In this article, we explore some basic concepts of online marketing.

There are numerous ways to generate income online. The most basic concept of online marketing is a system involving a web site or other electronic communication medium to advertise and sell a product. Of course, the devil is in the details, and there are literally hundreds of variations on some common methods to sell products online. Typically, they boil down to a few categories.

You could sell physical products through such venues as eBay and Amazon, or sell downloadable products directly or through an intermediary like ClickBank. In between are a considerable number of options, and this article will briefly describe the most popular.

With physical products, you typically stock (or warehouse) the product, make it available through either a storefront or an auction site. Once the product sells, you ship it to the customer. This approach is probably the most secure and easily understood, and will be explored in detail in a later article, Honest Marketing Techniques – Methods For Selling Physical Products

Recently, there has been a fair bit of buzz over “local marketing”. This is being presented as a new idea, but is merely a re-hash of an old process, that of building a web site and pushing prospects to a local, brick and mortar business. Anyone that has been involved with web site design and hosting will be more than familiar with this technique. The biggest departure from the old school approach is the proliferation of new techniques and tools. For example, WordPress, a blogging engine, makes it possible for anyone to have a reasonable looking web site online in a few hours at most, including writing the copy for their first few pages. By using a low cost hosting provider, WordPress and traffic generation techniques for conventional online marketing, it is possible to market a service to local businesses and make reasonable profits. Unfortunately, this approach requires a lot of local, face to face selling, and if you aren’t a born salesman, this can be difficult to accomplish.

For most people, online marketing equates to selling downloadable products. Downloadable products are in digital format such as ebooks, reports, training materials, courses, audio and video files. Each of these can be downloaded from a server directly to the customer’s computer immediately after a sale. This is a win for the customer because he gets immediate gratification with instant access to the product, and the seller wins because they don’t have to build or warehouse a physical product.

If you don’t own a good product of your own, you can still participate through the process of affiliate marketing. With online affiliate marketing, you send targeted traffic to the sales page of a vendor and if a visitor turns into a customer, you get a commission for the sale. Tracking who sent the lead is accomplished by coded links that contain your affiliate identification, or affiliate code. There are quite a number of different methods to sell digital products. You can test the waters, so to speak, without a web site or similar assets by sending traffic directly to the vendor sales page. However, to really make money you will need your own web site, a blogging engine, an autoresponder, and at least one method to drive traffic to your site. These don’t come for free, but are a small cost of doing business, compared to the profit you can generate.

In future articles, we will explore the processes setting up your own web site, and getting the various necessities in place, along with how to generate the targeted traffic you need to succeed in more depth. Look for articles that begin with Honest Marketing Techniques.