1. Product



2. Copywriting

3. Traffic

It really is that simple. If you have those three things… competently performed, you will have a succesful, profitable Internet business. Let's talk about competency in each of those three areas and how you can quickly master each one.

Product

You need a product that people want. Don't fall in love with a product just because you think it's cool. I'll go into details in a future article, but I look at two things to determine if a product is wanted enough for me to sell it:

1. Are there people searching for that product (I use the Overture tool)

2. Are fellow marketers willing to pay a significant amount of money for traffic for that search term because people are buying (I also use the Overture tool).

I multiply those two numbers. If the result is higher than the result for the product “air guns”, I'm willing to get into that market. Why “air guns”? It was simply my first profitable product. Can products that score lower than “air guns” be profitable? I'm sure they can, but there are enough markets that score higher than “air guns”, I'm not willing to chance it.

BTW, don't get too hung up on the product. It is the least important of the three items. Copywriting and traffic are infinitely more important to your business. Don't spend two years developing a product. There are already thousands of products available on the Internet that you can market and earn a percentage as an affiliate. Choosing your product should take no longer than a half an hour, not two years. You can run the numbers for 6-10 product ideas in less than half an hour and make your decision. Then start concentrating on what really matters… which is…

Copywriting

Now you need to describe your product. You will do this in many ways. You will create a sales page on a web-site that will describe the product and try to sell it. You will write small text ads to run on PPC search engines. You will write similar one and two line descriptions to enter into affiliate networks. You will write articles and resource boxes for those articles. You may even write a signature line for use on forums.

The point is that copywriting is what conveys the message about your product. It is simply some words. You can sometimes uses pictures and videos, but it is generally the words that actually do the selling. Don't forget that you are in the business of words.

How do you decide what words to use? You have three choices if you are a beginner:

1. Hire a high priced copywriter. Generally you will want to pay $5,000-$10,000 per sales page for a decent copywriter. Drop me a note if you want referrals. I know two of the best.

2. Use copywriting software that scores words. I recommend Glyphius which you can read more about at Glyphius.com. It scores your prospective ad copy against a massive database of profitable ads. You can simply make up some copy and click the score button. Then change it and click the score button again. Pick the highest scoring text after you have worked with it for awhile. You'll have copy that the pros will envy and more importantly… copy that will convert that traffic into customers.

3. Fail for a long time while you are learning. Don't laugh. Most Internet marketers choose this path. If you are persisent enough, you will learn what works and what doesn't.

Traffic

Once you have copy that sells, you need to get people to see it. We call that “traffic” on the Internet.

There are dozens of ways to get traffic on the Internet. Let me focus on two ways that I recommend to beginners because both are free (well; there is a small one-time cost to get started, but you don't pay for each visitor like some other sources).

1. Search Engine Optimization - get free traffic from the search engines by being ranked high for the search terms associated with your product.

2. Article Submission - get recognition and links to your site by writing and submitting articles.

Let's talk about Search Engine Optimization first. First of all, DO NOT waste weeks and months of your life listening to the lemmings on the SEO forums. In my experience, they are just the blind leading the blind. There are three factors to search engine optimization you should focus on:

a) Your domain and URLs

b) On page optimization

c) Links to your site

For the first, I recommend you choose your domain and URL structure using Nemeas. You can read about it at Nemeas.com. It is very simple to use and is also based on a massive statistical analysis of the leading search engine. You simply score prospective domains and URLs and select the highest scoring one.

I don't recommend any on page optimization unless you are creating free content sites to feed traffic to your sales page. Instead, optimize your sales page for selling with Glyphius and don't worry about the on page search engine factors.

For getting inbound links to your site, I recommend article submission. I recommend that you use Artemis Pro. You can read more about it at ArtemisPro.com. It gives you a boost above any other currently available article submission tool because it submits a unique article to each publisher. That boost can amount to an 1875% increase in effectiveness given the same amount of time invested.

At the end of each article, you should have a resource box with a link back to the site with your sales page. That resource box should be optimized with Glyphius.

That's it. Running a successful, profitable Internet business is really just that simple. It's just choosing the right product, choosing the right words for your copywriting and choosing the best way to get traffic to your sales page.

Please visit my blog often at www.JamesBrausch.com for further lessons on the simplicity of Internet marketing. I'll post regular lessons there. Every entry on my blog is categorized into three topic areas: Product, Copywriting and Traffic. Just choose one of the topics to find out more information about that area of running a successful Internet business.

Here's to your success!