Sometimes new marketers online get frustrated when they can’t seem to turn a profit with their new internet business. They think they are missing some magic formula that will allow them to succeed.

Maybe you are one of those newbies. Or maybe this will serve as a refresher to see which area you are not doing what you should be.

So here is the miniature version of the formula:

N + W + T + L + C = Success!

Let me explain…

N = Niche

Before you ever start an online business, or any business for that matter, you need to be sure that the market you want to serve has a desire to be filled and WILL spend money to fill that need/want.

The nice thing about marketing online is that researching markets is now a snap.

To start your research efforts head over to Google’s Keyword tool or if you want more advanced and complete info opt for Keyword Discovery and type in a keyword that describes what you want to sell. From that point you will get all kinds of related keywords that people are searching for on a monthly basis.

IMPORTANT: You will also be able to see how many searches are performed on the words you check. With each of these words you will want to do a quick search and see if anyone is advertising. If NO ONE is advertising you either found a gold mine or dud. Most likely a dud. However go through the top results and see if anyone is selling anything. We’ll come back to this later.

This is your starting point for a profitable business so you want to be sure that there is enough interest in what you will be offering.

W = Website

There are a few ways to make money online without a website, but these do NOT generally suit newbies well. What I am referring to is Affiliate Marketing where you would use ads or PPC to direct traffic directly to someone else’s website offer. While this process saves you the time and expense of dealing with customers it is in one BIG way flawed! I’ll get to that in a minute

Getting a Website set up is fairly easy if you know what you are doing, if not you can hire a web management company to do it for you.

In either case there are 2 essential ingredients you will need to have in order to run your own website.

1. A Domain Name - You can find a cheap domain at DomainIt
2. Hosting - I use media temple if you want high performance, but recommend host nine as an alternative if you are just getting started and don’t know how much traffic you will get.

T = Traffic

Ingredient #2 in this magical formula is traffic. It seems like everyone wants more of it. Which makes sense except traffic in itself is worthless without a few other ingredients which we’ll get to in a minute.

There are as many ways to get traffic as there are idiots at your cell phone company’s customer support department. We want to look at the fast and easy as well as the long term.

Fast and Easy

• traffic exchanges
• articles
• video
• social media
• ppc

Long term

• affiliate program
• joint venture network
• directory listings

The thing to keep in mind is that your traffic strategy relies on consistency and testing. You should always use a reliable web statistic program to keep track of where your visitors are coming from. I use Piwik although most people I know opt for Google Analytics.

L = Listbuilding

Listbuilding is the missing element that can drastically improve your results if you opt for NOT having a website online.

If you have no website there is no way for you to capture the names and email addresses of the traffic (people) you are driving to your affiliate offers. NO CAPTURE means NO ASSETS.

You see the asset you can build online is called a list and once you’ve collected names and emails for a certain topic you can continue to send related offers to that same list over and over and generate money out of the list from the recommendation you make.

If you send traffic directly to a site (even if it’s your own) and you don’t collect a name and email address there is a good chance you may never hear from that person again.

C = Conversion

And finally referring back from ingredient #2- Traffic, or ingredient #3- Listbuilding, neither one of these efforts amounts to any money in your bank account until these numbers are converting. So how do you make an offer that converts.

Do you need to be a master copywriter?

NO

Do you need to be a psychoanalyst?

NO

Do you need to lie?

NO

The answer to this question is simple, maybe not fast, but simple.

You run a split test, or a more advanced test called a multivariate test.

By running 2 or more variations of the same page you can systematically determine which version is more appealing to your websites visitors.

This is where the magic happens, and it’s in your best interest to master this skill as soon as you can.

Google offers some excellent tools for testing if you have an adwords account with them.

So that’s the magical formula.

If you are struggling in any of these areas which part do you find the most challenging and what could I do to help?

-Jae

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