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.