Internet marketing is very competitive. There are a thousand and one products available on the Internet. What makes your product better than the other guy? Make that a thousand other guys online because they are probably selling the same thing JUST LIKE YOU!

Furthermore, it is very difficult to pry money out of the hands of people online. They can’t see you or hear your voice (even if you use photos and YouTube videos, it is still relatively impersonal compared with meeting a merchant face to face). Millions of people are being scammed on the Internet everyday – in spite of guarantees.

Why am I saying all this?

Well… if you want to be successful in Internet marketing, you must take a closer look at those who have already made it and emulate their traits and habits!

A successful Internet marketer is more than just a brand. They are a name that people trust. When people trust you, you become the ‘go to’ person that everybody will go to when there is a problem to be solved.

This is the speed of trust. They trust you and they will spend less time trying to be convinced by what you have to say (or what you are trying to sell to them).

We must be realistic here. Internet marketing isn’t all about hiding behind your computer. You are not dealing with robots. On the other hand, you need go out there and build relationships with others and work together with others. A synergistic relationship is when two parties with complementary skills work together with each other to achieve tremendous results.

And often, when strong friendships are formed, people like one another and they feel comfortable working with one another in an environment where trust is built. They don’t spend too much time second guessing each other’s motives and let the one better at a certain task do their job well.

You see, when people don’t trust one another, the energy is low and things move very slowly as they try to break down the walls of distrust. They might spend time arguing with each other on who deserves the larger share and so on. This must be avoided at all cost! And of course, it’s not enough to have the skills to do the job. This alone doesn’t guarantee the long term viability of partnerships. The common denominator is once again – trust.

When two or more people work together in an environment where they can share ideas, grow together and make money together, synergy is formed (not just because of doing the tactical stuff together). Imagine having a friend who is ready to make money for you when you are doing your big product launch.

At the end of the day, you must never be afraid to go all out to build strong relationships in business. It will make or break your long term strategy. After all, human beings are sensitive creatures. The moment you lose the trust, it will take 10 times the effort to get back into people’s good graces.

What is synergy? Have you heard the famous saying that the sum of the whole is more than the parts combined together? That is what synergy is all about – one plus one plus one equals more than three!

In this world, God (or evolution depending on your beliefs) created human beings as very diverse beings. They are creatures that are multi-skilled but at the same time possessing aptitudes in specific tasks.

We are not like cavemen – hunting, cooking, cleaning and building everything with our bare hands. In the 21st century, people are all learning to specialize – and that is where we build on each other’s skills to develop synergy and that is especially true on the Internet.

Understand that no man is an island. After all, some of us have the aptitude of doing things better than others while being totally bad at another. In other words, don’t ask a fish to climb trees and get a monkey to swim. Let each of them do what they do best.

For example, you could be a really good writer but very bad when it comes to graphic design. Instead of 2 people spending tons of money outsourcing, you can form an alliance or a partnership. The best way is to share resources and help each other out on the fly.

The world is designed in such a way that we need one another to survive. That is why we have affiliate marketing and joint ventures. You can save lots of time by leveraging on the list of others and selling their products through their affiliate program saving you the time and hassle of creating all the products yourself.

There are also many other ways to form profitable partnerships. If one is good at marketing while the other is good at product creation and copywriting, they can do a joint venture together and share the profits in the end. By learning to pool your resources together, you will be able to work together with one mindset and one vision. That way, every party will have vested interest in a common goal and your team will be unstoppable.

Another way to develop synergy is to trade favors. In any affiliate marketing campaign, no single person can do a launch and expect to do more sales than all the other affiliates combined (unless the affiliates are very weak at marketing). In this world, no one person, no matter how strong is better than all of us combined. It is true in every aspect of the world – economics, farming, political… whatever it may be, learn to work together as a team.

When it comes to brainstorming sessions, don’t hog ideas all by yourself. Learn to share with others.

These are a few tips that you can use to develop unstoppable synergy.

Every successful Internet marketer knows that you have to reach to as many people as possible on the Internet. Your mailing list can only do so much for you and these people exist within your circle of influence. Don’t you wish you can reach outside your circle of influence?

If you want to be 100% effective at Internet marketing, you must learn the art of viral marketing – an essential trait of a successful Internet marketer. Many gurus use it solely to generate hundreds of subscribers each day to their list.

Viral marketing is basically using the influence of others to generate subscribers for you. You don’t want to do everything alone. You need to leverage on your subscribers, Google and word of mouth to get the word out about your latest product. Failure to do so will result in you leaving too much money on the table.

So how do you start a viral marketing campaign?

You need to work with a few principles: Firstly, you must provide value for the reader. If the reader feels that by sharing the content, it will benefit the recipient and the reader himself will feel better off by sharing it with others, then you will achieve the viral effect similar to those chain or forwarded jokes or E-mails that people pass around from time to time. Remember that the method of sharing must be simple – you must use a platform that is very easy to share it with others.

When you create content for your subscribers, you must always remember the golden rule that content is KING. Good contents are naturally passed around because it touches the human heart. Don’t try and manipulate the search engine too much or work too hard at selling yourself. Please PEOPLE first, not Google.

Once your entire marketing system is in place, the final piece of the puzzle is to let your business become as viral as possible. And that is why one of the traits of highly effective Internet marketers is that they know how to create a viral campaign and let their list grow on autopilot.

Your campaign could consist of all sorts of things – from strategic placement of solo ads, re-brandable E-books, having an army of affiliates or build your reputation to such an extent that people will willingly pass the word around about your products.

Once you have these attributes in place, your campaign will grow so contagious that many subscribers will flood their way into your landing pages. There are people who are getting at least 100-200 new subscribers a day totally done through viral marketing.

Once you have started a powerful viral campaign, you can spend time tweaking it and optimizing the campaign. By then, you will be unstoppable and you will join the ranks of successful Internet marketers in no time.

A joint venture is when two or more Internet marketers work together to pool their resources, their mailing list, their skills and their ideas together to create powerful synergy (and of course to make lots and lots of money at the same time).

Every successful Internet marketer at one time or another will definitely do joint ventures with others. It is prevalent in seminars such as the World Internet Summit (WIS) where it is a huge pool of successful Internet marketers working together for the greater good.

If you want to be a successful Internet marketer, learn the trait of creating good joint venture partnerships today!

So, what does it take to start a good joint venture partnership?

One of the main keys is the ability to work well with others. The other is to think win-win. People always ask others for joint ventures (or JV for short) because they think what’s in it for them. They offer try and offer huge commissions (like 60% to 90%) to bribe other marketers to build their own list without remembering what’s in it for the other party.

As a result, JV partners are hard to come by because people fail to provide overwhelming value for them in the first place. Don’t make the mistake of asking the fireplace to offer you fire FIRST before you offer the fireplace some wood later – it doesn’t work this way.

When you examine people who are successful in their Internet marketing career, you will find that even when they first started out, when they have a mailing list of less than 100 people, they still managed to build their list by helping out other people by helping them to reach THEIR goals.

You see, in this world, most people either looks at friendship or reality (feasibility). Friends ‘help out’ each other once in a while but if you don’t have the basis of a friendship, no one will JV with you unless you bring something of tremendous value to the table.

As you can see, making friends on the Internet is one of the ways to get along with other people and once you are friends with others, they will generally warm up to you with your joint venture offers.

So are you willing to help others first? The world is designed in such a way that we need one another to survive. That is why we have affiliate marketing and joint ventures. You can save lots of time by leveraging on the list of others and selling their products through their affiliate program saving you the time and hassle of creating all the products yourself.

Lastly, don’t make the mistake of chasing joint venture partners like a rabid bull dog. You don’t want to ruin your credibility that way if people perceive you like an ‘online’ door to door salesman. Be tactful and observant in your conversation and you will be on your way to online riches in no time.

Do you know that it is very important to build your credibility online? One of the ways to be truly successful in Internet marketing is to brand yourself in such an outstanding way that people will remember you for life.

Take for example…

What do people remember Mark Joyner as? He is known as the ‘Godfather’ of Internet marketing. At the World Internet Summit, his big name was flashed across the screen telling the audiences of his amazing feats.

How about Jay Abraham? Branded as the ‘Godfather’ of direct marketing. It is no wonder people are paying him $50,000 an hour for his consultation.

What about you? What are the things that make you unique? If you can brand yourself as an expert in a sub-niche, you will no doubt be able to achieve a fraction of the level of fame of these marketing gurus.

No doubt, it is very difficult to be the best at one thing. For example, in the offline world, it is very hard to release a platinum record or become the next soccer champion. It is a very competitive world out there and it is hard to be the best at those things.

On the other hand, one of the fastest ways to become famous online is to find a combination of two expertise and become better than most of the people in these two niches.

You could be an expert at writing and marketing. This is a powerful winning combination as an example.

When you want to build your credibility online, you must learn to make friends with others. I know of some online marketers who are willing to go to great lengths to do a lot of favors for established marketers.  They create their own products and are willing to give 100% of their commission in order to build their mailing lists!

Basically, you need to come out with a cutting edge concept, one or two skills that you can be the best in, and also a way to let others know who you are.

Branding is also closely tied in with your credibility. For example, if you are planning to do a product launch, make sure you work very hard at tweaking your sites, your affiliate tracking system and make sure your servers are all up and running. You don’t want to wind up launching your very first product or products, only to screw things up. If you piss off your affiliates, it is very likely that you will not be able to do a joint venture in the future ever again. Make sure you do the job right the first time and you will have more people knocking on your door next time.

A smart business owner knows that they need to draft out 2 plans when they are pursuing their business goals.

One is a long term plan and the other is a short term plan.

Why 2 plans? Why not merge them into one?

Well, simply put, you will only be able to survive long term in business if you are doing well short term. It isn’t easy to build a mighty fortress when you can’t even keep your tent pegs on the ground. Every successful Internet marketer knows this and it is one of the traits that you must adopt if you want to be successful.

Not only that, you will also survive in the long run if you keep on trading time for money. Unless you are totally in love with what you are doing, you can’t survive in the long run if you keep on doing the things you are doing over and over again. One of these days, you will grow old and you will get tired. For example, if you are working in a 9-5 job, and you spend all day working for your company for a good salary, what if you were to get into a car accident? The insurance and medical coverage will only do so much for your family and it is truly scary if you are the sole bread-winner in the house.

Here is a strategy that will help you to get by… you need to have a lot of money stored up for your business – even if you are operating a low-overhead business like Internet marketing. If you are desperate for money, it is totally okay to put aside your long term goals and get yourself not only out of the RED, but also to store up a lot of cash in the process. If you don’t have a lot of reserves, you will miss out on a lot of opportunities that require money to buy.

About your long term goals, you must focus on things that help you develop residual income. One of the traits of a successful Internet marketer is the ability to build multiple streams of autopilot businesses, and you must develop that kind of mindset as you are building your business for the long term.

Balancing your long term and short term strategy is the key. Here is an example:

There is a guy who is good at graphics design decides to start out his career as a by creating graphics for others. He creates graphics for others and charges them a nominal design fee. His rates increase over time and he is making good money. Unfortunately, his clients might switch business models or outsource to someone cheaper. He still earns good money but it is getting difficult because he keeps on trading time for money.

If he stops creating, would he still make money? Of course not. The income is good in the short run (furthermore, it is a cash business and you don’t have to wait 30 days for the affiliates to pay the commission) but without a long term planning strategy, his business might not grow.

He might experiment with list building and selling his graphics to the masses. He may even outsource graphics work to others while he focuses on marketing. Eventually, he will reach a point where he doesn’t need to rely on creating graphics for others to survive and he can make a good living selling advertising space (or Google AdSense) making a few thousand dollars a month – completely automated by the advertising networks or autopilot businesses.

Successful Internet marketers are mostly powerful list builders. They are guys that that spend 15 minutes writing an E-mail and later on earning thousands of dollars within a couple of minutes.

But how can we become like these superstars?

Well, a powerful list builder doesn’t need to be a person who can jump over tall buildings or outrun a speeding bullet. You just need to have the same traits as a successful marketer – a normal human being who is truly committed to having the right mindset and the right attitude to succeed.

Here are other practical was to get started.

One of the easiest ways to get started is to take a good look at our own skills. We need to be very good at creating strong value for your customers. In other words, the products or newsletters you are offering must have a killer concept. And this killer concept requires you to come out with something that is eye popping, jaw dropping and heart stopping!

One of the most prominent traits of any good Internet marketer is the power to do joint ventures with

If you want to build a huge list – it is just like getting lots of customers to your shop front. Just like in any business, you will need to focus on two things: Strategic & tactical.

The tactical aspect of Internet marketing is where you are getting your hands dirty building your mailing list, writing your E-books, developing your own products, E-mail marketing, leading your people to your sales pages, closing sales and doing a product launch – all these are very important things that puts money on the table… but it is only the short term aspect of things. The strategic aspect of marketing involves a lot of looking forward and developing a vision. It isn’t just about conversion and driving traffic anymore.

You will also need to build a strong rapport with people on the Internet – not just with your customer base, but with other people within the same line of work as you are. Go all out to promote their products, not just your own. Don’t be calculative when it comes to sending your list to their sites. People will do the same for you as well. After all, if you remember the cry of the three musketeers – all for one and one for all. You reap the rewards when others send their people to your sites as well.

Human beings sometimes work in a predictable way. You see, it is the nature of humans to reciprocate a favor. Isn’t that the way the world works? You help someone; they will feel obliged to help you in return.

On the other hand, when you ask someone for a favor without helping them first, it is only natural for them to think in their hearts, “What’s in it for this guy?” and immediately the mind or the heart closes its doors.

So what does this got to do with being a successful Internet marketer?

Well, almost everything.

Basically, people are looking for their own best interests. They want value added to their lives. Value is also the basis of forming strong relationships. Internet marketing gurus are experts at creating overwhelming value for their customers and that is one of the traits you must learn if you want to be like them.

Here are tips on how you can become a highly effective Internet marketer just by helping others to achieve their goals:

Create products of value that helps people to save time, save money, earn more money, save efforts and so on. Internet marketers are marketers just like you and me. In order to pry money out from their Paypal accounts, you have to provide value like this because they are busy marketing to their own lists as well. If you can help them to do their job better, they will be more than happy to buy from you.

Remember, no man is an island. After all, some of us have the aptitude of doing things better than others while being totally bad at another.For example, you could be a really good writer but very bad when it comes to graphic design. They help you, and you help them by leveraging on each other’s expertise.

Instead of 2 people spending tons of money outsourcing, you can form an alliance or a partnership. The best way is to share resources and help each other out on the fly. The world is designed in such a way that we need one another to survive. That is why we have affiliate marketing and joint ventures. You can save lots of time by leveraging on the list of others and selling their products through their affiliate program saving you the time and hassle of creating all the products yourself. Don’t you think that that is one of the most effective ways to build a business? It is sure better than doing things alone.

Once you master the art of building relationships with others and helping them to achieve your goals, you will be able to achieve financial freedom and new breakthroughs in your Internet marketing business. The best thing is, when you have successfully helped others to get what they want, they will definitely rush to your aid when you have a product launch!

When we talk about proactivity, what comes into mind?

A person who spends 14 hours in front of the computer? Maybe… but everyone knows that in order to be successful at Internet marketing, you must develop a take action only mentality. Don’t just sit on your butt staring at the computer screen all day.

I will share with you some examples:

A wannabe is someone who stares at his site stats all day hitting the reload button over and over again to see if he or she gets any commission. A successful marketer is one who gets up and gets traffic. And they don’t just get traffic, they also focus ways to optimize their site and get more sales.

A wannabe is someone who pesters others to build their business for them. They beg others to let them into their inner circle without any contribution whatsoever. Those people, who are on the road to success, get started by building connections and helping others. It could be something simple like editing typos for them, typing a report for them, promoting their products on your blog and many others. The key at the end of the day is to take action by building connections with others.

What it really means by a take action mentality is to develop your skills in Internet marketing and overcome the technical barrier by GETTING YOUR HANDS DIRTY. Sit down, buy your domain name, host your site, create your landing page, find a product and drive traffic, you have to GET INTO THE ACTION MODE before you can truly progress.

Only then will you be able to implement your ideas into your business – otherwise, it is nothing but wishful thinking.

You have to cross the bridge that only YOU can cross. Starting your own site is not something you can outsource easily unless you fancy the idea of calling your ‘web designer’ on a daily basis getting him to tweak every nook and cranny – it will drive either you or him insane (even if you can afford to outsource a site).

There are many times that we can be tempted to buy another E-book hoping that it contains the magic formula to success, only to realize that most of the stuff out there are only catered for people who are willing to think for themselves and people who take action. It is pointless to read E-books all day without doing anything so once again, get your hands dirty and develop a take action only mentality or else you will spend 6 months in Internet marketing without achieving anything.

Can you ever avail of free website promotion? Is that even feasible?

Of course yes! Nowadays, your baby website can amass huge traffic in no time thanks to free website promotion.

How does this free website promotion go anyway? What are things to be done?

1. Enlist your website.

Look for the hottest Internet directories and enlist your site there. This is the easiest and most effective free website promotion tactic. Start with this step and the rest of the good things will follow.

Just don’t forget to prep your website and make it all spruced up for a higher chance to get accepted in your directory of choice.

2. Know your forums.

One reason why forums are created is for free website promotion for everyone. Log in, post actively, let them know about your site in every post and you attract instant visitors right there.

3. Write a press release.

Release your writing prowess and start up a press release that advertises your site! This is a free website promotion tactic that you can do anytime. Type a brief paragraph or two and email it to your friends, colleagues, internet e-zines, newspapers and other media and massive traffic will come to you pronto!

4. Be friendly online.

Free website promotion means you need to be friendly to other webmasters. Why, you ask? So they can link you immediately! Establish contacts and never tire of link requests and exchanges.

5. Write an article.

Say, your website is about your travel agency. Write an article about the perks of traveling or the hottest travel spots in the world. On the concluding paragraph, mention your website in passing. This article works as an advertorial and doubles as a free website promotion approach.

6. Just let the whole world know about your site.

What is free website promotion without the word of mouth? Insert your website, its URL and features in daily conversations and let the good news spread from one mouth to another!

7. Make a banner ad.

Make a banner ad for your site and ask another webmaster to do the same for his site. Then swap!

8. Take up a free website promotion course online.

Yes, there are free website promotion tutorials. But don’t you know that you can actually take a free website promotion course that can help you out further? Part of the free website promotion program is signing up for newsletters.

When you make a website, you need not pay anything to promote it. You just read it — there is such a thing as free website promotion!