search on when they find it. Some good resources for doing this are SEOElite, a software program, Search Engine Fast Start, Little Known Secrets - Search Engines, and Get A Top 5 Ranking on Google. See the references section.

The best way to draw people to your site is to add valuable content to it so they want to visit it. There is a pre-packaged website that contains over 25000 freely downloadable articles called the Article Directory Cash System. See the reference section for how to obtain it.