Let’s go the good news bad news approach again.

The Good News – Google has ranked my site!

As you might have realized by now, I am documenting my internet marketing  journey in this blog. It’s not even a remotely original idea but at least it will be a record for me and entertaining for my few readers! (I hope)

So I after a few false starts I have decided that the way to learn the basic skills of internet marketing is to start off promoting other people’s products – affiliate marketing.

I have had my affiliate site up for a few weeks now and I have done some things to get links to my site and to drive traffic to my site. I’ve written a few articles and made a few videos, done some social bookmarking and it has definitely paid off.

As of today my site is ranked no.1 in Google for my keyword!

Hold no, it’s not quite time to celebrate yet, I am still not an internet millionaire.

The reason why…

The Bad News – The Classic Internet Marketing Mistake

The answer to this question lies in my research.

I have just spent an intensive weekend learning a technique for getting targeted websites up rapidly (I managed 5 new websites this weekend in different niches) What I also learnt was that the most important thing to do when you want to sell products online is…

find a market first and then find the product!

This is absolutely critical and so many people make this mistake, they find the product or worse still spend days, weeks, months creating their product only to find that no-one wants it.

I have based my affiliate website on flawed research. The keyword that I chose to base my website on doesn’t  have a lot of daily traffic. So naturally even if my site is ranked no.1 in Google the hoards of traffic will not come if no-one is looking for that keyword.

All is not lost, I just have to broaden my search terms with my articles and videos etc to drive traffic to the site and I can easily make another website based on better keyword research. At least I know that what I’m learning and implenting about SEO works now I need to combine good research with SEO and traffic getting strategies. Once I have people looking at my site then I can look at conversion rates! There’s a lot more to learn but the key is perseverance.

Keyword research is big area to cover and there are many different tools one can use to make things easier. Look for more on keyword research in the next couple of weeks. Doing your research properly first will same you time and frustration.

Stay tuned for more updates – I feel that I am very close to getting out of stage 1 and hitting stage 2 of the plan.

Related posts:

1. Internet Marketing Newbie Diary – Update No. 2
2. Internet Marketing Newbie Advice – Avoid this Mistake!
3. Internet Marketing Advice – Focus or Multi-tasking?