Getting started in Internet marketing over the next 90 days

Quick Tip: Go add yourself to wikipedia. Add a page about yourself. Add links back to yourself. Add information about your products.

So Chris, What is it that you do?

I create search engine optimization software that allow me to promote affiliate programs through search engines by creating highly optimized web pages. I also create information products and I promote these products in the same way.

So Chris, How did you get started doing this?

That's very easy. Back about 1999 I was working at a very large mortgage company, who is now a household name now, you see their name on TV alot now. They were paying $10 per application to affiliates for anyone who was referred to their web site who would complete a mortgage application.

I didn't know anything about Internet Affiliate Marketing back then and it sort of supprised me that we ended up owing a guy $100,000 for the month. He had referred 10,000 people at $10 a piece who completed a mortgage application. So the marketing people within the company came to me and asked me if I would investigate how this person was able to do this.

So I went out and found at what this person had done. He had submitted thousands of web pages to MSN search for different keywords. All these web pages redirected the web surfers back to a 5 page web site.

At the time Internet Explorer always defaulted the home page to MSN search. Unless someone installed another web browser on their machine or manually changed their home page, they were using MSN search for search results.

So what happened was for personal loans, auto loans, mortgage loans and lots of other searches this person was the first 100 links in MSN search for those keywords. When anyone searched for these terms they would end up on this person's web site. He had cornered the market on MSN search.

So the mortgage company asked me to put this system in place. We did and started making alot of referrals to our primary web site. We ended up getting alot of traffic and people filling out mortgage loans for free.

The affiliate income was never a steady income I could depend on, so I kept a full time job and did affiliate stuff as a hobby. I made $189,000 from a one page web site.

So how do you know if Internet Marketing is for you? The only thing I can say is to try it. One of my favorite things is from Dan Kennedy's book on direct marketing. He has a list of things that every direct marketing system should have. Everyone should own his book "No B.S. Direct Marketing". But basically it follows the path of lead generation, making offers, how to respond, tracking conversions, cross-selling, upselling and follow up.

If you send someone a letter, somewhere in that letter should be an offer. You don't want to just send someone a letter and educate them and then say by. You should always make and offer in every item you produce. So that customers can keep the conversation going by taking action.

It always easier to sell to someone who has purchased products from you before. So market and measure responses. Keep following up with your customers.

One of the techniques for selling is going out there and creating copy for customers who are close to buying a product. But they have a few questions in their mind. You want to cater to their emotional brain. They probably want to know if the product can produce the results that it says it can or if others have seens good results by using the product. Is this product a scam, is it for real, etc...

One of the thing that you need to do if focus your copy to the emotional brain. If you were going to build an affiliate page for mortgages, you want to sell the vision. If someone is looking at getting a mortgage are they getting one to have an extra payment every month? Of course not, they have some underlying want or need that is causing them to pursue this product purchase. You want to cater to that emotional want or need. Are they buying this home to pursure(continued)