Internet Marketing Ideas and Strategies

In my first post, I covered a basic introduction to AIDA, the structure and process that guides the sales cycle. I also recommended that you install Flock and join Twitter, two free and powerful Web 2.0 tools. Hopefully you familiarized yourself with them and had some fun.

Today I want to talk briefly about internet marketing strategy & ideas to make money as well as provide you some free resources to help develop these areas. How do you find ideas to make money and develop strategies to get your internet marketing business off the ground? While for some it may seem difficult to get your thoughts down and define a strategy, the good news is the process is easy to learn and implement.

I like to start with simple brainstorming and idea generation around things that I already like. I enjoy travel all over the world, health and wellness and of course making money. For me, these three ‘topics’ provide the basis of ideas on businesses I want to start and build.

Think about the things you enjoy, what hobbies you like, interests you want to pursue or maybe you have expertise on a specific subject. All of these are fertile ground for brainstorm and getting creative plus when they are subjects that you find interesting, the odds are your passion about them will show in all aspects of your business.

There are a variety of techniques that you can use to help get your ideas narrowed down but my favorite is mind mapping. If you do not know what it is I recommend you click here for a definition – there are some great diagrams on what a mind map looks like.

Basically it is a process of diagramming ideas, words, concepts, tasks and images around a central key idea. Mind mapping is great for generating and visualizing ideas and strategy – ‘roadmap’ – for your internet marketing business (and I will provide you a FREE tool you can use for mind mapping and developing ideas and your strategy at the end of this post).

So, go ahead and get out your paper and pen, then I want you to visit Amazon.com. I know, you are probably scratching your head but trust me on this. Like everything else on the web, Amazon is a great source of what is hot and interesting now, of what people are buying (and ultimately generating sales for companies) – and it turns out it’s a fantastic way to get ideas for a business.

Thanks to Ed Dale and the 30DC team, I learned this neat trick for picking up quick ideas for starting a business and I will summarize his process for you.

Go to the Books and Magazine Subscriptions. You will notice a good variety of categories and within each of these, depending on the popularity of the subject, there are dozens or even hundreds of magazine subscriptions about that subject. Go ahead and select Hobbies.

Now, you should see on the left a LONG list of hobbies listed. The goal here is to simply see what is popular, what is generating interest because the number of magazine subscriptions Amazon.com sells on a subject is a good barometer of strength of the market.

I have a friend that is really into knitting so I clicked on Needlecrafts just to see what is available – go ahead and click Needlecrafts. Notice the number of pages of magazine subscriptions – 3 pages totaling 84 different magazine subscriptions on nothing but Needlecrafts!

That tells me a couple of things. Since magazines have to support their publications through advertisements, there must be a significant number of subscribers generating massive advertising revenue for the publishers. So, this tells me it is probably a strong and healthy market.

The second thing it tells me is it may also be a heavily saturated market with little room and in my next post I will show you how to test keywords and web traffic in order to gauge the playing field but a good first pass test is to Google the site and see how many pages come up in the results.

I’ll also cover a neat FREE Google tool that helps you stay on top of your chosen subject but for now, just have fun getting ideas and be sure to write them down.

For this exercise, the goal is to simply look for ideas and think outside the box. Play with Amazon.com or some other sites like Yahoo or Google – check out different topics and categories. This is just freeform, so do not worry about structure or punctuation or neatness. Grab ideas, ideas, ideas and write, write, write.

Now, for the mind mapping tool. The Wiki article should have given you a general idea of what mind mapping is and now you have some ideas in writing but just in case, here is a great article from Mindtools.com on mind mapping for reference.

So, with your ideas in hand and an understanding of mind mapping, it is time for that FREE software. Visit Freemind and download the Free Mind application. It is a small file and a quick install – run the setup and have fun with it.

Don’t worry about getting it right as there is no right or wrong here. Use it to map out your ideas and jot down as much as you can – you can customize the colors of the nodes and tag them with different icons to show importance or sequence of steps – keep it simple for now.

Once it is down in a diagram, you should be able to see some strategic areas where you can focus on to help start and build your business, a basic roadmap of what paths you should take, what areas to focus your resources and time.

I will have a short, basic video tutorial coming in the future on this and many more great, FREE tools.

Until next time. To Your Success!!

LoadedBeachBum

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