The Internet Business Authority

Performing some target market research is an essential step I see many new marketers failing to do on their quest to succeed online. Disregarding this important foundation piece to any successful marketing plan can lead to frustration fast. One may think they are doing all the right things by following all of the marketing steps to drive traffic to their site and still find that they are not profitable. One of the leading causes for this is that the marketer did not perform any research of their target makret prior to embarking on a promotional campaign.

Think about it, how can you know what to sell to your audience if you have no clue as to what they want? It’s important to note that it really does not matter what you think they want, you must find out what information and products your target market is yearning for. And it must be as specific as possible. Finding this out will surely improve your results.

As an example, let’s take a look at the internet busines niche. Say you have found some forums, or other type of place that your audience roams, such as the many list building programs in that area – List Joe, Viral URL, and The List Auction for example. While yes, you know these folks are interested in building the best internet business they can, you still don’t know what they really want. So you can start to build a list of these folks by sending out some free reports in the internet business arena. Once you have a decent amount of leads, you can survey them easily using free programs like Survey Monkey. Now you can ask them any question you would like in an attempt to find out their wants, needs, struggles, etc. Doing this once I found that my audience in some of my lists were not necessarily tring to get super rich, they just wanted to make a few hundred dollars a month for extra spending cash. They also wanted to easily copy and paste something without any type of technical know-how needed because they didn’t have time to learn all the things necessary to build a business that way. Learning this, I found a cheap program that was easy to follow and implement, and quickly created a little stream of income for myself just by asking a few questions. Now we can get far more specific as to what our lists want, but still this was a good example as to how a few simple questions can lead to making money online fairly quickly if done correctly.

This same process works whether you have your own offline business, or you are selling dog training products online. Knowing your target market, narrowing exactly what they want, and offering them what they are looking for will bring you success much faster than just blindly promoting anything to anybody who happens to hop onto your website.

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I recently sent out a question to my online friends asking them what their biggest questions were related to internet marketing. There were a wide variety of questions, but two that seemed to pop up repeatedly.

How do I increase website traffic on a budget?

How do I build my list?

These are two great questions which I can write countless posts answering, but I will here give the basic instructions on how to achieve this.

The very first thing you want to do is get an autoresponder. No matter what business you have, the money is in the list, and it is imperative you start building it from day 1. An autoresponder is cheap (less than $20 a month), and will allow you to communicate with the list you are working so hard to build.

So I am going to assume that you have an opt in form on your website, whether it is a squeeze page, blog, or any other type of site. To get people to opt in, you should give something away for free. This can be something as simple as a free report on something like, “The top 5 tips on list building“. Once your people opt in, you can just send them to another site with this information, or even simpler, you can just have those top 5 tips given out daily for 5 days through your autoresponder. A perfect example of this is the form you see on the right of this blog post.

Ok, now that you have your list building tool set up, it is time to advertise your site.

The first way you can advertise that is completely free is through video sites such as YouTube. In addition to getting traffic directly from the video sites like YouTube, videos have a great chance of getting ranked in the search engines. Just make sure you use your keyword in the title and description of the video, and you place a live link in your description as well. If you have a little more of a budget you can use a video submission tool which will increase your exposure by submitting to multiple video sites and bookmarking them. Videos are very easy to create, and can really be of anything. Provide some good content on your subject matter, or take a different approach and be funny. As long as you just do it, you will see results.

Another way to generate website traffic is to write a press release. I have seen great results using a webwire.com press release, as well as prweb.com. If you can afford it, I would choose the Google option within webwire, but if not, the regular release costs about $20. Press releases have a good chance of getting ranked themselves, as well as increasing your page ranking and generating direct traffic.

Artcle marketing still works and is free. Write 10-20 articles per keyword you are targeting, and submit them to places such as ezinearticles.com and isnare.com. Make sure the content in the articles is good, and not simply spam with your keyword grossly overused. If you’re not a big fan of writing, you can outsource your article writing at a place like elance.com at around $4 to $10 per article.

Then you can hit the social networking websites. There are many, but I’d suggest starting out with the 100 pound gorillas. Use Twitter and Facebook to begin with followed by others as time permits. Have your link in your profile, but do not spam people with offers. That’s not how social networking works. Make friends with people who share interest in the types of products you are selling and build relationships. Share good content and ideas, and people will find their way to you. In addition these sites again help with page rank.

I would also make sure to use different web 2.0 properties. Create a wordpress blog at wordpress.com, a lens on your topic at squidoo.com, a hubpage at hubpages.com for starters. As always, provide good content about your keywords, products and services. Include your link in your profiles, as well as within your posts occasionally. Comment on popular lenses, hubpages and blogs related to your niche.

While increasing website traffic and list building on a budget can be time consuming, it will pay off in the end. You will gradually grow your list, and as money comes in, you can then begin to pay for more advertising, whether that means venturing into the ppc arena, or simply outsourcing more of the aforementioned tasks to free up your time to be more productive in other areas. No matter what, don’t give up, because making money online is certainly a realistic goal to attain!

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