The Most Common Question for Internet Marketing Newbies

As a newbie in the Internet Marketing niche, the first question is often "Where do I start?".
There is so much information on the Internet, and to get proof, I did a Google search of the term "Internet Marketing", which yielded an astounding 339 million results.
Unfortunately most Internet Marketers aren't concern with helping others, instead they want to fatten their wallets as quickly as possible.
That's the truth.
Thus, as you can imagine, a newbie will often not know the difference between fluff and the real deal when it comes to finding good information.
Here's the deal.
First, much of the important stuff is gleaned not by buying something that successful Internet Marketers teaches, but by observing what they are doing.
For example, rather than buying a lot of email marketing products when I first started, I signed up to as many email lists as possible, using a free email account (Gmail) one for each niche.
Later, I would create filters that would automatically organize each sender's emails into their respective folders.
There are four important things that you can learn from sellers' emails:

1. Headlines
2. Content
3. Products (& Bonuses)
4. Keywords

I'll explain.
Ask yourself what headlines sellers were using to get you to open their emails, what pitches they were using as content in their emails, what products they were selling and bonuses they were giving away, and what keywords they were using in their target niches.
Sounds simple, right?
This marketing analysis will help you determine which line works and doesn't work.
Occasionally I would save a seller's noteworthy email as a swipe file template, that I could edit later to use as my own email, or save keyword niches that I could categorize using a notes editor.
As I am working from both home and work, I used a cloud based editor such as Microsoft OneNote or Evernote (good for saving online articles) to facilitate my note keeping.
For example, I categorized the swipe file templates into Money (Gain), Time Limited (Pain), Review (Logic), without being overly scientific about the process.
If I could do this, so can you.
Second, I have saved every sales page as whole web pages (use File-->Save As) to my computer that has ever impressed me, and I've downloaded every videos and images that are attractive (use DownloadThemAll addon).
These are categorized too, and I've pulled some of them up at various times to study and apply in my own web pages.
Stay with me.
Third, I read through targeted forums to look up problems that people were having, or questions that they were asking about specific topics, and started categorizing these issues so that I could tailor my content marketing and sales pitches later.
Subscribing to these threads allowed me to keep up to date with the development of these topics.
That's how I started with my online business, and affiliate marketing, but it is just a small step.
So far, I have been less and less tempted to buy the latest new shiny toy and been focusing my efforts on the real marketing business, such as content marketing and list building.
What's the bottom line?
My expenses have dropped considerably from fewer online purchases over the last few months, and instead I have increased spending on growing my email database.
Hopefully, this article has answered the newbie's first question "Where do I start?", though there is still a journey of learning best practices, acquiring tools and building platforms, all of which I will hopefully have articles done for you in the future.

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