If You Build It They Won't Come

Some basics:

1. Don’t get pulled into trying to learn Adwords (pay per click advertising) until you really understand keywords and marketing. A few lucky and bright people figure out how to win at the Adwords game, but most of us lose a lot of money and get very discouraged if we start there.

2. Study and study niche keywords until you understand how to pick them well – ones that meet these criteria:

(a) enough searches per month; (b) not very much competition (fewer optimized websites in the niche); (c) the people who search for that keyword end up buying (buyer keywords – see Microsoft Adlab for Audience Intelligence to figure this out); (d) a product that they want to buy

3. Do start with your own websites. Don’t stop at one site. The people telling you that they are rich (the ones who are not lying — and there are quite a few) usually have dozens if not hundreds of websites plus a core business or two. Master a system for finding a market niche of customers who buy things (not just look), set up a website to attract them, market the website, and move on to the next market niche.

If you try to sell your beloved product in your beloved niche and nothing happens after a fair test, move on to sell what will sell, at least if you want to make money online instead of starving.

4. If you build it, they really won’t come…at least not right away or without more steps.

5. Market your site like crazy all over the web by getting links back to your site (not reciprocal links — you want oneway incoming links to your site to make it look more important to search engines like Google. Search engines are the only way strangers other than Mom and Dad are going to find you).

How do you do this? Go to the popular spots on the web and create a presence – forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo, Hubpages, PRWeb, Yahoo Answers, classified ads like USFreeAds, articles (some people love UniqueArticleWizard.com), and videos (YouTube, Tube Mogul, Traffic Geyser), and many other places where your costs are time, but not much money.

Don’t hard sell the products you are selling (your own or other people’s as an affiliate on commission). Just inform and educate your audience and make sure they see the URL leading back to your site. Then cultivate them when they arrive.

6. Once you get some cash coming in and you personally understand what works for your niche, then find cheap ways to outsource the work so that you can do these steps over and over on more and more websites (the big gurus mostly use outsourcing locations like www.odesk.com, www.rentacoder.com, www.elance.com, and many more).

7. Learn the tricks of the trade for PPC (pay per click) from a good trainer only after you know how to get traffic on your own. PPC can accelerate your entry into a niche, but it may cost you more than you make back up front. Many people expect to lose money on the ads themselves, but make it back and more by selling people other products over time once they get them signed up on their autoresponder list.