Sometimes I ask myself, “What would I do if I were a newbie in internet marketing?”. Let’s answer this question today. I believe it will benefit some of our readers here.

1) Build Adsense Income

Yes, the first thing I will do is to build my Adsense income.

Until today, I am still grateful that I added Adsense in my overall game plan.

The thing is, in the processing of building Adsense income, I would have mastered a few important skills, which include website building, simple server management and most important of all, search engine optimization.

I don’t have to know how to sell or promote things. As long as I know how to bring in traffic, I am likely to make money!

It’s truly a “Learn As You Earn” scenario.

When it comes to making money from Adsense, I will not start a blog, which most people will do nowadays. This is because blogging takes time. I want to spend most of my time learning more skills and exploring other ways to make money. (Note: When I say “starting a blog”, I don’t mean starting a blog filled with prewritten articles. I am referring to a blog where I need to personally write articles and post frequently.)

2) Explore Affiliate Marketing

The next thing I’ll explore is affiliate marketing.

There are many different strategies to make money as an affiliate marketer. For example, you can create different niche sites to sell different Clickbank products. But I wouldn’t do that. Somehow I don’t feel that it’s going to bring me long-term passive income. (I may be wrong.)

Instead, I will become a ‘guru’ type of affiliate marketer, where I build an info-rich website (not blog) and a list. I’ll get traffic through search engine optimization, advertising and viral marketing.

Once my website is established, I can sell many different affiliate products and I don’t have to worry about whether a particular affiliate product will disappear tomorrow because I own the customers.

When choosing which niche to get into, I will look for a niche where there is a lot of potential to earn passive income. For example, I may get into the stock trading niche where I can promote brokering services that earn me recurring commissions.

Through this venture into affiliate marketing, I would have learnt the art of copywriting, advertising and viral marketing. These are essential skills that will make me a powerful online marketer in time to come.

Did you notice that I said I will start an info-rich website (not blog)? Basically I will not start a blog until I feel committed to the niche.

3) Mess Around, Explore and Dream Of Big Ideas

In the process of building my Adsense and affiliate income (while learning all the IM skills at the same time), I will spend some time exploring different online programs and tools. While some of them may help me in my existing websites, the main objective of doing so is to learn more business models and marketing strategies that other marketers are using.

From time to time, I’ll also day-dream about big ideas and when a good idea strikes me, I’ll ‘ignorantly’ jump into it and never say die until I turn that idea into reality. The irony is what comes after a good idea is always a pool of sh*t and you’ve got to swim through that pool before seeing fruition of your idea.

Finally, throughout the journey, my mindset will be, “Though there is no guarantee that every venture will turn out to be a success, all I need is one successful venture to make a killing online.” The good thing about internet marketing is the downside risk is always manageable, but the upside potential is unlimited.