Do you think effective online marketing is difficult to learn? It doesn’t have to be. In fact, if you plan your learning, you can master it in a very short time.
Get started with these five easy steps:
Step 1: Choose Your Path
There are many systems and methods to use for effective online marketing. Some people focus on SEO, others on Joint Ventures and/or social networking, and still others focus on paid marketing. It doesn’t matter what you start with first. What’s most important is that you pick one system, method or tool to learn first and master it.
If you have a natural inclination towards one method, or if you already know one method pretty well, then use that method to start. Study a variety of different methods and decide on one that you want to learn first.
Step 2: Design a Four-Week Plan
Start with a four-week plan to learn about and execute your chosen system. Include books to read and people to talk to. If you know others who have succeeded in using the system, contact them. Most people are willing to help. If they can walk you through it, that can be a big plus.
Make your plan aggressive enough to inspire you to action without being so ambitious that it would intimidate you or result in procrastination.
Your plan needs to be fast enough that you’ll know whether or not it’s working in four weeks. It would be best to invest at least two hours per day in the project, five days a week.
Step 3: Execute, Execute, Execute!
Take action! That means actually taking steps that have a fair chance of resulting in more sales (i.e. making more money).
Actions include things like setting up campaigns, building links, writing (or outsourcing) articles, etc. Action is NOT planning, learning or thinking about strategies.
As a general rule of thumb, the more action you take, the more money you’ll generate. Action is what separates the people who don’t make money online from those who do. Keep that in mind!
Step 4: Track Results, Adjust and Improve
By week 3 or 4, you should have enough data to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing.
If you’re using paid advertising, you should be looking at your ROI (return on investment) and cash flow to figure out whether it’s worth continuing, making adjustments, or moving on to another medium or strategy.
If you’re implementing SEO (search engine optimization), look at your rankings and backlinks to see how you’re doing. Don’t aim for a top five position in the search results right away; if your site moved from page 20 to page 2 or 3, that’s a success!
Step 5: Duplicate What Worked
Once you know what’s effective, repeat it. Drop what didn’t work.
Multiply your success and keep learning about one method or technique until you get really good at it. Then, expand into other areas and different ways of making money and generating traffic.
Trying to master “online marketing” as a whole can seem like a daunting task. But when you approach it method by method, small step by small step, you’ll find it’s not that difficult after all.
