4 Step Checklist For Online Marketing Success

Many online business owners want to make the process of developing a successful online business harder than it needs to be.

The truth is that a simple 4-step checklist can lead anyone to online profits:

1. Create or Tweak your Offers;

2. Get Traffic – Attract Targeted Visitors;

3. Analyze Results; and

4. Repeat Steps 1-3.

There are literally hundreds of business models that you can use in this step.

The four business models undertaken by the majority of online marketers are:

1. Service Creation and Marketing;

2. Affiliate Marketing;

3. Buying Wholesale and Selling Retail;

4. Product Creation and Marketing.

The first two are the easiest for the new online marketer to get started.

• Service Creation and Marketing

I got my start by creating services and selling services. I started out as an article ghost writer, and over the years, I have ghost written for some very famous people…

Eventually, I got involved in Article Syndication to make my ghost writing more attractive, and eventually, Article Syndication became my primary business.

• Affiliate Marketing

With Affiliate Marketing, there are several affiliate networks that bring together product vendors with affiliate sellers. Those networks include: ClickBank.com, CJ.com (Commission Junction), PayDotCom.com, RapBank.com, ShareASale.com and Amazon.com

As an affiliate marketer, it is your job to sell products and services from other companies, for a commission on the sale.

• Buying Wholesale and Selling Retail

When it comes to Buying Wholesale and Selling Retail, most people go to sites like WorldWideBrands.com or Doba.com. However, I lost interest in those services when a lot of the companies I contacted could not sell the products I wanted – at prices better than Wal-Mart.

Forgive me if my thinking is backwards on this, but if I can get products cheaper at Wal-Mart than I can get them for at the wholesale distributors, then I find it hard to believe that they were offering me wholesale prices.

However, I met a fellow online who deals in real wholesale buying, and he recently made his knowledge available in a report called the Holiday Goldmine. I have read his report — it is very good at sharing details I was not able to find elsewhere. You can buy his report here: HolidayGoldMine.com

• Product Creation and Marketing

When you can start creating your own information products, you can pretty much build a solid future, selling yourself and your knowledge.

When you find that you possess a solid selling product, then you can explore becoming a product vendor on any of the Affiliate Network sites. Solid products can make a lot of money, when other marketers want to help you sell them.

Kevin Riley teaches people how to create and sell their own products at his website here: ProductCreationLabs.com

I used to get so mad when people told me that getting traffic is the easy part.

I just wanted to reach through the computer and strangle them when they said that.

Why?

If it was so darn easy to get traffic, why did I have to work so darn hard to get it?

Of course, after a decade of learning about how to get traffic, I can agree that getting traffic is the easy part. DON’T try to reach through your computer to try to strangle me!!

Hear me out.

There are dozens of methods to bring traffic to your website, through free and paid methods, and there are hundreds of thousands of websites from which you can derive that traffic!

When you begin to understand the methods and the strategies used by professional online marketers to deliver traffic to their websites, then you are on the road to being able to deliver as much traffic as you want to your website as well.

If you want to learn more on this subject, consider my report shown at the end of this article that outlines 35 Proven Traffic Generation Strategies. The report has received tremendous reviews and is titled, “Multiple Traffic Streams: The Magic of Attracting Buyers”.

It also teaches how to better target your Traffic Generation activities to ensure that you are spending your resources only on strongly-targeted visitors – the people who are most likely to buy what you are selling.

I am constantly amazed at the number of new online marketers who have yet to understand that THEY can analyze their results as easily as the professional marketers can.

Your Traffic Statistics are perhaps the most important business intelliegence that you have in your possession.

If your website has a cPanel login, as is common at most of the major web hosting companies, then you will also have access to AW Stats. In the absense of everything else, AW Stats is a pretty good program for determining the quality and sources of your websites’ traffic.

If you have the money to invest, a better website analysis software is the one found at HTTP-Analyze.org

While HTTP-Analyze is perhaps the best, most professional webmasters rely heavily on Google Analytics to track their results and conversion rates on specific sources of traffic. www.google.com/analytics/

What you want to learn from this process is: where your traffic comes from, how the traffic was derived from those locations (if you don’t already know), how much traffic came to your website from that source, and how many people bought from you and came from a specific traffic source.

Once you understand how many people came from one traffic source and how many of those people bought from you, then you can calculate your conversion rate for each traffic source. This information will assist you in making good decisions about where to invest your advertising resources in the future.

With your analytics in hand, you can make intelligent decisions about how to tweak your offer to get better results on the next pass.

At a certain point, you will want to introduce split testing, so that you can take a proper measure of two sales pages or squeeze pages side-by-side to see which one will produce better conversion rates for you.

All great success stories were founded upon minor improvements made over and over.

It is said that Howard Hughes helped his dad’s company go from a small dsitributor of canning for the food industry to one of the top canning companies in his day, by making one simple change to the processes they used.

Howard Hughes is said to have made one minor change to the way that his company closed the cans used to package food, and that change reduced the cost of cans by 2/3rds of one penny. Hughes gave 1/3rd of the savings to his customers and kept the other 1/3rd of a penny for himself.

This one minor adjustment in his processes helped make Howard Hughes the richest man on the planet during his lifetime – 1/3rd of one penny at a time.

The simple concepts outlined in this article will help anyone, who has the ambition to do so, to become successful selling products or services online.

The 4-step method defined in this article will very literally work with any business model used online.

Too many people get lost in methodologies, and this only serves to short-circuit their success.

For example, I am an article marketer, but article marketing isn’t the only thing I do to promote my online businesses.

I am also pretty good at SEO, but I would never invest all of my resources into Google or any other third-party website. When your business model relies only upon Google, you will find yourself only one algorithm change away from bankruptcy.

In my Multiple Traffic Streams report, I define 35 Time-Tested Strategies for Traffic Generation, and of those, I use 12 of them regularly. My top-performing website gets one-quarter million unique visitors and 1.25 million page views per year.

The point in this article is to show you know how you can accomplish the same or better results, if only you have the ambition to do so.