What’s The Best Way To Learn Online Marketing?

What’s The Best Way To Learn Online Marketing?

I saw a forum thread the other day which asked, “What’s the best way to learn online marketing?”

Naturally, the forum thread was filled with stupid answers:

• “Get Google Certified!”
• “Buy this book!”
• “Buy that course!”
• “Read all of [random blog guy] posts”
• “Dive right in to FB ads”

These are all pretty bad answers.

I don’t have much time, so this’ll be my quick take on how to go from knowing nothing about online marketing to learning all about websites, SEO, SMM, paid advertising and selling online in a quick bullet-point format.

1.     Offer Something Or Sell Something RIGHT NOW

A lot of people fail at internet marketing – and I’m going to be blunt – because they aren’t good at anything.

You’ll all have heard “90% of businesses fail.”

90% of businesses fail because they’re based on stupid ideas and run by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

Don’t be one of these people.

If you have nothing to sell and/or no service to offer, then you aren’t going to make any money.

“But… but… I’ve got blackhat SEO tricks and I’m going to affiliate market other people’s stuff!”

Too many people think that affiliate marketing is some cheap, free and easy way to make money by providing no real value. That’s not the case. In pretty much any niche, you’re competing against people with a budget, skills and who offer value to their subscribers. You have to do the same to compete.

Here’s what you need to do as a first step.

Find something you’re good at. It doesn’t matter what it is and probably the more niche and less online-marketing based the skill is, the better.

You’ll either provide a service around that skill, or buy products to sell to people in the niche. Hopefully locally, but not necessarily.

I strongly recommend starting a service as opposed to buying products when you start.

This is an important step so take your time with it. What can you provide that has a niche of customers willing to pay? Can you do that to a high quality? Can you do it to a professional standard?

If the answer is “no” to any of those, keep searching for a different idea.

Step 2: Create an Elegant Solution

This doesn’t need much explaining. You need to know the ins and outs of your service. Let’s take gardening/landscaping for instance:

1. What equipment do you need?
2. Running costs?
3. Profit margins?
4. Time taken to complete job?
5. How to get customers?
6. What do you do when a customer isn’t happy?
7. How do you reward customer loyalty?

All these things will come to you as you perform the service, but it’s the worst feeling in business to be completely flummoxed with an unhappy customer, so try and anticipate problems before they begin.

Step Three: Onto Internet Marketing

You have a service to offer. That’s great and puts you ahead of most of the guys who think they’re going to make millions off a $50 turnkey website.

Now you want to learn about internet marketing, and you know what your offer is going to be. You know it’s a good offer because you control it, and you know how much you can spend to break even.

But you’re going to spend very little to start with.

Start with:

• Building a simple website (but make it good)

Get high quality images. Write everything so that it sounds good and entices people to buy with you. Get a basic copywriting book so you know how to talk about a person’s needs and craft a decent call to action.

• Learn On-site SEO

You don’t have to have a million backlinks or buy dodgy SEO services to rank well for local terms. Mostly, on-site SEO is enough. It takes a lot of time to work, but when it does it provides a constant stream of leads to your business.

Learn how to optimise your pages. Learn how to do keyword research and then build more pages so that you can rank for new keywords.

There are no tricks. Follow the rules and learn what works and what doesn’t.

At this point, you can optimise your site in a wider sense. Test what works and what doesn’t. You’ll have built the skills to do this organically if you’ve followed the next step.

Syndicate

Once you’ve done that – and only once you’ve done that – should you consider moving to other platforms. There’s no point in having a terrible website, a useless Twitter program and an empty Facebook business page.

So get your ducks in a row, and then move onto different platforms. Carry on testing in the same way, and remember that it’s better to have a few high-quality pieces of content than millions of rubbish ones.

Move and concentrate on one platform at a time.

At this point, it’s important to remember: Everything is tested in terms of “does this make your service more money?”

There’s no point in having a million Twitter followers if none of them buy your stuff. All you’re doing is preaching to a crowd of people who don’t care. Sure, you might look more impressive to an observer, but  that doesn’t put food on your table.

Four: Paid Traffic

The above steps will give you a good grasp of split-testing, writing for an audience and general content marketing. You’ll also have a working business and general understanding of how you go from having uninterested eyeballs to interested customers and ultimately loyal customers.

It’s at this point that you can think about buying Facebook ads, putting money into Adwords or otherwise paying for advertising.

Some people suggest skipping the above and throwing up a landing page and paying for traffic from the beginning. I disagree, because if you do that and you lose all of your money, how are you going to know where you went wrong?

Getting an understanding of how to craft a decent sales funnel and learn basic free lead generation through social media and SEO is free and straightforward. Spending money is a risk if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Once you have a basic understanding then throwing money at advertising is less of a risk and you can mitigate the cost down to zero.

Also, by focusing on your own service, you’ll have control over the offer, which is what affiliate marketing guys don’t have when they start by throwing money at a random offer.

Final Thoughts

This isn’t a step-by-step guide. If you want to become goo at internet marketing, you’re going to have to learn a lot of things through trial and error, so a “do this, do that” guide would be starting off on the wrong foot.

Instead, the above is a pretty comprehensive path for taking a little at a time and mastering it before moving onto the next thing. This is all done in easy steps. Learn one skill at a time, one platform at a time.

Most importantly, base all of your learning around a valuable skill or offer that you make, have and control. It makes the learning curve much shorter.