The Online Marketing Process Simplified

So many people who get involved with home based internet business opportunities and internet marketing become subject to information overload and become paralyzed and unable to get into action. The fact is there is a ton of information about marketing on the internet and to a new marketer it can be very intimidating and make one uneasy as it is easy to lose track of what it is you are exactly trying to do. The end goal in most cases is to make money through selling products or services. There are many things that determine how this happens and this is where a lot of new marketers can get confused. In this article I am going to simplify the online marketing process and try to give you a better understanding of the big picture.

As we have already stated, the end goal of getting involved in a home based internet business opportunity or internet marketing is to make money via the internet by selling products or services. These products and services get sold from a website. Regardless if you are selling your own product or someone else's product, to make sales and money, you are going to need to get targeted prospects to that website where they can make a buying decision.

There are many ways in which you as a marketer can drive these targeted prospects to a website to make a buying decision. One of the best ways is through pay per click (PPC) advertising. PPC advertising allows for your ad to appear when people do a search containing specific keywords in a search engine. Another way to drive traffic is through search engine optimization (SEO). This is a free method in which people generate organic traffic. Other traffic generation methods include, article marketing, social book marking, forum posting/advertising, and classified ad submissions to name a few. I'm not going to get into detail about these various traffic generating methods. I just want you to realize that there are numerous means by which marketers generate traffic to their sites and give qualified prospects the opportunity to make a buying decision.

Something that determines how well a product sells is the quality of the website sales copy from which the prospect makes their decision on weather or not to buy. If you are promoting other peoples products from their sites you will not have much control of this. When you promote other people products or your own products from your own sites you have more control over the sales copy. There are many good resources available that discuss how to write good sales copy that converts your targeted visitors into sales.

The overall objective of people in a home based internet business and internet marketing is to drive targeted qualified prospects to a website, from which the prospect can make a buying decision. There are many different methods a marketer can use to drive this traffic (PPC, SEO, article marketing, ect.) and there are many good programs and resources available on how to use these marketing mediums effectively. When the marketer is able to get the prospect to the site, this is where they make a buying decision (often based on the quality of the sales copy). Again there are many good programs out there that discuss writing good copy.

Part of the reason I feel new marketers become so confused is that there is so much information on the above mentioned topics and it's easy to lose sight of how it all fits into the big picture. This is the big picture: Drive targeted traffic to a website where a prospect can buy and you get paid. There is a lot that goes into this and this is why there is so much information. Realize that all the information that is out there is geared at accomplishing the above stated objective in some way, shape, or form. When you can grasp the concept of what internet marketing is all about, you can begin to realize how all the parts that help you accomplish the primary objective (getting targeted visitors to a site where they buy) are intertwined.