The internet is a tool that allows people to find what they’re looking for. Many people are looking for goods and services they wish to purchase.

The internet marketing game is really 90% internet (aka research) and 10% marketing (aka marketing.)

It’s all in the keywords, and as I am so fond of saying: This is huge. If you can find an audience that’s looking for a product, and simply insert yourself as a liason between them and something they intended to purchase anyway… you’re golden.I do not consider this dishonest or evil in any way, especially if as liason you provide valuable information like honest reviews, comparisons and other feedback. A huge plus (and major selling point) is if you purchase the product yourself and provide some kind of supporting video documentation.

All this aside, the fact still remains that the absolute clinch of this whole deal is the keywords themselves, the knowing of how many people are seeking a particular product, and how they are going about this search. Ie, what are they typing in search engines to find what they’re looking for, and the equally important question, how many other people know about it?

Why I Know Keywords are King

I can say with confidence that almost every affiliate marketing scheme, system, blueprint or formula that promises to deliver the “roadmap to success” hinges on this underlying concept.

People will sell you $40 ebooks telling you “how they did it” all day long, the specific process and methodology that (purportedly) makes them thousands per day. This is all well and good, but it’s only technique. How many ways are there to skin a cat, after all?

The bottom line of all these programs is this: “I found a niche, and I marketed it in this way and it has been wildly successful.” They might even tell you one or two of the specific niches that A) are no longer viable or B) are insiginificant when compared to the overall revenue their total online real estate generates.

What to Market

If you have no niche of your own, however, if you have no keywords, then it doesn’t matter what they’re doing; it won’t be of any good to you. What good is it to know how to market something successfully, if you don’t know what to market? Affiliate marketing is based on the possession of three related and interlocking pieces of knowledge:

1. Knowing WHAT to promote.
2. Knowing WHERE to promte, and
3. Knowing HOW to promote.

Without one, the others are useless. In my opinion, it’s the “what” that is crucial to success. The other two things, the “where” and the “how”, achieve the greatest result when built upon the basis of “what” and customized to suit the campaign as a whole. One leads to two and two leads to three. Starting off with three and then looking for one is, in my opinion, starting off one the wrong foot.

So: “techniques” and “systems” and cookie cutter blueprints are a great resource for marketing theory, but don’t expect to buy something like “Google Cash” and receive the magic key to Internet-generated wealth in one neat, prepackaged, hundred-something page bundle of goodness.

Instead, look for software, services and tutelage that provide aid and insight into the REAL golden goose, and that is the keywords.

You want to know know everything about them. Where to find them, how to find them, what they mean, whether or not they’re profitable, and THEN, only then, how you can utilize them in a profitable way. Notice I didn’t say, “How you can use them in the most profitable way possible, because if you shoot for perfection in your first attempt then you are destined for failure.

This kind of knowledge comes only from experience (and even then, probably not at all. “Perfection” is, in the words of Henry Thoreau, “an elusive butterfly”.) Experience comes only from practical application, and you will get neither of these things without dedication, persistance, and the understanding that failure is the first step before success.

You have to be willing to put in the time, the research, the effort, and be understanding of the fact that what you are embarking on is, in it’s most base form, simply a learning experience. You are (rather wisely) seeking the knowledge of how to make money, and how to make it with the Internet.

As it has been aptly stated before, “Knowledge is power.” Get as much of it as you can.

Tagged as: Afilliate Marketing, cheap, How to Get Money, Internet network marketing, Keywords, Monetizing, profitable

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5. Introduction to Internet Marketing Affiliate Programs