An Internet Marketing Primer: Part II

In the first part of “An Internet Marketing Primer” we looked at the one of the traditional ways of putting products into the hands of hungry consumers; the retail store. The cost of doing business is high—rent, utilities, insurance, advertising and help add up to a big fat “nut” that needs to be cracked each month before Mr. Entrepreneur can begin paying his own rent, utilities, insurance, etc.

The personal cost is high, too. The retail store will be open 60+ hours per week and the owner will likely be there the vast majority of time the store is open. And when he’s physically free, his mind will remain incarcerated as he worries about his store. Now, let’s look at how I make money on the Internet selling a similar product.

Here’s my storefront, and in it you will find the guitar instruction books that I sell: http://electric-guitarlessons.com.

“Rent” for my store currently runs about $28/month. That’s its share of what I pay for hosting the site and my Internet access fee; that cost will drop as those two fixed expenses are spread over more sites as I build them.

I wrote all the articles and reviews on the site, and it took me about 20 hours to do that. While I acknowledge that my time is valuable, I spent $0 cash constructing my storefront.

I market my site using my knowledge of the best free Internet marketing techniques; keyword research, search engine optimization, link building, article marketing, directory listing, etc. Notice I said “free”; my monthly marketing expense runs $0. (Yes, you can spend money, and lots of it, marketing your site and one day I will explore that option. But for now I use the best free Internet marketing techniques.)

My hours are what I want them to be. I can build a site, choose a niche to market to and appropriate products, write product reviews/reports and articles (content) whenever and wherever I feel like doing it. My goal is to launch (build and market) one site per week; I’ve never actually counted hours because I love what I do and who punches an “I’m having fun playing golf with my buddies” time clock?

Once my storefront is running efficiently I can pretty much leave it alone and it will continue to earn money for me for months, or even years, to come. If I want to spend two weeks, or two months, in Aruba the groundwork I laid will continue to draw a hungry customer with credit card in hand to my site. If I am sitting on the beach or lying asleep in my bed and an aspiring guitar god in Istanbul decides to purchase “Jamorama”** from my site, I get paid.

So how much is one of these sites worth? Of course that’s impossible to say; build 10 sites and eight of them may be duds. But let’s use Jamorama for an example. The course costs $49.95 and pays a 75% commission; that’s about $37 to me. Let’s say that I sell a product 4 times a week; over a 30-day month that averages out to about $20 per day. I’m now making $600/month, or $7200/year; hardly a living but remember, I have 10 sites! So if I average $20/day on 10 sites I’m now making $72,000/year.

Remember, it takes me a week to build and market a site. So that means that every site I build earns me a $7200/ year raise. If I build one site a month for the next 12 months I will have given myself an $86,000 raise which when added to the $72,000 I’m currently earning from my sites will give me a total income of nearly $160,000—now we’re getting somewhere!

No, I am not doing this kind of business—yet. But now that I know how to do it I assure you I will. It has been a long and arduous task coming up with the tools, techniques and business model that has put me in a position to begin living the lifestyle of an Internet entrepreneur. The path to enlightenment is fraught with wrong turns, dead ends and charlatans. In coming articles I hope to share with you what I’ve learned in hopes of providing you with the freedom and independence that we all so desire in our lives—stay tuned, or better yet, subscribe.

**The link to that site contains a code that tells my affiliate that it was me who sent you to his site. That way, if you buy his product he knows to pay me. Go ahead, click on it; I don’t mind!