There are a number of ways to make money on the internet, whether it’s selling e-Books, a membership site, a site that makes money from advertising, selling software tools, or selling your time and expertise as a consultant, developer, trainer, designer, or writer. 

The great thing about an internet business is that it is not necessary to have any physical product which requires shipping, storing or production.  We tend to deal in digital products, information products, software tools and so on.  We sell our writing, our knowledge, our research.  And a lot of internet marketers are just selling plain old rubbish – a bit like the stuff you get from those long TV commercials, stuff you never knew you needed, and that doesn’t work when you get it.

Those of us selling information products first research a market and choose a niche.  The niche might be about building birdhouses, parenting, housekeeping, or personal improvement.  Choosing a small niche with enough people searching for information about that topic, and providing them with the information they are looking for, is a great strategy for starting an internet business, as any of the gurus will tell you. 

One of the biggest niches is, of course “how to make money on the internet”.  It’s right up there with weight loss as one of the biggest and most competitive markets.  It’s also one of the sleaziest, dirtiest markets with the widest array of absolute rubbish and rip offs available for the gullible, desperate and naïve to choose from.

They’ll try to sell you e-Books about guaranteed systems, e-Books that turn out to be just one big long ad for a product, e-books that give you a long winded boring waffling rambling rave that contains a tiny little bit of information they should have just told you for free.  A lot of it turns out to be dodgy affiliate marketing programmes or MLM. 

MLM comes in many disguises, but no matter how you dress it up, MLM is MLM, and bollocks it will always be.

And they don’t stop selling us rubbish after we’ve already started our own internet business.  That just gives them more rubbish to sell us.

They call it the B2B (Business to business) market.  That’s where people who have decided that internet marketing is not just what they’re going to do, but also their niche, their topic, try to sell stuff to those of us who are also trying to market online.  They particularly target vulnerable people who are just getting started and don’t really know what they’re doing yet.

They want to sell you courses and e-Books about how to write amazing 'killer' sales copy and use 'killer' words in your ads like 'killer'.  They want to sell you software products - mainly ones that don't work, are not relevant to what you are trying to do, are badly designed and full of bugs, that are already available free but you're a beginner so you don't know that yet, that are ridiculously complicated to use, so you can't actually tell if they work or not.

My advice if you are a novice at internet marketing:

Trust no one! 

Use the money back guarantee if you don't get what you needed.  Just ask for your money back.  The shopping cart companies make it easy, and people WILL just give you your money back if you can be bothered just sending them an email.  

Read this funny web page:  http://www.buymystupidebook.com/  (I just love it, it makes me laugh out loud every time I go there)

Get some gumboots for wading through the you-know-what.

Learn about pay per click advertising by reading Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd’s e-Book The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords. 

Don’t stop at Pay Per Click only – learn about SEO, SEM and everything else you can find out about.  I’ll add articles as soon as I feel qualified to say anything, lol.

Follow your plan in a methodical way and document your progress.  Don’t get sidetracked trying out new things when you have not yet applied what you already know!

Offer a product of real value, and ignore all the 'easy' affiliate stuff.  The advice I was given is that affiliate marketing is NOT for beginners, and I quite agree. 
 
The great thing about the internet, is that quality will win out!  The more I learn the more appalled I am and at the same time the more encouraged I am.  I see marketing everywhere I look now - everything, absolutely everything is marketing related to me.  It's not a concept I ever even considered before.  But with this sort of communication available to everybody, people are not going to be fooled so easily as we go along.

Quality and relevance.  And that's what Google loves, both for Pay Per Click and for SEO.

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