Online marketing has come of age. It’s a great time to be a marketer. For anyone who has the skill and know-how, an online business can be very rewarding.
I’m currently in the last year of a business degree
that allows me to have the money I need to work on marketing. It’s so refreshing to have such flexible hours. It allows me to focus on working on my degree and learning.
Marketing has changed over the past few years and there are a lot of new techniques out there. There are two sides to marketing and I want to show you the best way to go about it. Whether you are just starting out or have been marketing online for a while, I want to help you understand what the basics are.
The first thing you have to do is decide on what niche you want to start out in. This will have a big impact on what you sell. I personally started out with photography. I found a photography website and thought I’d give it a go. Then I realized there was a lot more to photography than I had been led to believe.
I bought into the hype of all the different companies selling their “the best” camera. It was nice to try all of them and to try the various products. As I was doing that, I noticed something really important. The niche didn’t offer much information about editing images.
This is the big mistake people make when starting out. Don’t start your own blog or website. It’s not hard to find some content, but once you get on a good site it can be expensive to add information from there. You could spend all day adding content or none at all.
Blogs and websites have a small learning curve.
If you follow the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) then your content is going to rank well in the search engines. The higher the ranking the more traffic you get. That’s how it works!
When you get to the point where you want to build your own website or blog you may want to think about affiliate marketing. It’s a great opportunity to build a small or large business if you don’t have the funds for the domain.
Using an affiliate program to get started is really simple. You build a page with content and you choose which products you want to promote. For example, maybe you want to write about beekeeping. You build a page with content about beekeeping and then you put in an affiliate link to your own website or blog.
This could be at the bottom of a page with information about all the ways to keep bees. You could link out to a local beekeeping forum or to your favorite coffee shop and you would be well on your way to a successful business.
The way I do it is by using a text link and then adding affiliate links to my pages. The important thing to remember is to place your affiliate links in areas where the reader will see them.
- I don’t like to leave them in the middle of a page because they disappear so quickly.
- Affiliate marketing can be very profitable and is perfect for online marketing in the real estate market.
- The only thing to remember is to never forget about building your own website. That will give you the greatest potential.