The key to successful marketing on the internet is to drive traffic to your website. Having a website that just sits un-promoted in cyberspace is not only a waste of time, but also highly frustrating. I have been intrigued by the idea of internet marketing for years, but it has taken me a long time to overcome all the gumption traps involved in actually getting started (the biggest one being that I am a cyber-dinosaur — my only real experience using computers for anything other than glorified type-writing involved Fortran IV and IBM punch cards almost thirty years ago). What I have learned is that the internet marketing process can be relatively simple. You have to find a market, develop a product, and build a website to promote your product and process transactions. But, all of your efforts will be useless if nobody visits your website. I have been studying a course that discusses the problem of driving traffic to your site in great detail.
There are at least six ways to increase the number of visitors to your site, including word of mouth from one web user to the next (you are reading this letter, aren’t you?), buying targeted hits to your site using paid keyword advertising on search engines such as Google, sending advertising e-mails to your proprietary list of prospects which you generate by signing up previous visitors to your site, exchanging links for your website with other websites that have similar products to your own, paying someone else with a proprietary e-mail list to send sales letters for you (you can pay for this with a flat fee up front or in the form of commissions that result from the e-mails they send), and paying fees or commissions to other websites for putting your banners, ads, or links on their pages. By using these techniques you will increase the number of visitors to your site, which is almost guaranteed to increase your sales. In addition to pointers on increasing website traffic, the course I am studying includes incredible amounts of information about many other topics. It is a free course (amazing, but true!) which covers every aspect of marketing on the internet. It covers material from the very basic to the very complex, including the nuts and bolts of building a website, the basic ideas behind the concept of selling on the web, and strategies for finding the right niche for marketing specific products. It is a tremendous resource for the beginning marketer, and is full of not well known tips for even the most experienced internet marketing experts.