Many people out there are looking for a quick start to internet marketing. I understand. You know being online and marketing yourself with blogging, internet marketing and social networking is essential, but you don’t know the best way to go about it, and you have a million questions.

This massive access to information causes what’s called “paralysis by analysis”. In other words, we’re so fixated on learning what we need to do, we fail to act. This is death for business. You need to act, but you don’t want to screw things up.

So here is a quick start to internet marketing checklist that will give you what you need to get started. It contains a little philosophy and a few specific actions that will get you off and running. There is a lot of value in knowing you’re starting off on the right foot, so I hope this helps.

Quick Start to Internet Marketing

1. Make the decision that your focus is going to be building a real business…or extending your existing business. Do not allow your sole focus to be making money. If your focus is on building a real business, creating a good reputation and brand and creating value for others, it’s hard to screw things up. It’s when we decide to focus solely on making money that we start doing crappy, spammy things that we will regret later…and that will not do us any good. This is the first step, and it’s easy. Just decide that your focus is going to be on creating value for your customers, not just selling stuff. With that, you have already cleared half the hurdles. Believe it or not, it really is that simple!
2. Start a blog. Don’t over think it. Don’t dwell on it for more than five minutes. Pick a platform, and fire it up. If you want my specific advise, I recommend using WordPress, and I recommend having a professional set it up for you. Any number of professionals can do it for you. WordPress can easily be search engine optimized, and it is highly extensible. Some of the most successful blogs on the internet use WordPress, and for good reason. That said, it’s more important to have a blog than it is to make absolutely certain that every detail is perfect. Your blog will serve as the hub of everything you do to market yourself online. It is your home. You need a place to hang your hat. You need a blog.
3. Post to your blog regularly. The more you blog, the more you will learn. The most important thing is to get started. This can be made very complicated if you want it to be, but it can also be simple. It is not rocket science, and if you put in the effort you will learn everything you need to know simply by doing it. You get out what you put in. Again, if you’re focusing on creating value for your customers, your blog will be on target.
4. Get on Facebook and Twitter. Are there other social networks? Heck yes there are. Is there value in checking them out and learning about them? Heck yes. But this is a quick start to internet marketing guide, right? So let’s keep it simple. The fact is that Facebook is huge, and Twitter is massively important and an indispensable tool. You can do a lot of damage with just these two. Just as with blogging, use them regularly. An inactive profile is worthless to you. Just like if you leave your house unattended…it will deteriorate over time, this is true for your internet property as well. You have to maintain it for it to grow and remain valuable. Use your social networking profiles for being social and meeting people. Sure, link out to your blog posts and such, but keep the content you produce 99% social. Believe it or not, people know you sell widgets even if you don’t tell em. It’s linked up on your page, see? So they know already. You don’t have to tell them every five minutes. Meet people and concentrate on getting to know and learning from others with similar interests. After doing this for a while, you will start to get these mysterious messages in your inbox. They will be coming from people who have visited your site and are interested in what you’re selling, and you’ll wonder where all this magical activity is coming from. Some of it’s coming from Twitter, believe it or not. And it will have all happened without you having to hard sell anyone. This stuff works really well, if you work it. Let it take time. It’s fun anyway, so why turn it into hard work?
5. Let it take some time. Like I mentioned in the previous step, this stuff doesn’t happen instantly. One thing about internet marketing is that people often expect immediate results. I’m not sure why that is. It must come from a misconception about what’s happening. When you give someone a business card at a social event, do you expect them to buy something from you right there on the spot? No. You meet 28 people that night, and 9 of them call you back over the next few weeks. You build it from there. This is how it works. Social networking has become confused with being this new phenomenon, and we think it’s complicated. It’s not. Social networking is people with common interests hanging out, talking. This has been going on for ages. It’s how business is done. And building a business takes time.
6. Read and learn. Study what you’re doing. Read other blogs. Look at other websites, especially within the same field as you’re working. Never stop this. Learning and stealing ideas from your competitors is another age old business principle that is not ever going to go away. Use it to your advantage.
7. Don’t quit. Be consistent. Things take time. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Before you get started using Web 2.0 features as a way of increasing your exposure and of marketing your goods, you need to have a solid social marketing plan in place that will guide the rest of your efforts. Here are the reasons to do so.

Tip 1: Need a Goal

To achieve anything in business or in your personal life, you need goals and the social marketing plan can help you set the appropriate goals for your work. Think of it as a vacation planner. If you never chose a destination, you would never really know when you’ve reached the getaway spot. All of your efforts would be fruitless.

Tip 2: Creates the Roadmap

While we don’t want to overuse the vacation metaphor, the truth is the social marketing plan acts like a roadmap for your efforts. It forces you to decide what routes to take to reach your goals and that means you really have to think about what will work and what won’t before you waste money.

Tip 3: Research sites you want to target

A good social marketing plan will also include the sites you’re going to target with your efforts which means it forces you to start doing some research on places like Mixx.com and Digg.com, as we as YouTube, MySpace, and others so you can see what will work best for your needs.

Tip 4: Helps Keep You Grounded

If you tend to jump from one idea to another, having a social marketing plan can prevent you from “channel surfing” from one idea to another. It gives you an outline of what you need to be doing and helps you stay on track.

Driving traffic to your website consistently is a important component of growing a successful business. You will have to know that the internet is created for the purposes of sharing content. Content is thus important in generating traffic to your website. Here are the 5 different ways that you can repurpose to squeeze more affiliate traffic from the same content

1) Writing Articles And Submit To Article Directories

You will be able to write your own article and submit to the top article directories. You will be able to get traffic directly from the article directories or you can get traffic from the search engine if it is indexed.

2) Create Slide And Submit To Slide Directories

You can convert the same piece of information into slide and submit to the slide directories. You will be able get traffics as there are many people who are looking for content slides. You will want to make the slide to be short and presentable so that they will understand the content fast. The advantage is that your slide might get indexed by the search engine if you do keyword optimization on your slide.

3) Creating Video And Submit To Video Directories

You can further leverage on the same content by converting into videos. Videos are very popular as people will be able to see and hear the content. You can create a simple slide and do a video recording with software. You will want to speak clearly and slowly so that your viewer can understand your message.

4) Put Article, Slide And Video To Hubpages

You will now put the 3 different formats into the Hubpages as you can provide the viewers with the content in different format. You will be able to get direct traffic from the Hubpages and the hubs that are posted might also be indexed by the search engine.

5) Social Bookmark Your Hubpage

You will want to social bookmark all the Hubpages that you have created. This will ensure that you will spread it across the internet and more people will be aware of your hubs. This will also drive you good traffic when more people are aware of your bookmark.

Here are the 5 different ways that you can use to repurpose your content. You will be fully leveraging on the content that you have so that you can squeeze the maximum traffic out of it. The advantage is that it is a free method of getting traffic and you do not have to pay any money but the disadvantage is that you will have to spend more time to generate the traffic. Whenever you have your own one new article, remember the process of:

Article -> Slide -> Video -> Put All In Hubpages -> Social Bookmark The Hubpages.

Do remember to do it consistently and increase the volume so that you will get the maximum amount of traffic for free.