I've been thinking for a while about writing a big overview of internet marketing, but hadn't been quite sure how to approach it. Until recently, I figured I'd try to come up with a way to be able to be able to answer "what's next" for any internet marketer, whether experienced or just starting out. But given the many possible paths, each appropriate to different types of people, I was never able to decide how to organize it. Then my wife told me she'd like to start contributing a little to our income online, and the seeds of a new idea were planted...

In order to help my wife decide what she'd like to actually do, I started working on a "great big picture of internet marketing", and as I did, a natural organization emerged. It wasn't about going step-by-step, but about seeing the big picture and choosing which pieces to explore in greater depth.

At the top level of internet marketing, there are three main topics: the building blocks or tools you use to do it, the activities that you do, and the revenue sources. Among the tools are email, a website, a domain name, an autoresponder, a payment processor, etc. Among the activities are niche selection, traffic building, selling, product creation, etc.

Then there's the revenue sources. As I built a list of possible sources of income, again, a natural organization emerged: those that require no product (selling advertising, collecting donations...), those that use someone else's product (affiliate marketing, drop shipping...), and those that use your own product (info products, software, your labor and/or expertise, membership sites...).

I won't go into more depth here, but I've started posting my thoughts on each topic in an interactive internet marketing guide I'm calling The Great Big Picture of Internet Marketing. You can access it all from that link or from the right sidebar of the White Hat Crew homepage. Perhaps I'll turn it into an eBook someday.