I am the biggest noob ever! Help

[crunny]

Hello guys,

I am a 22 year old finance grad that is seriously looking to step into the world of internet marketing. Unfortunately I don't know where to begin. I have done a lot of reading on internet marketing over the past couple of weeks but I still feel embarrassingly stupid. I can't even understand half the content in this forum, which is for noobs. Yikes!
I only became aware of Internet marketing about a month ago and I think that is were the problem lies. With no background in IT/net stuff I have 0 skills. I don't even know the first thing about building my own website. BUT I am a very stubborn and determined individual, when I put my mind to something I will usually succeed. Also, I am reasonably intelligent, so although I have a very steep learning curve in front of me I am confident that I can learn the ins and outs of Internet marketing...eventually.

So the reason I am posting is for some guidance:

Can you offer some advice about where to begin?

What is the easiest form of Internet marketing to learn?

Can you provide links to articles, websites, guides and other resources on Internet marketing for total beginners?

If there are any other questions that I should be asking, answer those too

Thank You.
Crunny

 

[Rob_TID]

Concentrate on ONE thing.

If you are a complete noob, then I would suggest adsense arbitrage is the easiest way to start an income.

Go read the stick on arbitrage, read it again, and when you get sick of it, read it some more.

Then read it again.

To REALLY understand it will probably take you at least a few days.

 

[Tenshaku]

Hey, you remind me of myself about a week ago, Im probably a few days ahead of you so I will help you out with the initial stages by giving you some helpful links that were useful to me... Im still extremely confused by all of this affiliate stuff but I am not giving up, same as you, good luck to you.

Here are some links in no particular order...

Affiliate Programs - Affiliate Marketing Guide //A website and forum kind of like this one, they seem to have some advanced info on there so I am keeping it til I learn some more basic stuff...

Affiliate marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia //Here is a more simple place, the most helpful one yet that I have found, as wikipedia usually is, Im still reading lots of it because each time you click a link it just leads to more and more links, so once you learn from one page theres always another path to follow...

Jonathan Mendez's Blog: Landing Page Optimization //This is cool too, I think one of the first steps is to make a website and this will help (somewhat) to optimize it within the search engine, and make it appealing to visitors and all that stuff, pretty useful, but I havent made a website yet since I want to learn more stuff before starting as confused as I am...

SEOmoz | Landing Pages for SEO //Landing pages for Search Engine Optimization, similar to the link above, I havent really read much of that but I think they are selling something, my advice, dont buy it, haha... But there might be something on there to help, I just havent got to it yet...

LinkShare | Affiliate Marketing, Search Marketing, ROI Tracking. Global E-commerce Solutions. //This is the Affiliate Manager I am starting out with, once you get done with adsense and get even a little bit of cash from it, I would suggest going to what I consider to be 'level 2' of this little money game, and that is promoting other products on your website and taking a little money from it, I am using the PPA system, (Pay per Action), which means they only pay you when somebody actually buys the product your advertising, someone told me thats the best way to go because they pay the most for actual sales and you can increase sales using techniques you can learn in other places or on your own... Oh yea, I think 'level 3' would be using the profits you make from your adsense and affiliations to spend on an adwords account which would promote your landing page, theoretically increasing profits tremendously...

So to me...
Level 1: Using Adsense
Level 2: Using affiliations to sell things.
Level 3: Using your profits from Levels 1 and 2 to buy some Adwords ads which hopefully, if done correctly (its harder than you might know right now, from the things I have read, to optimize your ad's keywords, text, and all that stuff) should increase profits to a tremendous level well beyond working any 'normal job'.

Affiliate Forum :: Where You Belong //Another forum, a lot like this, but I think they might be teaching some more advanced stuff... I havent really checked it out so I dont really know, but they are in my favorites so I thought I would give them to you too...

Ok, good luck, It gets easier as you go along to learn the new things, slightly more and more... Oh, also, I have only made 4.04$ on adsense, haha, and none with my affiliate links, so its pretty rough, I really hope I will have a huge breakthrough very, very soon... Cya.

 

[MisterX]

Ignore the post above.

While he has good intentions, he doesn't know the answers himself and his post shows that and is misleading.

I'll give you a quick summary of what you should do. There are tons of different approaches to internet marketing, so this is not the one and only correct answer, but it should be good for a complete beginner.

First of all, learn to use google and search options on forums, since most of the things you can ask are already answered on many places. At first you might not know whose response to trust, but it'll get clearer pretty soon, after you get into it and get a chance to compare different answers.

Desired goals:

1. your own wordpress blog
2. basic html and possibly php knowledge
3. basic seo, adsense and affiliate marketing knowledge

Now for the concrete steps - go to WordPress.com » Get a Free Blog Here and start your own free blog. Choose something you know about as a subject, whether it's gardening, sports or finance. That alone will force you to learn about setting a blog and you'll have a place to experiment as well.

Next, choose a subject and write a little something about it on your blog. Repeat a couple of times. In the meantime, put a link to your site in your signature here on the forum and read the following threads:

http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/8461-wf-winter-2007-case-study.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/8739-winter-2007-case-study-part-ii.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-s...-optimization-action-unknown-1-hopefully.html

While you're reading them, google everything you're unfamiliar with, so you don't come here asking what's adsense and how do you make a site. If you have a question that you couldn't find an answer to, send me a private message and I'll help you.

After completing those few steps, you'll have a decent entry level knowledge.

Don't try to rush through it, don't ask questions before you've used google and the search option on the forum and that's it, you'll be ready to start making some money online within a week or so.

 

[powermonger]

It would be great if you could give me a short review on my page (when I'm done) to tell me what I probably could do better. It's my first PPC project.

By the way: I'm creating the page manually without Wordpress and concentrate on driving traffic to it with adwords as described here. If there's something completely wrong with that I would be glad for any advice.

I will read the links you gave tomorrow MrX, thanks for your help so far. Sun's coming up here and I read this stuff the whole evening.

Oh, and "hello forum".

 

[crunny]

Hey guys,

I am going to try to keep this thread alive so that:

1. The forum can see what progress we are making and perhaps make some suggestions
2. Help out any other noobs out there that want to learn from my mistakes

I am now doing this project with another two buddies of mine. I think this is a great idea because we can share knowledge, labor and costs.
The first thing we did was brainstorm some ideas for a blog, finally we all agreed on the topic of snorkeling. Next we tried to set up a blog on wordpress.com as advised. However, the damn thing wouldn't work, each of us kept getting some error message along the lines of "you already have wordpress installed, clear your database". Anyways, we gave up on wordpress and got a blogger.com blog set-up instead.

The plan is to write at least an article a day targeting keywords that we found using overture and google suggestions.

Hmm, thats about it for now.

BTW thanks for the advice and links MisterX, I am halfway through them.

Cheers.