To me the Internet is useful for learning from others on any subject you like.

It is about tracking what is happening in the real world at any instant in time. It is also about preparing to share your own knowledge with others and it is about an opportunity to make money through your very own efforts without any involvement from others. The only snag to making lots of money is you need a product which many people would want to buy and of course one that you can deliver when the customer wants it and how the customer wants it. The Internet is absolutely fantastic when it comes to delivery depending on your product delivery can take place in seconds to any point on the globe. Whats more delivery charges can be almost FREE.

A product can be a physical item, it can be a service, it can be a training course or it can be a virtual or e-website for example. It hardly matters what the product is so long as there is a need out there. On the internet you can easily discover if there is a need, and how big that need is. Once you have established a need and you have the finished product all that remains is for you to get the traffic through your virtual store. This is the objective of search engine optimization.

On the Internet the volume of traffic passing through your store is critical. The numbers have to be high because percentage success rates are low even for the very best sites. To give you a feel for this it is reckoned that for a successful search query to a number 1, page 1 search result ranking only 10% of the visitors will click through to that page. Lets assume you then get 1,000 click-throughs to your web site in a month. Once the click through to the page has been achieved about 5% will click to a sales page or landing page as it is called and only about 2 to 5% will actually buy if you have written a good landing page. That means if you are good you will sell between 1 and 2.5 products. This puts things into perspective and hopefully explains why so many companies have been unsuccessful on the web.

It was not the web that was at fault it was the inability to get traffic to the web site and then the inability of the web site to persuade the customer to buy. This website is meant to help you overcome in a serious way these two different but equally important objectives. Your web site MUST:

• Attract large numbers of visitors

• Your web site must be constructed in such a way it entices the visitors who click through to your site to buy or do what your web site wants them to do.

Seth Godin who wrote Permission Marketing states categorically that the only reason for a commercial web site is to 100% focus on attracting total strangers so that you can market to them. Think about this it makes great sense to me.

I would hazard a guess that 99% of people who have tried to sell products using the Internet have been greatly disappointed. This disappointment could have been so great that they even became disillusioned with the Internet. There are only two reasons for failing to sell on the Internet:

• The international community has NO NEED for the product for whatever reason: design, usefulness, price and so on.

• The seller DID NOT KNOW how to reach the market for the product or to put it another way the customers could not find the product.

This latter point is probably the reason for most failures. If you are not on the first 3 pages of a search engines results (called SERPs remember this term we will use it a lot in the website) you can assume you will not be found in any significant numbers... and even page 3 is a problem. The only meaningful alternative to search engines for getting traffic to your site is through linking programs and email campaigns that are losing favour in view of the high and persistent level of spam.

Remember always though that it is not possible to succeed without effort and dedication that old maxim, the harder you try, the luckier you get applies here.

When people talk of the Internet and particularly the web site aspects of the Internet (as distinct from email applications) the first thing that comes to the normal persons mind is the appearance of the web site. More and more web sites are flashy rather than useful. Often the only real reason for flashy web sites is to make the web designers ego bigger. By creating flash, bells, whistles, streaming video, sound and cartoons the designer is allowed to boast and build hype around a CV. The flash component adds to the design cost and the designer is able to charge the unaware customer more.

Not only is EFFECTIVE web layout design made easy with programs like Front Page, it is not expensive and is best done by yourself in most cases. This website will show you how to learn to do this and more importantly encourage you to jump in and make the leap of faith and become your very own web designer.

Still not convinced? Ask yourself this question.

When someone else designs your web site who does most of the work anyway? YOU DO probably

• you give instructions (the brief)

• you provide the content in terms of text and images

• you pay for the photography if needed

• you check the various drafts and correct them and so it goes on.

seo internet marketing article continued