Internet Marketing Basics

Introduction

Well, before we start we should introduce ourselves and the way we approach Internet marketing. Putting things into perspective like this will help you because you will discover that you are no different than us and success within Internet marketing is 100% possible by everyone at Wealthy Affiliate! Our names are Kyle and Carson and we have been Internet marketers since 2002. We first started out in the Internet marketing (IM) industry because we were starving students taking computer science at school! We needed to make some money in our spare time, but with homework and labs at school we didn’t have the time to get a job. At that point, we decided to use the skills that we had and do some research into making money online. We quickly figured out how it was possible to make money online without having your own product. Even better, we found out that we didn’t necessarily need a website.

Now let's go forward a few years to the present. We're now full-time Internet marketers and have developed a lot of our own techniques. We went to college together and started at about the same time, and now have decided to merge our talents and form our own company and help others build successful businesses online.

We started WealthyAffiliate.com (WA) because we wanted to provide something that no other site offers. At WA you have access to support from us as well as the opportunity to "mingle" with other aspiring and very successful Internet marketers. Some members here are making upwards of $3000/day, and guess what, they started with nothing! We are not saying you will get to this level, however it is possible if you set this as your goal. We continue to build new resources, tools, and services into Wealthy Affiliate so everything you need to run a business online can be found here!

Without coaching of some sort, it could take years and thousands of wasted dollars to "see the light", and in most cases this is too long to wait. Internet marketing sounds like a great idea, but unless you know what you are doing it can be very easy to waste money. This is what happens to many people. Not you though - because here at WA you’re in safe hands!

Now that you know more about us and our motives in creating Wealthy Affiliate, we’re going to describe what Internet marketing is and help you understand many of the concepts and processes involved.

Internet Marketing Background

What is Internet marketing? IM has been around for years (since 1996), but has recently gained more exposure because of the huge opportunity it provides for anyone who wants to start an online business. People like you and us! If you could make some money from the comfort of your home, perhaps just bring in a little bit extra that would help pay the bills, this would be great wouldn't it? Internet marketing allows you to do this. IM is a growing occupation as more and more people take it up full time and earn $100,000's every year advertising other people’s products and services online. The concept is similar to any regular job. You go to work and make money for the company that you work for. It’s exactly the same with IM, but you are your own boss, you get to choose your own hours, work as much (or as little) as you want to, and the company you are working for is yourself. This way you get to keep all the money and not just make someone else rich!

There are 10,000's of companies online that are willing to pay you a performance-based commission if you can drive sales to the websites promoting their products and services. To do this you join the "affiliate programs" run by these companies. Your job as an "affiliate" is to align online consumers with the products that they are looking for. Affiliate marketing is a fantastic opportunity because billions of dollars are spent online each year and a large percentage of that goes to affiliates.

Internet marketing is a broad term and there are many different ways of making money online. Some methods are free, some are paid, some require more work, some require less; but the fact of the matter is that anyone can make money online and there are hundreds of different ways you can accomplish this. The majority of these methods are covered here at Wealthy Affiliate and, as we learn of new opportunities online, we will continue to reveal them to our members.

Your office is the Internet, and you can do whatever your mind will allow you to! There are unlimited opportunities and the amount of money you can make within the Internet marketing world is endless.

Affiliates

We're sure you’ve heard the term "Affiliate" before and many of you probably know what it means, but for those who don't we are going to explain exactly what an affiliate is.

In the Internet marketing world, you will likely take on the role of an Affiliate unless you own a product, in which case you would be called the Merchant. Affiliates and merchants have a direct relationship and it is very important that the relationship is a good one. The term "affiliate" stems from the fact that you are "affiliated" with a company, and are working for them, though you don’t usually have a contract. At any one time, you may be working as an affiliate for many companies, promoting a large number of different products.

Affiliates work for merchants by bringing customers to the merchant’s front door (in this case the website) and earning money in the process. If you are an affiliate of a company and you send a visitor to the merchant website through your special link, you are now eligible to be credited for anything that the visitor buys while at the merchant website. When a visitor buys something, the merchant will pay you a commission ...sometimes up to 75% of what the item costs. So, it’s simple; as an affiliate, it is your job to get web surfers (traffic) to visit the merchant site.

Why are affiliates important to merchants? If you are a merchant and have a product that you want to sell online, you may not have the expertise to advertise the product online, so you have partnerships with affiliates who will do this for you. You pay your affiliates a percentage for every sale that they generate. As a merchant, you’ll get less overall return on investment (ROI), but you will reach potential customers you wouldn’t have been able to attract otherwise. Many companies rely completely on their affiliates to bring them business and they are more than happy to pay them for that service.

The relationship between affiliate and merchant is very important. As a merchant, you must provide your affiliates with as much support and as many promotional resources as you can to help them publicize your product. You must also be sure to send out your payments on time. The fastest way to lose affiliates is to not pay on time.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Now you know what it means to be an affiliate and how an affiliate relates to a merchant. Since you are likely to start your business as an affiliate, you are probably wondering what your main role is. It must be simple to just send traffic to a website and make money from it- right? WRONG! This is the role of Wealthy Affiliate: to help affiliates learn how to send traffic to their merchant websites and how to turn this traffic into buyers.

There are a number of ways to generate traffic, but the fastest way to get results is to advertise. When you visit www.google.com, and do a search for something, you’ll most likely see a list of boxes on the right-hand side of the screen. These boxes are called sponsored listings, and advertisers are paying Google to put their ads there. There isn’t a set cost to have an ad placed, as your cost depends on how many people click on your ad and the quality of your ad campaigns. This is called "paid traffic", and is also known as "Pay-Per-Click advertising" (PPC).

When a web surfer does a search and clicks on a sponsored listing, it costs the advertiser money. How much depends on the amount the advertiser is bidding on the term that the surfer typed into the Google search box.

Wait a minute, so what do sponsored listings have to do with me, the affiliate? As an affiliate, it is your responsibility to get people to visit the merchant site. Advertising in Google is a great way to do this. This is the world of Pay-Per-Click advertising. You sign up with Google Adwords (their advertising network), and create ads that will be shown in the search listings. You will pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad and is taken to the web page of your choice (usually a page that you create, and in turn links to the merchant site).

Google Adwords isn’t the only place that you can advertise online. It isn’t the only search engine out there. Another big PPC network is Yahoo! Search Marketing. It works in a similar way to Google Adwords in that you pay for your ads to be displayed within the Yahoo search results. We’re not going to get into the specifics of Google and Yahoo advertising here because both techniques need more explanation than we can give in an introduction.

Although there are paid advertising techniques, you should be aware that there are also free advertising techniques. We offer tutorials and explain many of these here at Wealthy Affiliate. The main ones include Article Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Forum Marketing. As with PPC, we are not going to elaborate on these here, but you should definitely be aware that there are free marketing techniques that you can use to earn money online

Conclusion

If you are starting out and wanting to become a successful Internet marketer then you need to understand the basics. You need to understand how IM works and the nature of the affiliate/merchant relationship. The role of an affiliate is to sell the products/services that are offered by the merchants. When a purchase is made by the traffic that you generate, you will get a commission (anywhere between 1-75% of the sale)! Most companies pay commissions every 2 weeks, some instantly and some once per month.

You now understand that to sell products for merchants, you need to send traffic to the merchant website. Pay-Per-Click advertising is the most popular form of generating traffic as you can start attracting potential customers in very little time (usually a day or so). Google Adwords is a popular PPC advertising network as is Yahoo! Search Marketing, both having many similarities and differences. There are also many free marketing techniques that can be implemented to generate traffic as well, and these are also explained here at Wealthy Affiliate.

This is just the start of your Internet marketing career and if you set goals and push yourself to achieve them, you will become a highly successful Internet marketer!