In this post I’d like to introduce you to a concept that should form the foundations of everything you do online related to Internet Marketing. Since it is so vitally important that you remember this concept I’ve given it an easy name to remember – TAP.

So what is the TAP concept? In a nutshell, it is a way of breaking down all the complications related to Internet Marketing and keeping you focused on the bare essentials. TAP stands for “Traffic, Action, Profit” and you’ll soon see that everything you do online related to Internet Marketing can be broken down to this basic level.

Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of your Internet Marketing business. Without it, nobody will know that you even exist and you won’t make a single cent. Of course, there are many different ways to generate traffic. You could look at paid options such as Google Adwords or some other PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, or you could put up a blog and use SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques. You could even put videos on YouTube or use social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t matter how you go about it, the main point to remember is that somehow you need to get some traffic.

Of course, not all traffic is created equal. The best type of traffic you can have is targeted traffic. There’s no point trying to sell cheeseburgers to vegetarians or wine to teetotallers. You need to generate traffic that will genuinely be interested and what you have to offer.

In future posts I’ll cover some of the different ways in which you can generate this targeted traffic but for now just remember that you need traffic – and targeted traffic is best.

Action

Hopefully by now you understand just how important it is to get traffic. The next question you need to ask yourself is once you’ve got that traffic what are you going to do with it? What action do you want people to take and how are you going to get them to take that action?

Again, there are many different paths you could take here. You could have your own website where you sell your own products or you could act as an affiliate where you get paid commissions on all sales made by people you refer to the vendors website. Another alternatives is CPA (Cost Per Action) where you can get paid just for having someone submit their email address or zipcode, or take a free trial of a product. Then there is contextual advertising such as Google AdSense where you earn every time somebody clicks a link on an advertising displayed on your website.

Within the broad models of generating income I have just outlined there are still a number of possibilities. If you’re doing affiliate marketing or CPA marketing for example you have the choice of direct linking to the merchant’s page or using your own landing page where you pre-sell them on the offer you are promoting. You may also use a squeeze page where instead of linking directly to the offer the action you want people to take is simply to subscribe to your list so that you can follow up with them in the future rather than hoping that they act there and then.

Like traffic, there are many different ways in which you can convince people to take action and I’ll be covering some of them in future posts.

So you’ve got traffic, you’ve given that traffic an action to take. What comes next?

Profit

This is the final part of the equation and most likely the part that you are most interested in. It’s what you are trying to achieve. Just remember that profit won’t simply come to you out of thin air. You need traffic, and targeted traffic at that, and you need to give people an action to take to convert that traffic into profit.

If you’re currently involved in any form of Internet Marketing take a step back for a moment and examine just how you are going about it. What aspects are related to generating traffic? What aspects are related to getting that traffic to take action?

Once you break things down in this way it becomes much simpler to understand and helps you to improve and fine tune your processes. For example, you might find that you’re getting a lot of traffic but very few people are actually taking action. This could either be because your traffic isn’t targeted enough, or it could be that you’re simply wasting that traffic by not doing enough to convince them to take action. If you improve the targeting of your traffic and getting that traffic to take action then you’ll see an increase in profits.

Another situation you might find yourself is that you’re not getting much traffic, but the traffic you are getting converts well. In this case you should be focusing on generating more targeted traffic since you know that once people do find you there’s a good chance they will take action.

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