Internet marketing methods may vary considerably depending on what it is you are trying to sell, and what your target market is, but they all follow the same fundamental guidelines. The twin Holy Grail of traffic and conversions is what will decide whether your bottom line is positive or negative. The first step you need to take is to sit down and work out exactly what your goals are. If you have an established business, you will find that that is easy to do. You already have products for sale, and you already know who your target markets are.
If you are starting a business from scratch, you will have a lot more work to do before you can decide how best to attract prospects and convert them into buyers. You will need to do market research to determine whether there are enough buyers to warrant the creation of a product, and then do deeper research into exactly which products the market is looking for. It is always possible to test a market without creating a product, by promoting one of the many affiliate offers which abound on the Internet.
One proven Internet marketing system is to pick markets based on products which are already selling well in an established marketplace. Promote these offers as an affiliate until you have established your position in the market. Then, when you have done this and everything is working as you expected it to, you can re-invest your profits in producing your own product to sell to the same market. This is as close as you can come to a guaranteed profit, and can save you months of work on creating unwanted products.
Once you have your products, either your own created products or an affiliate program you are promoting, you can begin to look into driving traffic and achieving conversions. The fastest way of driving traffic is simply to pay for it. You can advertise on the front page of the search engine results for your chosen keyword. Unlike a newspaper ad, you will not be charged if no-one responds to it. You will only pay when someone clicks your ad. This makes it very easy to monitor conversion rates. If your ads are not working, you can easily change them.
The most common alternative Internet marketing system is to write articles and submit them to article directories. You will get a vastly increased amount of traffic is you can get these articles to rank on the first page of the search engine results. This means you will need to submit to the top directories where quality is paramount, and then build up backlinks to your articles. If you can do this, you should see a constant stream of traffic from your articles over time. Combining article marketing with paid advertising allows you to get the best results from both Internet marketing methods.