What Web Marketing Novices Should Know

It is possible to be successful at web marketing, and many people are making a nice living at it right now. For the most part, It is not (as many advertisers would claim) a “get-rich-quick” method and it’s not something that can be set up to run on auto-pilot.

It will require a lot of work and it can also be time-consuming. Until your web presence is established, and you are getting a steady flow of buying visitors, you must put in the hours advertising and promoting your site. And if this is your first foray into web marketing, there is a mind-boggling array of products available that you can sell as an affiliate, or you can get exclusive “resell rights” for others. And of course, you can come up with your own products to sell. Bottom line though, is that there must be a demand for it.

But whether you are promoting a merchant’s product as an affiliate, or you have your own product to sell, you should note 2 basic, essential points (It goes without saying that I’m assuming you have your own website):

1. You will need people to visit you website (lots of them)

2. You must build an ‘optin list’

No. 1 will provide growth to no. 2. Your subscriber list may well be your main source of revenue, so it’s important to work on the marketing of your site and attract more and more visitors.

Without either website or list, it is still possible to earn a good living online. You can send traffic (via your affiliate link) to the merchant’s pages, or you can have an ebay shop or drop-ship business.

But in most cases, a web marketing business means having a website on which you can make sales, get signons to your list, and to which you add frequent, relevant content.

Have a look at your home page and give an honest assessment - is this a site that I would want to spend some time on, if I were a visitor? What do I find appealing about it (or not). With a little work to make the site more visitor-friendly, and visually pleasing, you will have visitors that stay longer, with the result that they are more likely to purchase your goods or services. You should position your list optin box in a prominent place, like the top left or top right, under the header area. And it should be offering a free resource in return for a lst sign-up.

One of your goals should be to get repeat visitors to your website. The site’s overall appearance is one of the main determining factors, so it deserves a lot of attention. And the other factor is content - the majority of browsers are looking for fresh content, and so are the search engines. It’s probably the best way to get a steadily increasing flow of inbound traffic.

Trackbacks are another great marketing tool - that is, HTML links to other blogs which have content relevant to yours. They help to increase visibility with search engines, and with other readers.