When it comes to developing an online wealth, its important to have a list ( a list of emails of prospects you can sell to ). Sure, you can sell your own products or promote affiliate products on niche blogs, but having a responsive list is the fastest and most dependable foundation for making money on the internet.

There are many ways to build a list, but the easiest and most cost effective is to add an AWeber opt in form to your blog. AWeber is one of the leading email management systems available online. The back office is easy to use and the feaures continue to get better and better. If you dont already have some kind of email management system, I recommend you sign up with AWeber. It will cost about $200 a year for the service which isnt bad at all. Between my domains, hosting, and email management I invest a total of about $350 a YEAR. If you cant afford that maybe the internet isnt right for you. And like I said about Domains and Hosting as well, there are options other than AWeber available if you choose.

In this quick video, see how easy it is to place an AWeber form on your blog to begin building yourself a list…

The first step towards starting an online business involves setting up a website.  In order to have a website, you will need to choose a domain.  I personally use GoDaddy for all of my domain purchases, but that don’t mean you have to. There are many available sites to get a domain from, Godaddy happens to be my site of choice. 

Watch the video below as I walk you through the domain purchasing process…

After choosing the domain for your new website, the next thing you need is a server to host the website. For all of my hosting, HostGator has been my favorite and comes with many great features.  All of my video tutorials will be based on using HostGator but as I stated before, there are many companies that offer web hosting other than HostGator, the choice is yours. 

Here is another quick video for you to see the setup process…

In my opinion, blogs are the most powerful tool any internet marketer can have.  They are easy to set up ( which I am going to show you in a second ), easy to maintain, and the search engines love them.  Now with the rapidly growing list of available plugins and themes, a WordPress blog is an extremely powerful platform with endless possibilities.

To set yourself up a new WordPress blog, the first things you need are a Domain and a Hosting service.  I personally use GoDaddy for all of my Domain name purchases.  The back office is easy to work with and the prices are reasonable.  As for Hosting, HostGator is the service I chose 2 years ago and have not had any issue with them since.  The control panel is very strait forward and allows you to create a new WordPress blog in seconds with their Fantastico DeLuxe software.

Here is a quick video to show you how to set up a new WordPress blog…

Video Marketing would have to be one of my favorite types of free marketing.  I also feel that it is the most effective strategy once you master its full potential.  With Videos, you will basically be to taking Attraction marketing and mixing it with Content marketing to really show who you are and place a person behind the brand name. 

It won’t take long and you will notice that people will practically start flocking towards you after releasing some great informative videos.  It is, however, important what to place in your videos, as well as how to rank them in the search engines to start that snowball rolling.  With the same SEO techniques we use to optimize our content, we will mix in with the videos to spread the word accross the web in record time.

The main focus is to provide value in the video itself.  The real key is to share information that people can go out and implement right away.  When they start to see results and know that your information is genuine, they will want to see what else you have to offer.  This is basically where you are attraction marketing through video, just be sure to be yourself and let the viewers get representation of the real you and what you have to offer them is quality and they become buyers in the future.

When it comes to actually releasing the video to the web, take a look at some Video SEO methods first to explode your results faster.  Check out the article on Video File Name –> HERE <– to get started.

When it comes to article marketing and search engine optimization (seo), understanding how the search engines work is vital to the success of your marketing efforts.  Keep in mind, when I say search engines, I am mainly focusing on Google and here are a few reasons why…

-Google provides all of the necessary tools to help you research and prepare your articles.  From start to finish, everything you need to complete and distribute your articles can be found by using Google itself.  I will go into more detail on that in future posts.

-Google is one of, if not the biggest of all search engines on the web today.  Since a majority of the people who surf the web use Google to find what they are searching for, focusing on placing your content within will generate the best results.

-Google owns some of the large submission sites and therefore, if you place your content within those specific sites, Google will favor that content so to speak since it is featured on its own directories.  I will venture more into this as well in future posts.
To help you understand how the search engines work, its best to look at this from their point of view.  The first and most important thing to understand about search engines, is that they are based entirely on key words or phrases.  When you go to a search engine and type in a word or phrase, let’s use “baby names” for example, the search engine reads through its entire list of indexed websites and articles and chooses the ones that are most related to that key word or phrase “baby names”.  The more that site or article is related to the searched term, the closer to the top of the results it will be displayed. 

So, Where do the search engines get their massive index list of websites and articles?

From You!

The key to effective article marketing is being able to create an article that is directly specific to the search term a person who is looking for what you have to offer will search for.  In other words, if your website provides baby names, you need to let the search engine know it so when a person searches for just that ( baby names ) your website or article is one of the first listed in the results.
The first thing to focus on is the Title of your Article, which is the next post in the Article Marketing topic.

One of the first things you should focus on when entering the world of internet marketing is creating your brand.  Your brand is the name that you will use in all of your marketing efforts.  It can be the name of the product, service, or program you are promoting; or simply your name like I do.  Think of a brand as if you were comparing the trademark ‘Nike’ to shoes, or ‘McDonalds’ to fast food.  What you want is to create that relation with your brand name to what you are offering online. 

A good way to help find an effective brand name is to use Google.  Do a Google search of the ideal brand name you are after, and look to see if there is already a person, product, or service using that or something close.  You will not want to be competing with someone else who may already have that named branded to them as it will be difficult to target a specific audience.  It is also a good idea to find a name that has a very low number of search results.  That way when you begin to submit content, it will rank with your specific brand name much quicker.

One of the first things you can do to get started, is take the time to write a short story about yourself.

With the story, you are looking to provide readers with a sense of who you are, and that what you have to offer holds value.

Your Story should include a little about your past experiences, what you have done (or doing) to take action and make changes, and also should share in broad detail whatever it is that you have to offer.  In the end, the idea of your Story is to give your readers a sense of comfort and the ability to build a friendship.  Nobody is impressed by the fancy websites with flashing money and cars, people are looking to follow someone that actually provides a true value of guidance.

If you need an example you can take a look at my personal story on the About page.

Once you have your Story written up, save it and in the next article I will demonstrate where to place that Story to begin building a foundation for success.

Web 2.0 Marketing is the method I use to get the internet to work for me.  Focusing mainly on only free methods of internet marketing you can take over the search engines very effectively by learning and utilizing the web 2.0 properties.  Articles and Videos are the two main methods that when implemented correctly can attract a very targeted audience, which is a must.  Trying to sell car tires to a bike shop just wouldn’t make sense.  So by learning how the search engines work and how you can utilize them to your advantage, you will be able to actually attract the people specifically looking for what you have to offer.  That alone is very powerful.

What makes the Web 2.0 Properties so vital, is the fact that they automatically feed off of each other.  Once you begin placing your articles and videos into the search engines and they become ranked, other web 2.0 websites will also want a piece of the attention that hot content is getting for their website too.  So what they do is duplicate your content and advertise it for you on their website with the intention of gaining more viewers to your content, but on their site.  Best part of this… it’s totally free.

Can you see how the internet can literally work for you?   Once you learn to master the search engines and how to effectively place your content within them, you will start to receive swarms of targeted traffic to your website… and that’s exactly what you will learn here at Nathan-Hilton dotcom.