Lately, a number of people have asked me
- what they need to get started with internet marketing
- what basic tools I recommend
While it’s true that you can make money from writing articles without having a website, if you’re serious about making money online, you do need to establish an internet presence. You can do this easily do this by starting a blog or by building a website or you can do both.
You need 5 basic things to launch a succesful internet business
Domain name
This is simply the address where people can find you and what you have to offer. It’s a way of branding yourself. I recommend buying a domain name at www.GoDaddy.com because they are cheap and have an excellent 24 hour, 365 days a year helpline. And, if posssible, buy a dot com domain name with your main keyword in it.
I recommend Godaddy because it’s easy to use the conrol panel to change DNS settings and lots of other things that you probably don’t need to know yet. Just buy the domain name and ignore all the extras they try to sell you along the way.
Domain Host
This is where your website or blog lives. It’s the service that stores you website content and it’s your gateway to displaying your website on the internet. You need to choose a reliable host because you want to be sure that your website will always be available for people to view.
I use and recommend Hostgator. It’s easy to use and there is 24 hour 365 day support. You can have as many websites as you like on one account and the price is very reasonable.
Hostgator is good if you want to install a Wordpress blog on your own domain. You can do it in 15 minutes using Fantastico, available on cpanel and very easy to use. If that doesn’t make sense right now, don’t worry about it. All you need to know is that Hostgator is a reliable reasonably priced host that makes it easy to do all the things that you’ll want to do later.
If you can’t imagine getting to grips with the technicalities of creating a website or installing your own Wordpress blog on Hostgator, you could buy a domain name and map that domain name to a TypePad blog.
TypePad is a complete hosted solution that is very easy to get up and running. It offers powerful customisation features and you can easily create pages just as you would on a website.
If you need help with starting a blog and making it search engine friendly, I can talk you through how to do that for a reasonable fee.
TypePad Blogs - Get a 14 Day Free Trial!
Autoresponder
If you’re serious about making money online, you need to build a list of potential customers, and to do that effectively, you need an autoresponder. People rarely buy the first time around. You need an automated way to follow up.
You could use a stand alone service like Aweber It is reliable, won’t break the bank and a lot of people are happy with the service. There are video tutorials and you can have a free trial.
Alternatively you could opt for 1Shoppingcart an autoresponder, shopping cart and affiliate manager rolled into one.
If you’d like a more economical all in one option, you could try Wahmcart I’ve been using this service for 3 months now, it is good value for money.
Payment Processor
You need to be able to collect payments. You could apply for your own merchant account, but that might be a step too far if you’re just starting out. If you’re not ready to apply for a merchant account you can easily accept credit card payments through PayPal.
Shopping cart
You can do without a shopping cart initially and use Paypal in conjunction with Aweber instead, but it is easier to have a shopping cart.
A shopping cart provides a secure transaction and allows customers to buy a number of products at the same time. The added benefit is that a shopping cart can make it easier to set up and manage your own affiliate programme. I recommend 1Shoppingcart or Wahmcart depending on your budget.
So there you have it, a website or blog, autoresponder, payment processor and shopping cart are all you need to begin your successful internet business. Once you have them in place you’re ready to develop an information rich content site, generate traffic and turn your visitors into buyers.
Here are the links for the resources I mentioned again
Is there anything I didn’t mention that you’d like to know more about? Just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.
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