Everything you will ever need to know about internet marketing is plainly available to you everywhere you go on the internet. All you need to do is dissect, study, and emulate these methods and you invariably will become just as successful as the people who created them.
How do I know this? Because I use this exact pratice to make money with my own online businesses and newsletters. Whenever I have a problem, I look to other successful internet marketers and see how they have overcome these same obstacles I am facing.
Some people will tell you must buy a certain ebook or internet marketing course to become successful. This is not true. Informational products do have their merits, but it is important to understand that a lot of them become out-dated immediately after publication.
The online marketplace changes very rapidly and the best, most successful internet marketers change with it. A good traffic-building tactic one day may be ineffective the next. If you hinge your entire business plan around this single idea you read in an ebook, and that idea ends up being outdated, then you will fail.
I am not trying to say that informational products are not useful. But I am saying you need to find a real time way of analyzing and implementing the information you do have. You cannot purchase internet business success, but you also cannot have it for free. You must work for it.
If you blindly purchase information and then try to implement it, you will not succeed.
Take list-based marketing for instance. Sending email to opt-in subscribers used to be one of the most effective, inexpensive ways to make quick sales. But in the wake of recent anti-spam legislation, this same method has become drastically less profitable. Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and other email client services have clamped down on business emails in general, blacklisting all email from some autoresponders and filtering out up to 70% of legitimate business emails in some cases.
Of course, you wouldn't know any of this from reading 99% of the marketing information available on the internet. Why? Because these books became outdated the second congress passed the CAN-SPAM ACT. These books will still tell you that simply filling an autoresponder with messages and buying leads will make you a fortune. This is no longer true.
You can still make just as much money from list marketing now as you could before, but you just need to solve some marketing problems first. You cannot continue to use outdated information that could not possibly take into consideration the current marketing world.
So how do you deal with these problems? The same way you need to deal with all eBusiness marketing problems. You operate in REAL TIME. You dissect, study, and emulate what successful webmasters, listowners, and netrepreneurs are doing to make money right now.
There are a number of different ways you can do this--but they all involve the same three steps: dissect, study, and emulate. In the remainder of this article, I will explain website reverse engineering, which is one of the real time methods I use to improve my marketing efforts.
You can start by taking a closer look at the websites you visit most often. Rather than looking at them as a customer or as a member, think about the process that went into making them. You did not find that website by accident. You are not looking at certain products for no reason. If the webmaster of this site is a professional, then it was engineered to drive you there and then to look at specific things. Undo this process to learn from it:
Dissect. Study. Emulate.
Look at the layout of the pages. Check the site map. Look at how things are arranaged. Are there popups? Is there a newsletter? Do they have a lot of outgoing links to websites they do not own? Is this website actually mini-site of another bigger site?
Figure out why this webmaster has things setup in the way you see them.
How does the webmaster really make the majority of her revenue? Does this webmaster get a lot traffic? If so, where does it come from (hint: google and alexa have functions that allow you to back-track links and traffic). Does this webmaster use certain techniques to lure you in--and then close a sale? Does the mainpage contain primarly free or purchasable items?
How is this webmaster's sales copy constructed? Would this webmaster prefer you to purchase a product or sign up for a list?
Dissect. Study. Emulate.
Answer all of these questions. You can do it for free and you will only get better the more you do it.
Now take some of the methods you understand best and are technically capable of implementing and then emulate them on your own website, personalizing them to fit in with your own scheme, of course.
If you do this regularly--if you use REAL TIME as your standard of evaluation--you cannot fail. I have personally used this method dozens of times to fix my website, and just recently I adjust my new internet income course, which now not only gets to all of my subscribers, but also teaches them how to accomplish the same thing with real time marketing.
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You may use this article for reprint, as long as it remains unaltered and the resource box and author information are included. - Isaiah Hull
Isaiah Hull is the CEO of an internet business, a publisher of two business newsletters, PTL of several affiliate programs, and a business trainer for his affiliates. On 11/10/04, he released a brand-new free internet income course to address the major changes in internet marketing: http://www.workathomerightnow.net
