How to Start a Web Based Business Part 3

Still with me? So far we have covered the business opportunity that you want to offer and getting a domain name and web or splash page. What's next?

Now you have to use marketing to drive prospects to your opportunity. Some opportunities come all set up for you to make it easy to drive and track traffic to your site. Others only offer a product and a replicated web page. Replicated web pages are ignored by search engines . Why? Because there are a bunch of the exact same landing page out there and the search engines are programmed to ignore them as spam. So, if you have an opportunity that provided you with a replicated splash page are you dead in the water? No Way! You just have to use marketing to drive people to your page.

It doesn't matter what kind of page that you have to send people to so they can view your offer. In every case you need to learn and master web based marketing in order to drive traffic to your opportunity. There are a number of systems on the web that make it easier to get traffic to your page. One of them is listed above in my links area as "Internet Driven Business System". This is an opportunity and a business system with training and mentoring set up to make it easy to get started and to get high quality traffic to your site as quick as the first day. This system is more expensive than a start your own system, but it will save you hundreds or even thousands of hours learning and many dollars marketing trying to find the key to successfully driving quality traffic to your site.

There is another system listed in the links called "Easy to Follow Web Business Tool". This tool will help you research a your opportunity for a niche that will allow you to figure out how to target a group or network of people to attract to your opportunity. It also will help you research different keywords based on Supply and Demand and potential for return on an investment. It also allows you to see what the Alexia rating on different sites with your keywords are doing to attract prospects and lets you go directly to them to research what's out there and who your competition is. This is hands down the best web based research tool I have ever used and I'll be using for years into the future for the potential to take research that would take months and get it done in a day or two. If you want to learn how to research and how to select good domain names and create themed websites that rate high with the search engines, this it the only tool to use and it's very inexpensive compared to other tools I have used or seen advertised.

The above two opportunities are both targeted towards teaching you how to market and giving you the tools to get set up quickly and intelligently. You don't need wither of these tools to get going. You can do your own research, look at other tools, check out advertising rates on sites that you think you might want to advertise on and build you own plan from scratch. I recommend this only for very experienced web and marketing masters. What usually happens to most new web marketers is that they get something up and start advertising, but they don't know how to test an advertising campaign, the don't know how to keep the cost within reason, they still don't get much qualified traffic to their sites and they go broke or give up after becoming frustrated at the failure of their attempts. The problem is that it is very easy to advertise on the web. But it is very difficult to successfully advertise on the web without a mentor or training program to help you sort it all out.

There are hundreds of ways to get your message across and some are free, some are inexpensive, and some can get very expensive, very fast. What you really want to do is get something going that can make you a little cash money with, very quickly, so you can use the cash to cover your advertising and get your business going and generating a healthy paycheck. There are paid lead lists, paid opt-in leads, pay-per-click campaigns and other mediums that will get traffic to you site. Many pay per click ad words that are working for some people are commanding $1.00 per click or more. What if you get one of these and get 500 clicks per day, but no-one buys anything or gives you their contact information? How long can you keep that up with no return on your investment?

I have three ad campaigns running right now. One cost me nothing at www.usfreeads.com . This one cost nothing and has not generated even one hit on any of my offerings. I have another one that I paid $50 dollars to post. In the three days since I posted it, I have received 94 hits, 4 opt-ins where someone gave me a contact e-mail address for more information, and 2 hits on my order page. The $50 dollar ad will continue to run for a month and as long as it's visible, it will continue to generate traffic to my site. Usually the rule of thumb is that you need about 100 opt-ins before you generate a sale. Based on the above figures that means that I will need over 2000 hits on my page to generate 100 opt-ins and 1 sale. This means that you need a lot of traffic to make real money. It means that you need very good copy to make your ad work for you. It means that you may have to test different ads, copy, and placement on different sites before you find a combination that will work for your offering. I have just placed an ad with another internet company that e-mails their opt-in business opportunity list and I paid for a one time ad that runs by itself and is mailed one time to their entire list of over 30,000 subscribers who are looking for opportunities for $99. I can keep this kind of copy testing and ad placement up for some time before going broke. If I place two ads per week that continue to be posted for 1 month or more, soon I will have many different ads running at the same time in many different places all pulling for my opportunity and it will cost me about $100 per week. If I can average 200 hits per ad it will cost me about 50 cents per lead. If my ads don't produce, I will either modify them, change the sites that I post them to, or search for other advertising mediums that can produce.

This blog site is an example of a site that can produce business without any advertising cost. The blog provides information for free to people who are interested in starting their own home based business. I have some links to some of my offerings at the top of the blog. Some of these links go directly to the opportunities, and some of them go to business tools that help people who are looking for a way to duplicate what I'm doing. This approach takes time. It also takes some experience with tools, techniques, and information. It takes time to write the blog. It takes a reasonable idea for a blog that people might want to read. You have to post to the blog on a regular basis. And you need to have had some kind of success or it's just not going to work. So far I have made a couple of sales for small items from this blog and I'm writing it to help others learn the business, so overall it's working fine for me. I'm not looking to get rich from this particular advertising medium by itself. I just want to help point people in the right direction and help keep them from making some of the mistakes that I have made along the way so they can get their business going and producing faster, for less money than it took me to get going. I've purchased all kinds of e-books and other tools on the internet market. I took the time to read and implement them. They brought me further along in the process of finding out what works and what's necessary to make it in this business. Some of them were a complete waste of money and time. Some of them were total scams.

But most people do not want to take the time to figure all this out on their own. That's why I have posted the best opportunities and tools I have used on this site. There are only a few listings because I don't want to make it difficult to select an opportunity or tool from a huge list of offerings. There are websites that specialise in this type of listing and they are every bit as daunting as trying to figure this all out on your own. I only post offerings that I'm involved in, so that I can advise and mentor others that want this kind of opportunity and success. I only post business tools that I use for the same reason. They work, I use them personally, and they have helped me to grow my business with a minimum investment of time and money.

You can also explore the numerous social networking sites out there like YouTube and MySpace. They are free, but they can be difficult to use for marketing unless you have a system for making them work for your opportunity. There are a number of companies dedicated to teaching you how to do this and I'll post information here about what ones I have tried and how well they work as I progress in my own marketing business.

Don't forget, word-of-mouth advertising, classified ads, business cards, radio and TV. They can all play a roll in your quest to grow your internet business. I've seen, and responded to many of these typs of ads over time and have found a few of them to be good opportunities, and have found some that were complete scams. These types of advertising can be inexpensive or free and word of mouth is a very powerful method to show people your opportunity if it's done right.

Remember that you best tool is going to be your drive, passion, and committment towards learning and succeeding at this business. If you thnik that you will succeed. You probably will, because you will not give up until you "crack the code" to internet marketing. There are quite a few people making very significant money doing this and there are more and more people every day who are becoming successful as well.

I can't post tomorrow, (I have guitar practice for my church worship team), but on Friday I'll post some specific nuts and bolts of driving people to your site to get you started.