How to succeed in Internet marketing, part 3

Now that you got the main idea behind succeeding in Internet marketing, let's go on to describe the FIRST actual step of any marketing campaign...

RESEARCH

It's almost mind-boggling how many people just go for the first "opportunity" that seems to get in front of them. Does this sound familiar:

• 1000's of ready Adsense sites. Just put your Adsense code in and you're on your way
• master resale rights for 50 Internet marketing products... Fresh, new, get it now!
• affiliates join my program! Make up to $3583,29 a WEEK! Join NOW!
• the hottest selling items online, join 1000's in making a fortune online!
• you get the picture...

The problem with all of these "offers" above isn't always in their idea! You have to do the necessary research to determine whether taking them up will be actually profitable or not.

Let's go now through examples of what can be wrong with the above ofers:

• Those same sites could have been already purchased by 100's of people. And even if they weren't yet, the publisher might have already used them. This means that the search engines will not put so much weight on your content and could even penalize your sites for duplicate content. This way they will be very hardly profitable
• Well, how fresh are they really, and how long until all the big names will be purchasing them and sending them as bonuses to their huge lists. It just might be that just when you've set up a sit selling such a product, everybody will have gotten it as a bonus from someone else. Also, how many people already sell those items and how many will in the near future?
• if his program is really sooooo successful, you should really consider checking for competition. It could be so fierce that you'd have a very slim chance to get in and make a decent profit
• same as above
• you get the picture :-)

So now you see that research is a very important part of any campaign you might launch.

Of course the same goes when creating your original work (adsense sites, products...). It just doesn't make sense to make a site and target a single keyword that gets no searches per month. How many visitors will you get by the search engines that way?

So, research is the first thing you should do. But what's important? Let's see...

First you have to consider if there's a market for what you're about to offer. This can simply mean -- are there people interested in buying, reading... whatever I want to do. You can easily determine this by visiting online forums and checking what people ask about on and on, check how popular the keywords in your niche are, you can see if there's anyone else selling what you want (a great indicator that there's a demand, especially if the company has been around), check the magazines what they write about -- they research the market thoroughly before deciding what to write about...

When you see that there's a market for what you want to sell (this term includes ads on your site etc.; E.g. targeted content sites with showing ads), you should do some more research and see how much competition is already in this market. There should always be some (unless you go really deep... discussed later) as that way you'll know for certain that your idea sells.

If there's too much of a competition in that particular market, try going for something more specific. There's no reason you should go for something completely else if you see too much competition. There's certainly something more specific you can sell/write about. Just make sure people are looking for it. You can do a great research on huge online stores/market places. Browse the general categories and go deeper for more specific topics.

Now that you've done the research it's time to devise an Internet marketing plan which we'll discuss in one post after the next as the next one will be a special post that will help you obliterate procrastination and give you motivation on demand. Remember to come back for it as there's a very high chance you've never witnessed something like this!

See you tomorrow and I wish you all the best in your Internet marketing endeavors!