It’s all in the Name Whether you have a local brick and mortar business or work from home at an online business, you’ll need Internet marketing to grow your bottom line. There are several key factors in learning how to make money online, none of which require you to be technically proficient. Internet marketing takes time, effort, patience and sound choices of market, target audience and advertising methods. Some of your Internet marketing savvy comes from trial and error. Whether you work from home as owner of a Web-based business or you manage a large corporation learning the ins and outs of Internet marketing is crucial to your company’s profits. The first step of Internet marketing is creating your business Web site. To do this you must first register your domain name. It’s important that your domain name be closely aligned to your business name and clarify what it is you do – or be intriguing enough for consumers to want to go there to determine all you offer. Your Web address should be short, and as much as possible it should be something that consumers who know your business name can guess at. Internet marketing is about ease and instant gratification. Consumers don’t want to work hard or spend a lot of time finding out about you and your firm, or trying to find it on the Web. Whether you have an online business or a brick and mortar location, the basic Web site rules are the same. The best Internet marketing tactic to use, and the first step in how to make money online, is to own your domain. Don’t tag onto a platform that advertises its name too. http://www.geocities.com / http://mamacooks.com is not nearly as successful an Internet marketing ploy for Mama Cooks, LLC, as is http://www.mama-cooks.net. However, www.mamacooks.com is so much better, and so much easier to guess at and find than www.mama-cooks.net. It’s especially bad for a retail site to use a hyphen, and while .net is not terrible it’s the kiss of death if there is a http://www.mamacooks.com out there already and you opt for .net as a result. Eight times out of ten consumers will end up talking to, and doing business with your competitor without ever getting to your Web site. In a nutshell, Internet marketing for your online business starts with an effective Web site, and that Web site starts with a terrific domain name.