How To "Make Money on the Internet"

The Internet is a mine field to navigate.

We have all seen the hyped ads " make millions in your pajamas " .   But this is furthest from the truth as it implies Internet Marketing is easy.  Not so.  There are great profits to be made on the Internet but there are many pitfalls preventing profit.

If it were that easy, there would be millions of rich marketers running around.  But the truth is there are millions of frustrated marketers who have all spent a lot of money they should not have spent.

If you don't believe me, do a search for second hand domains for sale, and you will find many thousands for sale.  The reason ... a marketer saw a product or service that they liked which has a great affiliate program paying 60% to 70% commission. 

A quick calculation of potential sales makes it too enticing to pass up. So the marketer purchases a domain and adds advertising text, banners, graphics, lead capture pages and anything else he/she thinks will convert surfers to customers.  The page is published to the Internet and the marketer sits back and waits for sales to happen.

Nothing ... So he/she tweaks the page, adjusts meta tags and adds some more graphics.  Still nothing.  A quick check of the stats page shows a very small trickle of hits / visitors, but no sales. 

Time to buy advertising.  An email arrives offering advertising to 500,000 double opt in subscribers for only $99.00 (normally $199.00)  So the marketer hauls out the calculator and figures out that only 2% response will generate several thousand in sales.  So the advertising is purchased with much excitement and within days, the hits begin to soar through the roof.  But still no sales.  After many exciting days of checking stats and bank balance, it becomes evident that he/she has just lost $99 and many valuable hours. 

The answer is not hits, it it targeted hits.  A simple definition of targeted hits is "Visitors who are actually interested in the product you are offering"  In fact getting targeted hits is not that easy. 

Search engine optimization has become a science and even the experts have to change strategies often to compensate for the ever evolving search engine algorythms.