Starting an Internet Marketing Business from Scratch

Over the past few months, I’ve been sensing it is time to take my business in a fresh direction.  After 10 years selling, developing and designing websites, social media is taking marketing on the web to a different place. While I’ve always recognized SEO (search engine optimization) as an important component of website design and development, it wasn’t the only key to the success of a quality website.  The online environment has changed again.  Five years ago creating SEO for your website was often more time consuming that it was worth (for a small to medium-sized business).  Today, it is much easier for a business to learn and to succeed at improving their search engine rankings.  And today it is critical to be part of the discussion in a multitude of social media locations.

With that said, I’m going to begin my sojourn into internet marketing.  I’ve dabbled a bit over the years, but my goal is to create passive income by developing useful and needed products for the market.  Doesn’t that sound pretty broad for a goal?  Maybe it needs narrowed down a bit.

Getting the lay of the land (or the web)

I’ve spent the past 3 or 4 weeks listening to many gurus, purchasing some materials, and signing up for free trials.  Through all the noise, I’ve been looking for the starting block on the game board.  You know, the square where you place your game piece to begin the game and follow the assigned path.  Not that I’m necessarily a good “path-follower,”  I am curious where that starting block is located.

There are so many arenas to develop expertise.  There are:

• webinars
• teleseminars
• product development
• squeeze pages
• list building
• niche finding
• sales pages
• wordpress website development
• and the list goes on . . .

Where is a girl to begin?

To me, it seems a toss up between building a list and determining your niche.  For some, a niche will be the easy part.   If you desire to teach online violin lessons, than your niche is pretty cut and dry.  For me, I’m a generalist with a little bit of knowledge about a lot of things.   I teach some basic graphic development or HTML or CSS or good website design principals or setting up a wordpress blog or using Facebook or Twitter tweeting or . . .

My first baby step

It’s a tough call.   After a conversation with IM guru, Jason Parker, I’m going to keep it simple and offer a free squeeze page.   He had good advice to keep your first offer simple and then to build on it.  Stay tuned for the next step in my story of Internet Marketing initiation.