Most of us have started in the Internet marketing world from scratch. You may have a business background, and bring those skills to the table. Yet, you'll soon come to find that doing business online is just a bit different from doing business offline. Lead generation is done with squeeze pages and opt-in boxes. Traffic can be bought, but learning all the different forms of it takes a while. You may know how you want to advertise but not how to get the advertising. Though online marketing takes all of its principles from direct marketing, the activities involved in each are clearly different.

Here are the top three mistakes that new Internet marketers make when starting out:

1. Not operating in a niche that you're passionate about.

Because learning the ins and outs of Internet marketing is so different from the outside world, you may be thinking about the money first. This is a HUGE mistake. It's not really about the money when you start out. It's about learning to function and helping people. When you do that, the money follows.

If you choose a niche that you're not passionate about, you won't find the thrill of coming back to it to learn day, after day. You'll get bored and the whole business will fail because you just don't like what you're doing. You'll probably even blame the process and not yourself.

2. Not starting off right away with lead generation

The very first thing you need to do is to pick a niche. The second thing you should do is to start building a list. You need to get a squeeze page up almost immediately and to start sending traffic to it. Only through having a list of people who know, like, and trust you, will you be able to make any money online.

3. Not creating a blog

So many people think that blogging is too hard, takes too much work, and isn't necessary. Well, it is! You need to bond with the people in your niche. You need to give them good information and show them that you're an authority. A blog is a great way to do that and a great way to send traffic to that squeeze page. But you don't have to write all the time. You can use video, audio, and captioned images to relate to your audience. When people love your blog, they're much more likely to opt-in to your list.