Knowing why people google is important basic knowledge. As an internet marketer, you're either interrupting their search process or entering into it. You're saying "Hey! Look at me! I've got the solution you've been looking for! Click here!" In order to really get your prospect's attention, you need to know why they are doing what they're doing.

At base, people search for two reasons.

• for entertainment
• for information

You can make money out of both. I make money out of both. So, for thoroughness, let's look at both.

Entertainment Searchers

These are the millions who spend millions of hours surfing the internet and not looking at TV. These are the folks who hang out on MySpace or Facebook and interact with each other. They also download stuff--music, books. If you consider shopping a form of entertainment, then these are the people looking through Land's End's website looking at the shoes or sports coats.

Can you make money off these folks? You bet! The shoppers are obvious. My first successes were sites selling hard goods, instead of information products.

Plenty of internet marketers have made money off of MySpace. There's one guy who designed stuff for MySpace pages. I don't know a lot about his business, because MySpace is not something I do, but he's making a good living at it.

If you're considering reading a form of entertainment, which it is, then there are a ton of sites devoted to promoting authors and their books. These would have to be included among the sites making money off of the entertainment end of things.

Information Searchers

The other reason people use the internet is to find information. Although, most of my early success was with sites selling hard goods, I mainly work in information marketing, now.

Information marketing works like this

• find a group of people with a problem
• sell them the information they need to solve it.

How do you sell information? With information! There are a number of ways of doing this. Let's mention two

• You can build an authority site (a site with lots of information about a topic) and use search engine optimization to get traffic. There are many ways to monetize that traffic.
• You can offer information in other formats (articles ?), get traffic that way, then send that traffic to a squeeze page where you collect the name and email address.

The later is my current modus operandi.