The question that every marketer must ask is "why should THIS customer buy THIS product from ME?" What special opportunity do you provide the customer, compared to your competitors? This question is easy to answer when you are the ONLY one offering a particular product or solution. And the way to be the only one in a market is to be the first in a market. As an on-line marketer, you are constantly looking for the opportunity to offer solutions to your customers. You keep an eye on trends, you gather feedback from your customers, you network with other marketers to find out what"s working and what"s needed. The best products or services to offer your customers - the ones with the highest likelihood of sales - are the ones that help them solve a problem or introduce a better way of doing something. And the marketer who is ahead of the curve and can get a product to market first has a decided advantage in reaching customers and making sales.

But if you have to take days or weeks to identify a problem, find a solution, develop or improve a product, craft a marketing campaign, and finally roll out your offer - you may find yourself chasing the market instead of leading it. You need to have a system that is flexible enough to adapt to different products and markets, but one that provides the outline and skeleton of producing a product and presenting it the the market in a comprehensive hard-hitting way.

You can develop this system in two ways. The first is to track and record everything you do on all of your programs until you identify the steps involved in the one or two that are successful. This may take years, and - since none of them are successful yet - you aren"t making any money. The other way is to model the success of the top Internet marketers, but not necessarily copy ever little thing they did. Find a marketer whose products you like or whose methods are compatible with your own, and then purchase their system (if they offer one). Lay out their method, and find the steps or areas that you feel you can do well. Identify the steps or areas that you think you might have to change or even enhance with other methods you know. And then roll out your product!

Always track your ads, use variations in your ad campaign, and read your traffic reports. Use these and other metrics to fine-tune your campaign, which means also fine-tuning the system. But using a model may save you years of effort and thousands of dollars, and get you known to customers as a marketer who can offer solutions first.

ERIK CARTER maintains the Your Business Sales Portal (http://YourBusinessSales.bravehost.com), dedicated to helping you AUTOMATE your sales and DUPLICATE your success by offering programs and bonuses focused on growing and expanding any business, as well as the FITNESS Portal (http://fitnessportal.bravehost.com), focused on making fitness seamless with your life.

Internet marketing is one of the hottest subjects on the internet, with almost endless websites devoted to the subject. More and more people are realising that there is a lot of money to be made online through legitimate businesses, such as selling on Ebay, promoting affiliate products, and developing and selling your own products.

The major attraction of internet marketing is that there are almost no barriers to entry. You don"t need any substantial capital to set yourself up, as you would in the offline world. For example, you can immediately start selling unwanted household items on Ebay, or you could sign up as an affiliate for a company and start promoting their products on the numerous sources of free ads, such as free classified ads sites, safelists and traffic exchanges, and earn a commission for each sale.

Most of the resources that you need to start making money online can be found cheaply, or indeed free in some cases. I recommend creating your own website if you want to increase your earning potential, but again this can be done cheaply if you are on a limited budget. Registering a domain name can cost less than $10, and the cost of web hosting varies, and although I recommend finding a quality web host, it is possible to find free web hosts that will host your site.

To build your site, there are various free tools that will simplify the whole process by using simple, easy to understand editors, so this needn"t be daunting either. A good way to get started is simply by creating your own blog, using a service like Blogger, for example, who will host your site on their server for free.

As you can see it"s obvious why internet marketing is now so popular, and will only continue to grow in the future. However, if you want to be successful marketing online there is a steep learning curve, and a lot of people simply give up after a few weeks because they haven"t made any money. It takes time to learn how to be successful. Experienced marketers have endless resources they can draw on, that will most likely have come from years of testing and researching.

In the early stages of your internet marketing career there is a lot to learn, and you should absorb as much information as possible. Look for the more renowned internet marketers, and subscribe to their newsletters for ideas and tips. Also be sure to check out the Warrior Forum, which is frequented by some of the very best online marketers, who you can learn so much from. There are also numerous ebooks and websites devoted to the various aspects of internet marketing.

There will come a time though when you have to take action. A lot of new potential marketers end up spending hundreds, if not thousands, on ebook after ebook, trying to learn as much as they possibly can, without actually devoting much time to doing it themselves, and learning as they go along. Don"t get caught in this trap. It"s very easy to do. I know because I did it myself to some extent when I first started out.

If you don"t make any sales straight away, don"t panic. Just keep trying out different things and learning from your mistakes. No-one makes lots of money instantly with no experience. It takes time. One thing I would recommend highly is having an opt-in form on your front page, where visitors to your site can choose to receive emails from you. This way even if you are not making any sales at the present time, at least you are building up your mailing list, which many successful marketers claim is their most valuable asset. This will enable you to market your product to the same prospects in future emails, increasing the chances of making a sale.

James Woolley is a successful internet marketer who has a number of sites in various niches. His latest site is a complete guide to internet marketing, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses:

http://www.jimsmarketing.com