This article aims to help you understand some of the important things that go into making an Internet marketing business successful. You might be someone who is a total beginner, someone who has just waded in, or someone who unfortunately, has grown skeptical because of a bad experience. Whatever your reasons for wanting to succeed financially with as an internet marketer, getting a handle on some basic but essential facts upfront could mean the difference between losing your faith in the online world and staying the course. Creating a stream of passive income is definitely achievable. It’s just how you do it and there’s really no mystery to the entire process. Here are the facts.

1. Hard work

Yes, I’m afraid that’s what you’re going to need. Loads of it, in fact. There is no get-rich-quick with a single push of a button. Never has been and never will be.

That said, a successful and profitable online business is actually not difficult to create. It just takes a lot of hard work. Well, at least in the beginning stage until the entire business can run on auto-pilot. Even then, you still might want to pop in every now and then just to make sure things are going the way they should.

2. It’s the same as any other business

Next, an online business is no different from any other business except that it exists in the virtual world of the Internet and not a brick–and-mortar. As an Internet marketer, you either choose to sell something you created or you promote something that someone else has created e.g. cameras, coffee machines, software, etc. You can set up store on a full-blown website, blog or just a one-page gig that is also known as a landing page.

Therefore, yes, in a successful online business, sales do get made while you sleep and you wake up with the ‘karchink’ of the cash register. But way before that, you need to, and you guessed right, put in the hard work.

In the beginning it’s going to demand your time and attention while you build your business up from scratch. Loads of it. For sure you can do this part-time, after work, in the evenings, putting in a couple of hours everyday or every other day. Not at least until you are earning more from your online business than your day job. With that said, the next important thing you need to know is who you are targeting as your preferred customer.

3. Know who you want to sell to

You are not going to sell to all and sundry. Neither will you want to try to tough it out in a highly competitive niche. Sure you can if that’s your choice and you know how but it’s not strongly advised if you are just starting out.

So, before you can sell, you need to know whom you are selling to. Only then will you know what you want to sell, where to sell it and how to pitch it. Who are your customers? More specifically, what problems do they have? And what sort of useful solutions are you going to offer them?

No matter if it’s online or offline, to succeed in a business requires you to always remember one singular thing: You are providing a solution to a problem. You are selling a benefit that will enrich and simplify your customer’s life and not a feature that isn’t going to make a change in his happiness quotient.

4. Don’t innovate when you can substitute

There is no need for you to create a new product. For sure there will come a day when you will want your own product but for starters, you do not innovate but create a solution using something that is already out there in the market. So, what I am saying here is don't reinvent the wheel. Leverage on what's there.

Therefore your Internet marketing business is really about connecting your preferred customer to a product that they perceive to be useful to solving their problem, all these taking place through your website that functions as your online store. Once you have identified what your customers' problems are, you will then look for the right product that provides a solution.

There are many places on the Internet where you can find products to promote - Click Bank, Amazon, Commission Junction and eBay, just to name a few.

5. Getting customers to your online business

Once you know whom you are selling to, the next thing is to figure out how best to get them to your online store. There are a few strategies to get your preferred customers or better known as your targeted traffic. I will briefly explain just two major ones.

1. Paid advertising:

• E.g. pay-per-click where you only pay if someone makes a click on your advertisement that they will find on the first page of Google Search. The beauty of this sort of advertising campaign is that it involves no upfront payment unlike placing a classified in the newspapers.

If you were using paid advertising, it would mean you are really clear and specific in your sales pitch. As far as you can, you don’t want to attract people who are looking for something else to click on your advert, only to leave once they discover you don’t have what they had hoped to find. So when it comes to targeted traffic you don’t want to waste their time nor your own.

1. Search Engine Optimization (or SEO):

• This basically means that the write-up or content you have on your site is of high relevance and contain keywords that match what your targeted customer is looking for.
• Good SEO begins with good keyword research.
• Keyword research is not difficult to learn and it begins with finding what search terms your targeted customer might use

So, by now, logic will tell you that your chances of getting targeted traffic are higher when your content and keywords are highly relevant. And targeted traffic is desirable because it represents a customer who is a better match for your product thereby increasing your chances of a sale or conversion.

6. In a nutshell

In a nutshell, your successful Internet marketing business would look like this and you know your hard work and perseverance have paid off when:

• You have a website or landing page where your targeted customer can connect with your product
• Your customer perceives your product as the best solution to his problem
• You make a consistent profit
• You have targeted traffic when your customers are the preferred kind
• You have higher chances of conversion when your traffic is of the targeted sort
• You have different strategies in place to generate leads
• More leads mean more traffic to your online site
• Your online site has relevant content that provides value to your customers
• You have done good keyword research ensuring that you match your content to your preferred reader or customer’s needs

And that’s it. Remember....succeeding in an online business that you can call your own is no mystery. It is a process and a system that could be easily understood if you apply effort into the learning. I know because I speak from hard-earned experience.

The best part of it all is that once you’ve tasted success, once you’ve found how the system works, you can rinse and repeat the process thus creating multiple streams of income while you go out there to live life to the fullest. Now, wouldn’t you like that?