The dream of every marketer is to find a profitable market with the highest returns. Unfortunately there is no one button or magic formula that will turn such dreams into reality. But there are the tried and tested methods and systems that have consistently worked over the years. Combining the right attitude and some hard work, with the following powerful marketing tips, you should see growth in your sales and your ability to not only survive, but thrive in the Internet Marketing world.

So what is the secret to survival?

1. Keeping the customer’s attention and having dedicated internet sites.

Every product you promote should have a unique page and domain name associated with it. Skimping on the costs of hosting each site separately by lumping them all together, is not a good idea. It looks very unprofessional. You will also wind up with un-targeted buyers, and less traffic overall. It is far better to spread out your products on different sites and send targeted traffic to each specific product. This will generate more sales for you. Having several products on one page or site distracts the attention of the reader away from your focal point. That is the last thing you want to do. The goal is to have the complete attention of the prospective customer on one thing at a time – the page at hand.

2. The target.

Your website traffic should be targeted to your product or service. In fact, wherever possible, hyper targeted. No matter how great your site or product is, if a person has no interest in your product, they will simply leave your site. Set up strategies to bring in targeted leads.

Writing articles to promote your site is a great way to get free targeted traffic. Write on topics related to your product or niche. Find a way to relate your article to your website or product. Write and publish your articles several times a week or every day if you can manage it. Anywhere between 300 and 600 words is a good length in general for your articles.

Remember to be selective with your keyword usage. Although it is not a complete disaster to have un-targeted keywords in your free traffic generation methods, at worst you may have wasted some time and lost potential traffic.

However, if you paid for this traffic in advertising, you may throw away a lot of money, with bad keyword usage.

For example: If you are selling golfing equipment and advertising with Pay Per Click using the keyword “sports equipment”, what do you think will happen? You will have a large number of clicks on your advertisements. But how many people will be looking for golfing equipment specifically? Your un-targeted traffic will be looking for everything from baseball gloves to cricket balls. Statistically, few people in that traffic stream will be looking for golfing equipment. That is an expensive venture indeed when using paid traffic generation. So choose your keywords carefully.

3. Writing reviews.

It is important for prospective customers to understand the value of the product in question. Secondly, they will want to know how it will help, entertain or educate them. Reviews are a great way to educate your prospects and entice them to become customers.

When it comes to purchasing products, people often make decisions based on what other people’s experiences have been. Providing testimonials is fantastic for this purpose, so use that to your advantage by including them in sales letters and emails. Ask for your customers’ permission to use their testimonials, including their name and preferably a photograph on your site and in newsletters.

4. Provide product information.

People are busy, and they like quick access to all sorts of information without needing to go and try to find it. So provide as much information about your product on your site as possible. Once again, it maintains the prospect’s focus on your site and product.

Demonstrating the uses of your product is a valuable resource which should be included on an additional page on your site, in the form of an article. For example, if you are selling jewelry cleaning product which also happens to be great for cleaning bathroom tiles, providing that sort of information will increase your conversions. Create a list of all the product’s uses. Bullet point them and include brief descriptions where needed.

Highlight all the relevant points and information on your page, to keep the viewer reading and more aware of what your page is about. The more a person becomes familiar with a new product, the more they become a customer with a buying mind. Keeping them reading helps this process, provided it is useful content.

5. Using multiple purpose marketing websites.

One of two things happens with a marketing website. You either have a closed sale, or you have a “bounce”. This is the problem with not having a mailing list.

If you have a sale immediately, you lose the customer for follow-up sales. If you have a ‘bounce’, you lose the customer completely. Should the customer bounce, you have wasted much of your website building and traffic generation efforts. This is because there is no convenient way to contact your customer if they purchased something from you, and no logical reason for thinking that the ‘bounced’ customer will either find or revisit your site. What to do about this problem?

6. Build ‘a list’.

By having an opt-in box to subscribe to your mailing list, you can continue to build a relationship with both the prospects and the paying customers. Periodic reminders about your product via email will increase the likelihood of a sale to prospects over time.

According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect. That means that in order to be a successful internet marketer in the long term, you must build a list. That does not necessarily mean you need to write a years worth of daily emails and load them all in an autoresponder. Nor does it mean you need to write every day, depending upon your target audience.

If you are in the health products niche, you may like to email your customers quite often. In this niche, many of these products are consumables and they change continually.

For a niche such as personal development, generally purchases are not so frequent. In such events, you can use the interim time between sales to build a customer relationship with helpful hints and other information via newsletters or bulletins.

7. Spot your prospects a free lunch.

You must have heard the expression, ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’? Well that is true. But free products are a great way to build your list. The hidden price of the “free lunch” is a subscription to your mailing list, which many people are willing to do nowadays.

The idea behind the free gift is two-fold. Firstly, it provides a compelling offer, in exchange for a prospect’s information via an opt-in box. This of course provides you with the option to email prospects with offers on multiple occasions.

The second reason is to provide an offline link back to your website(s). That can be complicated to achieve with software giveaways, and not very likely to work well. However free software is great to send to your list, as a way to show your appreciation for being valued subscribers.

One of the best freebies to give away is an eBook. As a customer, I tend to appreciate eBooks over videos. That is because eBooks are usually more concise and have a higher content density as compared with videos or recorded webinar events.

It is more difficult to make professional appearing videos versus professional eBooks. Videos take more time to demonstrate the same content as a PDF, and often they are merely long-winded sales pitches in disguise. That is fine for sales purposes, but the idea here is to provide something of value, and build a list. If you wish to use video giveaways, provide content without a sales pitch. Make your videos interesting, and to the point.

8. Surprise lunch

It is important to make sure where possible, that your free item is closely related to your saleable product.

Firstly, being off topic with your “freebie” means that your potential customer who was enticed by that free item, is not targeted to your saleable product.

Secondly, you can use the benefit or information vacuum created between your freebie and saleable product, so as to increase the apparent value of your saleable product to your list.

For example: Say I am in the natural foods niche and I am selling a vegetable juicer machine. If my freebie is an e-book called ‘Natural Therapy with Juiced Vegetables’, I can use that to a distinct advantage to promote my juicer.

However, if the freebie is a book called ‘10 Vegetables That Benefit Your Health’, the likelihood is far fewer sales. While reading the latter eBook, the prospect may have started thinking about spending their money on other natural health books, or on organic vegetables for example, rather than buying your juicer. So wherever possible, keep the freebie and your product tied closely together, to keep the prospect’s train of thought on one track.

9. Email relationships and sales.

While building your relationships through emails, focus on important and related topics to your niche. Periodically you can briefly explain how your product is beneficial, when doing so relates to the email topic.

In more sales-prompting emails, include what is good about your product and how the product will help your customers with their problems, education etc. However, try not to make your emails sound like a sales pitch. You want to send them to a sales page to take care of that part of the equation. Remind your customers about your products positive impact on other people, with testimonials where available and appropriate.

When writing emails, avoid certain keywords which will increase the likelihood they will be filtered as spam. Words like “free”, “money” and “business” are typical examples of spam filter triggers. It is possible to alter these words to fool the filters, such as using ‘fr.ee’ or ‘fr ee’ but it looks sloppy. So avoid those words where possible.

The best advice I can give is to focus your efforts on a good strategy and an action plan. A good strategy will require far less work and effort in the long term, rather than trying to do everything “on the fly”. Form a strategy; make a list of requirements to fulfill that strategy, and then take action steps every day.

Become an expert at each stage of your overall system. There is no need to rush anything, and this is usually counterproductive in any case. Breaking down your required actions into smaller manageable steps is actually rather easy, and far less overwhelming. Take the time to do everything well.

Following this advice, you have a far greater chance of creating a long and successful internet marketing career. Enjoy the process of building a strong business, and you will reap the rewards for many years to come.