When a new person first gets started trying to make money online the learning curve is almost overwhelming. This is really true if you have a job, a family, or are an active person. Prioritizing what you do in your business can be the difference between sticking with it or quitting.

As a new person if you do not want to quit you must master this. I can relate because I had the same problem as a part time internet marketer for over 4 years. So what I did was focus on learning and mastering one aspect of marketing my business.

I picked list building because I was told the man who rules the list rules the money. I also read that people primarily use the internet for sending and receiving email and for researching information.

So I concentrated on article marketing and driving traffic to my home page. Then I would capture contact info and follow up via my Aweber autoresponder. This is the same system I use today, except that my article marketing efforts are even more intense.

Learning to write is the most important skill you can have because you or someone in your company will be doing a lot of writing.

If you can not, or will not write, then hire a quality ghost writer to do it for you. We started our article writer service for people like you. We have even began to develop it into a service I call "Hands Off Article Marketing" which really covers not only writing your article, but also getting it out where people can see it.

This is the best internet advertising in my opinion. I do all kinds of things now. Most of them are free, or nearly free, and are designed to provide search engine bait, and potential long term traffic. That is why I do not do pay per click advertising. PPC is great for immediate traffic, but you always have to do it to get traffic tomorrow and beyond.

Same thing with traffic exchanges and safelists. You are trying to brand yourself and build a list if you do it right. But the minute you do not buy credits or surf pages you have no advertising. I have learned that when it comes to internet advertising if you are standing still you are really going backwards.

Blogging is great use of articles. Social bookmarking is as well. You can get excellent traffic from your blog. Blog Rush is one way to do that. Just putting their widget on your blog in a prominent place can get you traffic when your blog posts are shown on other people's blogs.

But you still have to write blog articles, post them, ping your post, and social bookmark your articles to get traffic from a blog.

Here is my own 4 step system for article marketing.

1. Write an article of 400 words or so.

2. In my Word Press blog I will post, ping, and social bookmark my articles.

3. Bookmark my post to OnlyWire.com, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo, Digg, Stumbleupon, Netscape, and a couple of others if I have time.

4. Submit an article several times a month to Submit Your Article where I rewrite it in 20 minutes into hundreds of unique versions. Each one is then submitted for me to hundreds of directories who all get a unique version of it.

This is a very well rounded approach to article marketing. Of course learning to write the articles to target specific keyword phrases is a big key and that is where an article marketing company can help. They can write targeted articles for you and even do the marketing so you get the full benefit from them.

You get all of the glory because you get 100% copyright for that article. Put your name on it as your own and start branding yourself as an expert in your niche.

So whether you like article marketing, email marketing, forum marketing, traffic exchanges, safelists, pay per click, classified ads, ezine advertising, blogging, social bookmarking, etc. pick one and focus on it until you are having success.

I suggest you choose article marketing!

Copyright (c) 2007 Jeff Schuman