In this post, I will answer the question, ‘what tools and skills do I need in order to create an income-generating internet marketing business?’

One of the problems with internet marketing is that you can easily become overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of products, tools and training packages available for aspiring online marketers.

The reality is that you need relatively few tools.

Basic Tools Needed

If I was starting again, I would limit it to these few tools:

  • A domain name – purchase your domain name from Namecheap.com.  I recommend that you simply use your name – here are some variations for my name in case you find that your first choice is taken – marksalmon.com, mark-salmon.com, markcsalmon.com, msalmon.com, mcsalmon.com.  Cost of your domain should be around $10 p.a.
  • Hosting – I use Hostgator.com.  I recommend the Baby Plan for $5.95 per month.  This is where your website will be hosted
  • WordPress.org – WordPress is a free script for creating websites and web pages.  This is one of the skills you need – you can find free training on You Tube or you can sign up for one of my old training programmes WP Website Wizard which has comprehensive training videos on WordPress.  (Some of this training requires updating as WordPress is under constant development but if you get stuck, I will gladly assist you if you are my customer.)  Warning: Do not use WordPress.com – you want a self-hosted WordPress website using the WordPress.org free script.
  • A page builder plugin for WordPress. This is required for creating squeeze pages and sales pages in WordPress.  I recommend Thrive Content Builder, Instabuilder 2.0 or WP Profit Builder.  (There are some hosted solutions like Click Funnels and Lead Pages which cost around $97 per month – whilst these are great products, when starting out it increases your break-even cost.  Also, if you stop paying you lose all your web pages.  If you stop driving traffic to the pages, you still have to pay the monthly cost.)  That’s why I recommend that you start with one of the self-hosted page builder plugins recommended above which will cost around $67 or perhaps a little more.  ( Top Tip: If you want a really cheap solution, you can go to Fiverr.com and you can get someone to install Instabuilder 2.0 for just $5 on your website!)
  • You will need an auto-responder to collect email addresses of prospects and customers and to send messages to them.  I recommend either Aweber (which I use) or GetResponse.  Both are used extensively by internet marketers and represent great value.  You cannot run your internet marketing business without an auto-responder so this tool is mandatory.  Costs are around $20 per month with a free or low cost trial period but costs rise as you increase the size of your list or database.
  • You will also need some click tracking technology to monitor and optimise your marketing.  Whilst you could use Google Analytics which is free, I recommend a tool like Click Magick which costs $17 per month initially (discounted to the equivalent of $12 per month if you pay in advance for a full year.)

You should be able to get all of the above tools for well under $100 if you follow my advice:

  • Domain – $10 p.a.
  • Hosting –  $5.95 p.m.
  • WordPress – free
  • Page Builder – Instabuilder 2.0 from Fiverr – $5
  • Autoresponder – Aweber – free for 30 days then $19 p.m.
  • Click Tracking – $17 p.m.

The only other elements you require in order to start making money is products to offer and traffic to drive to your offers.

(An optional extra is to buy a nice theme design for your website – $60 is the price of the one I am using on this website.)

Skills Needed

Attractive Offers

With regards to offers, if you start with promoting affiliate offers i.e. you sell other people’s products in return for a commission, you can find plenty of these at websites such as Clickbank, JVZoo and WarriorPlus.

I recommend that you start with affiliate marketing so you don’t immediately need to start creating and launching your own products.

However, the skills of product creation and product launching are skills that you need to rapidly acquire in order to optimise your marketing results, even if your own products are initially only used as bonuses for your affiliate promotions.

Traffic

With regards to traffic, whist you can find plenty of products that relate to free traffic methods such as SEO, video marketing, article marketing, podcasting, guest blogging etc, I am going to recommend that initially you ignore all these methods because:

  • in reality they are not ‘free’.   Your time is valuable and they all require that you create content and rank it in the search engines.  This takes time and skill to do and your traffic is unreliable both in timing and quantity.  By all means pursue this at a later date as ‘bonus traffic’ but when you are getting started, you really want to see results and to test your strategy quickly.

I am going to recommend that you effectively buy clicks i.e. use paid traffic methods.

This will save you a great deal of time when getting started.

I recommend that you initially master just one paid traffic method.  Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to master everything at once.

You therefore need a budget for paid traffic and this could be anything from $100 or more because you need to buy enough clicks to make your test results statistically reliable.

Of course, the more traffic you can put to an offer, the more reliable your data will be.

This is why I cannot be precise about your traffic budget – the more you have, the better, although you need to start with small tests before scaling up your expenditure on any paid campaign!

Traffic methods are covered extensively within my email marketing and products that I recommend, which is why you need to be on my list – see below.

Marketing

You will also need to learn the art of advertising and marketing, which includes copywriting.  Internet marketing is online advertising, so any books or training products on these subjects are vital reading.

Advertising nourishes the consuming power of men. It sets up before a man the goal of a better home, better clothing, better food for himself and his family. It spurs individual exertion and greater production.

Winston Churchill

In the initial strategies I recommend for getting started ( – provided via my list – make sure you sign up  below!), I will give you methods that are easy for newbies to master, without the need for extensive marketing knowledge. But, as you progress, marketing and copywriting skills are essential skills for optimising your results.

Copywriting is required for writing:

  • adverts
  • squeeze pages
  • sales pages
  • content marketing
  • product creation
  • email marketing

Closing Advice & Homework

Please do not get demoralised about the number of tools and skills required to be successful at internet marketing.

If you start off with the correct training and advice, the basic skills for getting started making money are relatively easy to acquire and you simply need to hone your skills further over time to optimise your results and the opportunities you can pursue.

Hopefully, this brief explanation of the tools and skills required will start you off on the right track.  Ignore all the other bells and whistles – there are thousands of them!

Your Homework is to review and acquire the tools I have outlined above and get some training, if you need it, on creating websites, preferably in WordPress.