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Posts Tagged ‘internet marketing’

One of the first decisions you will have to make when starting out with internet marketing is whether you would like to build a blog or website. Actually most marketers would recommend having multiple websites so you may end up with a blog as well as static websites, but I am going to assume you are just starting out.

In my introduction to internet marketing I briefly spoke about the difference between a blog and a website, but in this post I want to look at where you would use these and some of the advantages of each.

Blog

You are currently reading my blog and this is what I have decided to dedicate most of my time to. The main reason I chose a blog was that I am currently on a bit of a journey in my life as well as my ‘career’, and felt that blogging would be a good way to keep people up to date on what I’m doing.

Some of the advantages of a blog over a website include:

Easy set-up – Blogs can be set up within minutes. I have spoken about how easy the free services like blogger and wordpress.com are, but even wordpress.org (this is also free, but you have to pay for your own hosting) is very easy to get set up.
Easy to update – If you want to add a new post to a blog, you click on “add new post” and fill out the boxes. It’s that simple.
Community – With blogging you can become part of a community or even have a community as part of your blog when your site gets popular. This can be extremely important for promoting your blogging.

Website

Websites are different and used for different types of sites. They are usually static and do not get updated as much as a blog. It is probably a little more tricky to set up a good quality website rather than a blog, but once your site is set up it is relatively low maintenance and a static website can potentially generate a passive income with little or no work once its set up. Advantages of a website include:

Low maintenance – unlike a blog, websites do not need constant updating and are relatively low maintenance once the initial set-up is complete.
Passive income – Because they require little or no maintenance, static websites can be a great way to generate passive income.
Design options – All blogs have a similar layout and run in a similar way, but with websites your design options are much greater. You can even incorporate a blog into your site if you wish.

Most of the best hosting companies these days will include some kind of basic web design program. However if you want to get serious about web design then you may want to invest in a serious web design program or hire a programmer to do it for you.

Whether you choose a blog or a static site is a personal choice and it depends on your plans for internet marketing and the style of website that you wish to create.

There is no right or wrong answer. Some internet marketers will swear by static websites, saying that you can build a few websites then sit back and watch the money roll in. Other marketers say that blogging is the way as you can constantly update it and keep up with the times and the latest news and products.

If you are really serious about internet marketing and making money online then you will probably end up with both. I built a static site before this blog, mainly for practice more then anything as I wanted to learn about web design and internet marketing but felt it would be better to start my blog when I started traveling.

I may build more static sites in the future but first I want to write and promote this blog. That is my choice and it doesn’t really matter whether you choose a blog or websites, the main factor of whether you will succeed or fail with internet marketing will ultimately come down to how much work you put in.

After speaking about blogging, I thought I would write a brief introduction to internet marketing. You have probably come across the term internet marketing before, but may not necessarily know much about it. Word is slowly spreading about the potential to make money online, but too many people still seem put off by the idea. Many believe that internet marketing and affiliate marketing are for the computer geeks and the tech heads, but I want to make it clear that anyone can get into this game if they are willing to take the time to learn a few basics.

Imagine I was to offer you your own shop for a few dollars a month in rent. This shop was in a special location that could be visited by anyone in the world. Imagine I then offered you unlimited stock, and said this stock would be free, however much you need, just sell as much as you can. You would probably either bite my arm off, or dismiss me as a nutter. But this is the kind of business on offer with affiliate marketing.

If you are not familiar with the term affiliate marketing, it simply means selling other peoples stuff. As an affiliate you find a product that has an affiliate program, and more and more companies are starting to use these. Clickbank.com is one of the biggest affiliate networks with thousands of digital products to promote. The great thing about promoting digital products is that there is no real cost involved with the sale, so the commission you receive can be very high. 50% seems to be quite common, however there are programs that even offer 70-80% commission.

You do not have to sell digital products, Amazon Affiliates is growing rapidly and allows you to promote their products too. The commission may not be so high, but there is still good money to be made if you are promoting the right products in the right places.

The best place to do this is through your own website. Now please don’t be put off by this, creating a website is easier than ever and programmers are continuously coming up with new ideas to make creating a website even easier. I’m not going to go into how to do this right now, but I do want to make one thing very clear:

YOU DO NOT NEED MAJOR TECH SKILLS AND YOU DO NOT NEED TO LEARN HTML TO CREATE A WEBSITE

I hope that’s clear enough. There are lots of guides around on internet marketing and a lot of them are a little dated from a time when you would have needed to learn the HTML basics to get a website set up, but I am writing this in 2010 on my website and guess what, I know hardly anything about HTML.

I do know how to copy and paste, and if there is the odd bit of HTML I need to incorporate into my site, I simply look it up, copy/paste it into my site and follow any instructions to make sure any changes I need to make are done correctly. There is heaps of information on HTML online but personally I’m too lazy to learn it all, I prefer to just copy the bits that I need.

It isn’t essential to get your own website if you want to get into internet marketing, you can promote using certain forms of social media, and there are certain forums that allow you to promote affiliate links, but your options would be limited and I would highly recommend getting your own site.

This is a very basic introduction to internet marketing, there are whole courses and ebooks that tell you a lot more about how to make money online, but the main point I want to get across in this post is that internet marketing is something that anyone can get into. There are bored housewives and weird nomadic twenty somethings like myself with little or no computer experience all over the world making money online, so it is not just for the techies and the gurus.