If you make money on the internet with your own home based business or if you have been trying to make money online, then it is important to understand your marketing funnel.  It is essential that you understand your methods of finding interested prospects and converting them into paying customers.

What is the process that you take them through?

Do you drive prospects to a sales letter or blog?  Do you give content away for free or sell them?  Do you try to get their email address or build trust?

Everybody does it a little bit differently.  You need to find out what works for you and stick with it long enough to determine it’s effectiveness.

One of the challenges that I see with newbies is that they don’t commit to a specific plan of attack.  They change their mind every two days on the best way to market their product or service.  Their marketing plan or funnel is changed on a whim because they watched another free video from a marketer trying to sell the next latest and greatest system.

News flash…

You might actually be selling stuff if you stop changing your gameplan every time you watch a new video.  Pick something and try it.

Try it long enough to determine it’s effectiveness in your marketplace before changing your entire strategy because you watched some new free video of an internet marketer trying to sell you something.

Internet marketing is simple.  YES… simple!  Stop letting people confuse you… and stop over complicating it!

It is simple, but it may not be easy.  It is simple because making money online boils down to a few things.  If you get good at doing a few things right, then you can become very successful.

It isn’t easy because it takes effort, determination, and a willingness to keep going… even when times are tough.

If you want to make money, then follow these 3 steps:

1.  Determine your goals.

2.  Pick a marketing strategy / business model that makes sense to you.

3.  Implement it.

Do NOT alter your plan just because you learn something new today, unless it specifically fits into your business model.

This doesn’t mean to continue using ineffective strategies.  This means do something long enough to determine if it is effective or not.  Stop changing on a whim!

Making money online is more like an art form than an exact science.  Everyone does it a little bit differently.

Follow what makes the most sense to you and give it try.

I make it no secret that I am a big fan of PPC traffic. I’ve always been able to use it as one of my marketing tools to generate big profits with my online marketing. However, I’ve met many individuals who have never been able to build profitable PPC campaigns for their business.

There are several possible reasons why PPC hasn’t worked for these internet marketers. Let’s assume that these people are smart marketers and understand how to use PPC effectively. This is a big assumption because I’ve seen plenty of individuals ‘think’ they know what they are doing, but really don’t. It’s a shame to see this happen. I don’t like to see anybody wasting money on ineffective marketing strategies. Nothing can be more ineffective than doing it WRONG!

So, let’s assume that they actually know what they are doing. In this case it is possible that the market they are in is too competitive for them to compete. This can be true if most of their competition consists of large corportations or big businesses. For example, if you are competing with corporate giants that sell $20,000 software programs to businesses and you sell a $69 info product, then it may be tough to fight them for good ad placement. They will be willing to pay much higher per click because of the profits they can make.

(FYI- Here is an interesting way that you can actually get your Google ads free.)

Another possibility is that these marketers are targeting keywords that are too general for their audience. This can happen easily and go unrecognized by the marketer. In this case, they may be able to create a profitable campaign by eliminating the keywords that are generating traffic but not converting to sales.

Pay per click can be a rough game for all marketers, especially newbies. Sometimes the only way to get a campaign profitable is by tweaking and fine tuning multiple variables. This costs money. There is no way around it and it can often knock a newbie out of the game before they ever get started.

On a side note:

If you are sick and tired of the PPC game and want a way to get FREE search listing traffic, then checkout the system by Chris Rempel and Dave Kelly. It’s called the Ultimate Search Engine Loophole and they use it to get free traffic in just about any market.

This system shows you how to get a ton of traffic from MSN. I’ve found over the years that traffic from MSN is some of the highest converting traffic that I get. It doesn’t deliver the quanity of traffic that Google does, but the quality seems to be better from my tests.