So you’ve decided to maybe give this internet marketing thing a try, but you aren’t certain where to start. I’ll try to enlighten you a little bit on the subject. If you were to start a new project, these are the basic steps you should take in order to get started. You might want to print them out, copy and paste them or else bookmark it for referring back to later.
Follow this outline to begin building your first profitable niche website from scratch.
- Pick a niche to work in
- Identify some keyword phrases within that niche that you want to build pages to rank for.
- Determine whether or not you can actually make any money with those keywords. Go back to step 2 or step 1 if there isn’t any money to be made with those keywords.
- Analyze the competition for those keywords. Determine if you have the capability to beat the competition without requiring unreasonable amounts of work. Go back to step 2 if you can’t beat the competition for that keyword.
- Determine how you would monetize the site. Go back to a previous step if necessary.
- Determine what domain name you would use for the project and whether you will buy a domain or register a new one.
- Decide what content management system you are going to use and where the site will be hosted.
- Develop a step by step plan of attack for completing the project. You should have a crystal clear outline for what step needs to be taken next.
- Execute the plan step by step adjusting along the way as things progress.
More about those 9 steps
Those first six steps are more of a process. You can actually mix up the order for those steps according to whatever system works for you. Some people prefer to find a niche accidentally when they come across a highly commercial keyword that they see nobody is really targeting. There are countless long tail keyword phrases for everything imaginable that nobody is actively targeting. There are pages ranking for these terms, but they are sometimes incredibly easy to outrank if you apply superior SEO techniques.
Sometimes people look for a domain first. Once they find a solid domain they will do the other research to determine if the project is viable.
As you can see, these steps can be done by anyone. The difference between a beginner and an experienced internet marketer comes down to making the decisions along the way. An experienced internet marketer will know what niches there is money in. They will also have the tools needed to conduct research about what keywords are likely to make money. They will be able to assess the competition much more accurately than a beginner. They will also know the best ways to monetize the traffic that the site generates.
If you make a serious mistake in any one of those steps, your entire project could end up a failure. This is why most beginner internet marketers who try to learn all of this without help from a mentor will typically fail time and time again until they get lucky and hit paydirt with one project.
There are a lot of little details that go into determining how strong the competition is. It takes years of experience to learn how to outrank competitors. Until you really have that experience, you will be guessing and second guessing yourself all the time. Then you have to wait months to find out whether or not you guessed correctly. This is a very frustrating part of this business when you are a beginner.
You will see people telling you what you need to do to outrank your competition, but until you see it work for yourself once, you won’t believe them. There is simply too much conflicting information online and you won’t know which information is up to date or who is telling the truth.
We will get into more detail for each of these steps in other posts. If you are a beginner, follow this outline to the best of your ability. You will make some mistakes along the way. Just try to learn from them so you can increase your batting average with each new project. Nobody is perfect and even experienced internet marketers miss with a lot of projects they thought would be winners.
