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 making money. 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.

If you bought this book because you wanted to make money you will not be disappointed. It might possibly turn out to be the best money you have ever spent. It does need work however.

This book assumes you already have or can create a useful in demand product. A product can be a physical item, it can be a service, it can be a training course or it can be a book like this for example. It hardly matters what the product is so long as there is a need out there. This book will show you how to check 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 one of the reasons for this book.

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 a maximum of 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 book will 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.

The book will even help you to create a product by suggesting approaches and providing the means for producing information type products. Information type products are perfect for selling using the Internet.

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:

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

2. 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 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 book) you can assume you will not be found in any significant numbers... and evn page 3 is a problem. The only meaningful alternative to search engines for getting traffic to your site is through linking programs. We will cover this also in great detail in the book.

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.

At the risk of upsetting some web designers let me make the following statement.

Very many web designers do not have any idea of how to use the Internet to actually sell successfully. They do not even know how to design a web site properly to create a sales opportunity or generate traffic. Take a look at Google.com or HotBot.com. These sites work, yet are incredibly simple in layout.

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 book 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.

Once the picture and text is available it can take as little as 5 minutes (yes it is true) to do the web site. Unfortunately the designers charge you by the hour and give no credit for the effort you made. They also do not indicate how easy their job is in by far (not all of course) the majority of cases.

To make matters worse who updates your web site? The designer does assuming you can find him, and he is not too busy on his other jobs. The reason: you cannot it yourself and the characteristics of the design are complex and possibly done using own HTML rather than commercially available web packages making it almost impossible for you to update the site anyway.

This leads to more frustration and has been the reason for many abandoning or not even starting their e commerce challenges.

The fact that you are now reading this book does mean I do not have to convince you of the absolutely critical and uncompromising need to get onto the web or die as a business sooner or later.

Web sites have to be updated frequently in many cases, even daily possibly. If you cannot do it yourself the only option to be successful is to have deep pockets and dedicated designers who know what they are doing. I am going to repeat this message:

To be successful on the Internet you must do (or at least be able to do and therefore be able to manage) most things yourself. It really is easier than you think and it takes a small amount of time once you know what you are doing. The learning curve can be a little steep however.

Unfortunately you will probably only realize how very true this is once you have done it and had some success I remember clearly the feeling on seeing my first page 1 number 1 SERP on Google..

This book will encourage you to DO IT (or at least try) YOURSELF.

To encourage you this book will show you how to be successful on the Internet and it will be done by using a real and recent project completed entirely by myself. I started knowing nothing about the practicalities of web design and implementation although I have been a user of the Internet for many years and used certain aspects of the net very successfully.

This is not a book based upon what I think you should learn to succeed.

It is a book based upon what I have done to succeed and a book in which I have learned from others who have succeeded before me these are the paraphrased words of Michael Fortin, another of my web marketing heroes. It is the result of numerous failed attempts, wrong starts and ultimately wonderful success.

My success is measured by the fact that I have many hundreds of page 1 SERPs on Google, Inktomi, AllTheWEb, Ask Jeeves and so on covering most aspects of water gardening, which is one of my areas of specialisation. I also make money my web sites are not costs to me they are profit earners.

It took me some 2 years from first becoming interested in selling on the Internet to completing my first project. It took so long for the very simple reason I did not know where or how to start or what was important and even critical as I discovered later.

All I knew was that I wanted to sell a product I believed in and knew with some certainty there was some need for. I did not even know if there were similar products already available.

This period was taken up learning on a step by step trial and error basis using mainly paid-for information from Internet experts who I found using Internet resources (I never met a single one of these contacts such is the power of the Internet)

I spent considerable sums of money to learn the trade secrets and can honestly say that with very few exceptions the money spent was never regretted. Yes, some was wasted but this was an important and probably necessary part of the learning. I never felt however I had been ripped off.

There is lots of free stuff about web marketing but almost without exception the free stuff hides the really important bits of information not surprising because most Internet experts make their living by selling intellectual property.

Nowhere could I find a complete How To Do It . that would have satisfied me knowing what I now know. The information was there but spread around a lot and mainly in the USA with some excellent resources, but far fewer, in the UK, and Australasia .

The information was also always changing.

It is still changing..

The SEO industry remains in its infancy.

You will be taken on the journey I went on with the great advantage that I will save you a great deal of money and time and frustration. You will learn all the good things that allow success to be achieved. You will be warned of the real pitfalls to avoid (I had to redo much of my initial work because of my own lack of understanding at the time). You will be introduced to the fantastic world of successful web marketing and how to successfully compete in it.

Understand, follow and improve upon my suggestions and you will rank among the top echelons of web marketers.

I have not kept anything back.