How can I  make money in internet marketing? I’m sure this is a question all newbies ask all the time.

Having been thrashing around aimlessly for a couple or so years and getting nowhere I decided it was about time that I got serious about trying to make money via internet marketing. Up to this point I had spent quite a bit of money chasing the elusive “Silver Bullet” that was going to give me entry to the high life seemingly enjoyed so effortlessly by many of the internet gurus.

After doing some research, the process of building an internet business began to reveal itself. I don’t think I’d have been able to do this nearly so easily with out the help of John Thornhill and Lee McIntyre who have different approaches but are in ways similar. The most obvious similarity is that they subscribe to “no easy button” philosophy. An internet business is like any other business in many respects. What you get back from it is directly related to what you put into it.

The process at its most basic is:

Get a website

Drive traffic toward it

Make money

Now obviously this is a gross oversimplification of the process – e.g. lousy website, disinterested traffic = no money. But assuming that you have a good product for sale – be it your own or someone else’s (affiliate marketing) there are customers out there prepared to buy. You don’t have to spend a fortune to get a decent product – just a bit of research and some imagination – or find a good affiliate product to promote.

Now comes the tricky bit. How do you get these all to elusive potential customers to visit your website? There are a myriad of so called “Silver Bullet” solutions out there but from what I’ve seen they all cost money and don’t always teach you the basic methods of how to get free web traffic.

Now let’s assume that you’ve started off with a blog. A blog is one of the easiest places to start: it doesn’t cost much (just hosting costs really) and it can be a great place to have links to affiliate products. So how to get free web traffic to your blog. There are 2 very basic simple methods I’ll deal with in this piece:

Blog Carnivals and  Article Marketing. These two can actually work hand in hand to get your first free traffic.  

A Blog Carnival is a bit like a magazine dedicated to a particular topic. It has editors and contributors and a readership. I think the best place to start is at http://blogcarnival.com where you can find a list of Blog Carnivals by topic and when the next issue of a particular carnival is due to be published. You’ll also find the deadline for submissions.  The principle is that you submit a blog article to a relevant carnival and if it’s accepted and published in the carnival, readers will click on the link that takes them to you blog – free traffic. Obviously this a grossly simplified explanation and I plan to expand on this in some depth in a subsequent blog entry.

Article Marketing is where you submit articles to a article directory (EzineArticles.com seems to be the most popular) and hope to have the article published. At the end of your article you can append a resource box which allows you to include your details and a couple of links back to your blog/website. Other publishers and webmasters can reprint your article on their websites as long as they retain the resource box with your links.  The more exposure your article(s) get hopefully the more people will click on your links – free traffic.  Again there’s much more to it than that but this is another topic I’ll expand on in a subsequent blog but staying on the theme of how to get free web traffic.

Now the secret is that as you submit your blog article to a blog carnival submit related articles to ezine directories. This will magnify the effect and hopefully get more links pointing back to your blog/website. Now it’s down to hard work and repeating the process over and over and over again to build momentum.

Just remember to keep your eye on the target, learn the basics and don’t be diverted by bright shiny things. Ignore the continuous stream of “Silver Bullet” offers flooding into your inbox. Once you’ve got the basics right you can then look at alternatives with a more practised eye.