Welcome to The Truth About Internet Marketing - Internet Marketing Solution

We as webmasters tend to look at things on a grand scale when it comes to marketing online. We seem to want to sell to the whole world and ignore other opportunities that lay before us.

The problem with this outlook is that there is a lot of competition and because most of us think this way we tend to go in that direction. It’s not all our fault though because most of us learned this from self-proclaimed gurus. While it sounds like the best way to make a lot of money fast and get the word out about our online business it generally doesn’t work out that way because everyone else is doing the same things as we are and we tend to blend in along with all of the other millions of online marketers.

To do well online you need to do what most others are not doing. If you do what everyone else is doing there is no way that you can be distinguished from every other guy on the net.

A very ignored place of marketing on the web is local web marketing. Most local websites promote their business on the Internet but sell their products in the offline world. Most of these businesses do very well because they are promoting their business from a specific location so the competition is very minimal if at all.

For example: Let’s say I were to promote my restaurant in the town or city that I live in. If someone were to run a Google search for restaurant they would get millions of results but if someone were to run a search for restaurant in a localized area of the country the list of results that they would get would be very small.

Click each link below to see the difference between a global search and a local search for the search term restaurant.

Google local search for restaurant

As you can see, the global search resulted in over 300,000,000 web pages that use that search term while the local search has less than 15,000 web pages that use that search term. Which search term will you have the better chance of being found with? Common sense should tell you that you will be more likely to be found with the search term restaurant in Manomet Massachusetts.

While the second search term won’t get anywhere near as many searches as the first search term you will more than likely get more traffic from the second search term as you would with the first because you will be much easier to find because of the lack of competition of the second keyword.

Granted you probably are not willing to start an offline business in your local neighborhood. You don’t have to. What you can do is check out local merchants to see if they offer a pay by referral program. While my restaurant example on restaurant probably won’t have such a program in place other types of businesses will.

Here’s a couple to get you thinking a little.

Travel Agencies

Real Estate Referrals

Using the 2 examples above you should be able to setup a local website using local keywords.

For the travel aspect you could setup a website using a theme of a specific vacation spot in the world. You would use keywords that would target that particular vacation spot.

Here’s a keyword example you might use. ‘Vacation on Martha’s Vineyard’ or ‘visit Martha’s Vineyard’.

You can do the same with real estate as well using keywords such as ‘real estate on Martha’s Vineyard’ or ‘homes for sale on Marta’s Vineyard’.

For each referral that you send that results in a sale you will be paid a commission.

You may be thinking that you won’t be able to make enough sales due to the lack of people that you will be able to refer. If you were to use just the one theme you won’t get enough referrals to be worth your while but if you were to setup say 50 to 100 themes using either of the two ideas above you will do very well. In other words take the main theme such as vacation and apply different vacation spots around the world and setup separate local websites for each. Do you still think that you can’t get enough referrals?

There are plenty of other ideas that will work well using a localized website you just need to find them.

Ezines are a quick and easy way to drive targeted traffic to any website. Among the main advantages of advertising in Ezines is that they have a highly targeted audience. Top marketers agree that ezines are the best medium you can advertise in. With ezines, you know that the reader is interested in your type of product before you place the ad, because ezines are about very specific topics.

I read somewhere that ezine emails never get opened. There is no way that this is true. By its very nature, emails sent by an ezine will be opened more often than any other email that one might get. People subscribe to an ezine because they have an interest in the subject matter that the ezine offers and many are very passionate about the information on the topic that the ezine offers.

You can advertise in most ezines. Ezines periodically send new information to its subscribers via email. Inside of those mailings are advertisements of products or information that are directly related to the ezines topic. Anyone can advertise in an ezine if they pay for it. Most ezines will not accept ads that are unrelated to the interest of its readers. You can never be accused of spamming because your ad is sent by the ezine to recipients who have subscribed to the ezine.

Most ezines will offer solo ads to its advertisers. A solo ad is a standalone ad that usually stands at the top of the ezine email guaranteeing that your ad will be read. While a solo ad will stand out more and will get you better results, they are a lot more expensive.

Ezines are an excellent place to advertise because they are very targeted and will convert very well. If done right, advertising in an ezine is one of the best and easiest ways to advertise. Unlike any other avenue of advertising you will never wonder whether or not, the right people are seeing your ad. As long as you choose an ezine that is laser targeted to your product, the right people will see it.

The ezine that you choose is very important. It must be highly related to what you sell or what your website is about in order to do well with your ads. For example, if you sell fishing equipment, you want to advertise in an ezine that is only about fishing and nothing else. The ezine must have a decent amount of subscribers. Anything under 50,000 subscribers should not be considered.

You should always subscribe to the ezines that you are considering to advertise in to make sure that they are targeted enough for what you sell. The last thing that you want to do is advertise to an ezine that you thought was a good choice to find that it’s not as targeted as you thought. Besides, you want to advertise to an ezine that provides good content to its subscribers. Ezines that email good content will get opened more often and will be seen by more people. Don’t advertise with the first ezine that you come across. Research them first and subscribe to the ones that you may consider advertising to before you put out any of your hard earned cash.

You should be able to find a decent list of ezines on your topic by doing a google search. Keep in mind that you won’t know anything about any ezine unless you subscribe to them. Make sure that you do. It will save you a lot of money. Do the research. It’s well worth it.

If you own a website that only requires local traffic you can get visitors to your website much quicker than you would if your website was geared toward everyone on the Internet. The competition will be a lot less and your ranking on the search engines will be a lot higher. Depending on what your business is and where it is located, you may have no competition at all.It is much easier to get traffic from a local area than it is trying to get worldwide traffic because you are targeting a very specific area and a very specific group of people. It is almost impossible to fail to get web traffic under these conditions. Unless there are many businesses of your type and they are all doing the same things that you are doing to promote their business, you should do very well.Depending on what your business model is will greatly depend on how many visitors you will need to get to your website. If you sell items of low cost local advertising probably is not the way to go because you won’t be able get enough traffic to make it worth your while. If you sell something like real estate where you would get high commissions this would be the way to go because you don’t need a lot of traffic to sustain your business.

Let’s say you are a real estate investor and were selling homes in cape cod Massachusetts. You could put a website up featuring homes on cape cod. You wouldn’t need a lot of hits to that website because the price tag is high and your profits are pretty much guaranteed. If you got just 20 clicks a day you would get 600 hits a month to your website. The fact that your website has a local theme will automatically give you highly targeted traffic. Your keyword phrase may be something like “homes on cape cod”, or “real estate in cape cod Massachusetts”. Well you get the idea.

You don’t even need to be a real estate investor or broker to do the above. Many real estate brokers will pay you for referrals that you send them. Send them prospective buyers and they will pay you quite well if they convert to a sale. You don’t need to have a broker’s license to refer people to a real estate broker. You would make really good money by just sending a few people that convert to sales every month. There are lots of ways to sell localized products that will put money in your pocket by way of referring people to a local business site or directly to their business office. You may want to do some research to find the best fit for you.

You don’t need to have a local business to setup and run a local business website. Using other people’s resources can make you a lot of money with little or no competition. Going the referral route will put most of the burden of risk on the broker and very little on you. You could actually make this your online business referring multiple local businesses that pay high commissions. You could target any local area in the country or the world for that matter.

Bottom line. Running a local website if structured properly can make you a lot of money with very little competition. If you are struggling to get your online business off the ground you may want to consider this as an alternative.

While so many things are constantly changing on the Internet one thing has not changed at all. Good content still rules the day. After All, the majority of people that use the Internet are looking for information. The important thing to remember is that you must give it to them or your website will not do very well. Throwing a long hyped sales letter and using it as your website will not get it done.

So many websites out there have no real content. Too often you will see a beautifully designed website with nothing but products on it. This is fine if the web surfer is looking for something to buy but if that’s all you have to offer you are leaving a lot of money on the table in my opinion. I will guarantee you that these types of sites don’t do very well.

Providing good content will cater to the majority of web surfers. Not only that, the content on your site will allow you to get more targeted traffic. Chances are, if they are interested in your content then they will also be interested in what you have to sell as long as it is directly related to your content. Your products should always be content related. Remember, your visitor came to your website for the content. Sell something that relates directly to the content and chances of converting increases many times over.

I know that you think that creating content is a lot of work. It is but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming nor do you have to do everything all at once either. If you were to put up 4 web pages a week you would have over 100 pages on your site in 6 months. If you were to continue to do this you would have a very large website with original content in a couple of years. I know a couple of years is a long time but ask yourself this. How much content will you have on your website in a couple of years if you do nothing.

I know that everyone and his brother says to take the easy way out and use other people’s content and use it for your website. It is better to use your own content because it is original to you. That’s what will separate you from the rest. You will be providing information that nobody has ever seen before. You are the best resource for the content on your website. Realize that many other websites will be using the same content if you were to use other people’s works. Make your website you, not someone else. Your visitors will be able to identify with you much better if the content is your own.

Search engines look for original content on the websites that it spiders and will rank websites with original content much better than copycat sites. As a matter of fact, your site can be penalized if that content is on a lot of other websites. Use original content and your site will get noticed faster and your conversion rates will be a lot higher.