If you’re starting out in internet marketing, it can be quite overwhelming. There are a ton of sites, forums, blogs, books, e-books, videos and strategies out there. Which is right for you? What should you focus on? Where to begin? I think the first step is to understand the large pieces first. What makes up internet marketing. What are the large segments? Once you identify the large areas, you can start to put some of the resources out there into these larger categories.

For the sake of this post, I would like to break it down into these three primary sections. Remember, we are looking at the broadest sense of these areas.

– types of monetization
– types of delivery
– types of traffic generation

– types of monetization
This means how do you want to get money? Product commissions, click earnings, incentives, paid advertisement, etc. This is where you need to start observing sites as you surf. See and understand where people are making money on sites. Understand why they are choosing those types for their particular site (delivery)

– types of delivery
To me this simply means, how do I ‘deliver’ the types of monetization discussed above. Delivery could be sites, but it could be forum signatures, printed flyers, RSS feeds, email, etc. Also, these could be broken down to ‘styles’ of sites.
Blogs, Forums, Storefronts, Review sites, etc are all potential delivery sites. Each one of those ‘types’ of sites perform better. Again, start paying attention to types of sites. Looks at these sites and notice how they try to monetize it. Some sites work good for ebay. Some sites works good for AdSense. Some sites works good for products and or banners.

– types of traffic generation
You’ll see this discussed here a bit. Basically, how do you get people to the site and how do you get them to convert. Basically there are two worlds. Organic search and PPC (Pay Per Click). Organic search means that people find the site based on keywords via Google, and PPC is when you pay for sponsored ads on Google or Yahool. Basically paying for traffic. This site really promotes organic and backlinking via Squidoo, etc. I like it.. it’s good, but nothing converts like PPC, so I like to do both, but focus on PPC.

I think paying attention to these three areas will really help you get over the curve. Now is the time to absorb and observe. Start surfing the web and identify where they fall within the aras. Types of traffic generation will be harder to identify, but maybe start at Google and type a keyword, and click on a sponsored niche. You should run into a affiliate site or two by doing this.

If you have any quesitons, please don’t hesitate to contact me or comment to this post!