You Don't Need A Website To Start Marketing
(Niche Marketing-Branding Yourself)
Most people just starting their home based internet marketing businesses think the first thing they need to do is build a website. They may look at other sites that they like, pick out three or four designs that look good to them, and off they go to try and make one that looks similar. If they can't seem to get it "just right", they start looking around for a web designer to build it for them.
I say ...hold on, what makes you think the first place to start is with a website? I made this mistake when I was first starting out, and all I ended up with was some really great looking websites that didn't bring in any profits.
What I finally figured out was that having this awesome looking site that I love means absolutely nothing, and building a site that is what my customers want means EVERYTHING.
What I am saying here is that if you are ready to fly out of the gate and start designing and building your site, you may want to spend some time figuring out exactly what it is that your customers are looking for. If you figure out what "sells", you won't end up spending money you may not have, and a ton of time and energy on something that is going to bring you no results, or at best...minimal results.
So number one is to figure out what niche, or area you want to work in, and then decide what product or service you will sell. So how do you start this process?
Really...the best place to start is by picking something that you know a lot about, something that you are really good at...this can be something you do for work, or just for fun. Now, looking at that subject...see if there is one area that can be a problem for people. Believe me, if it is a problem for people, they will be looking for a way to solve it. Next, you want to brainstorm all of the possible ways you could solve that problem. Look at it from lots of different angles.
And think about this...whether the problem you are solving is in the car niche, or medical field, or cooking or running...the truth is...a site that has the information that solves the problem the person is searching for will ALWAYS beat the cool looking website...every time.
My recommendation if you are just getting started is to make sure you focus on picking your niche and problem solving. Start there...start building a list around that niche...provide good information and then start building your website.
Don't worry so much about how your site looks-even though you are joining the ranks of people with home based internet marketing businesses. Focus on the business, not the appearance. You can always make it look better later on. Keep your attention on your niche-your customer and solving their problems and it will save you a lot of money and a lot of headaches.
Make It Simple To Share
With the massive success of YouTube, one of the best internet marketing strategies is to get your message or product or information to "go viral"...and by that I mean...get other people to spread your message for you. How fast and how far your message spreads depends on your ability to engage your reader, or listener, or viewer...psychologically and emotionally, what you are offering and if you are making it easy to share.
One of the ways to do this is by making your product or your message absolutely awesome. If you give your recipients great content and information, or really cool tools and offers...they will instinctively take it viral.
A key piece to this that I think a lot of people overlook, is simply doing something to make it super simple for someone to pass the info along. You can do really easy things like adding a tell-a-friend button to one of your thank you pages or simply adding tell-a-friend scripts into your autoresponder series.
You also want to think about giving people an incentive to tell friends about your marketing message. This doesn't have to be some "blow people out of the water" offer that ends up costing you a ton of money if you don't get the huge response you are looking for...it can be something pretty simple, something that is cool enough that people will want to pass it on.
You can incentivize people financially to tell other people about your product or service. This is basically what affiliate marketing is. There are scripts that will track this and do it all for you. And hey, the whole idea of spreading the word is...the more people you can get to spread the word for free, the more traffic you're going to get, the more sales you're going to get. Very cool stuff.