‘Build it and they will come’ no longer works the way it used to.

For years internet marketers have had a fairly easy time, where simply making good content resulted in the information hungry internet users coming to their site. However we’re now in an age where we’re approaching information saturation and getting to the top is getting harder and harder.

Pursuing a passion, turning that into an online presence and making money from it isn’t easy, especially starting from scratch.

I found that there is no real step-by-step guide to help the ‘noob’ in getting found on Google (and other search engines) and that a lot of research was required to learn even the basics.

That’s where I come in.

My intention is give you enough information to create a site that you can make money from. If you do better than that and get rich, even better.

Please note that this information is based upon my findings and research and whilst much of it will be good advice some of it may be slightly inaccurate (especially if you read this long after it’s published) or not work for you (it’s not a check list science).

The other thing to note is that in this I will be teaching you how to modify your strategy by keeping up with the latest ideas. SEO is constantly evolving and requires a fair amount of time to keep up with developments. Other marketing methods evolve as the web does, although this is usually a little slower.

If you want insta-cash generating sites then, although this advice may work, it’s not in the spirit of what is intended.

Just to finish up for the day I’ll give you a quick look at some of the other topics that we’ll look at. Remember that online marketing keeps evolving and I’ll try and keep things structured without jumping about too much to confuse you.

Viral marketing
Blogging (like this)
Top lists – 7’s the magic number
Traffic – how to get and keep it
Pay Per Click
Selecting affiliates
Marketing tools
Where to get help
Starting a community
Where to source good content

Again as a taster of what sort of marketing treats you’re in for we’ll have a look at direct marketing and it’s place in the CRM cycle.

Direct marketing used to be all the junk mails that came through your door and went straight in the bin. These days the junk mail comes through your inbox and email filter kindly puts them straight in the bin for you.

We want to avoid this fate and give our customers offers that they’ll respond to.

Direct Marketing

Data Capture – how and what
Email segmentation
How to write emails
How often to send emails
Creating a landing page

As SEO is what I do for a living you can imagine this will be the topic I talk about most.

There is a blurred line between onpage SEO and web site optimization, which will be discussed more in depth later. Offpage SEO is arguably the most impotant SEO factor.

For years the maxim “content is king” has held true and to an extent still is, however with all the millions of websites with content the game becomes how to attract visitors in the first place.Traditional marketing methods can be used the same way as attracting brick and mortar clients but one of  the newest ways is by using search engines.

However with a limited number of searches and an even more limited number of results users will look through, this often means that your site will have to be something special to occupy the top spaces.

In this section I will mostly be fighting against mis-information and how to avoid the agencies and charlatans that over charge for their ‘snake oil’.

SEO falls between science and art and there will never be a check box of what to do. However there are good foundations that you can build upon and if you are completely new to internet marketing this is often one of the hardest areas to understand.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine submissions and why to avoid anyone selling it as a service
Why Meta Keywords are useless and avoid anyone saying they’re good for SEO
Links & backlinks – how to get them
Reciprocal Links
Paid Links and link directories
Competitor analysis
Anchor text
Why page rank isn’t an SEO factor
Commenting and social networks – reputation, contributions
Vertical Results
Country Specific Targeting
Google vs. The World – MSN, Yahoo etc
Syndication and linking

This barely scratches the surface but if you follow them all hopefully I can structure it in a way that’s easy to follow.

As an online marketer one of the few things that everybody will need for success is a website. However not all of us are tech savvy and when it comes to clear and concise information on creating a website that will get found and ultimately make you money, there is very little information.

Having been at that stage at one point myself and still not a great programmer I plan on passing on what information I do know to help you create a fully functioning website and avoid the pitfalls that I first encountered.

To that end I’ll give you a quick insight into some of the future posts that I’ll be going into. This section will be called web optimization and is tied closely but is not identical to, search engine optimization (SEO).

Beginner

Planning –
Keywords – search term identification and refinement
Competition search
Choosing a domain name – URL length and Keywords in URL – secondary markets
Keeping URLs neat
Revenue model – affiliate links, adwords etc, selling links (eek!), selling product

Creating a site –
Design – making a sale, navigation
Content – sales, articles, other
CMS showdown
Semantic structure in HTML
Spiderability
Code validation – W3C

How to write copy -
Focus on keywords
Mistakes to avoid

Intermediate

Planning –
Diversifying site
Foreign searches
Google analytics
The long tail

Creating content –
Duplicate content

Advanced

Keeping on top of the game