Internet marketing is exciting,challenging and confusing. It can lead to success or leave you disappointed. Many people depend on Internet marketing and yet some of those do not have a complete understanding of the basics involved in making an internet marketing business work.
In fact,many Internet entrepreneurs lose a lot of time,energy and momentum because they don’t ask the three essential questions. Do not let this lack of understanding sabotage your potential for success.
To better understand Internet marketing and its impact on your online business,you should know the answers to three key questions:
1. What is Internet marketing?
2. What about the costs?
3. What benefits are there of an Internet marketing business?
What is Internet marketing?
Marketing is actually quite simple. Marketing is to communicate an idea,product,service or organization. So marketing includes advertising,promotion and sales as well as the different techniques and forms of communication used to advertise,market and sell.
Just remember marketing is broader than just advertising or promotion. It includes market research to know what consumers want and then meeting their needs with the right product,price and delivery. Marketing includes market research,deciding on products and prices,advertising to promote,selling and distribution.
Marketing covers all activities involved in moving products and services from source to end user. This includes making customers aware,attracting new customers,retaining existing customers and building and maintaining a customer base.
Internet marketing (IM) includes the same activities,but also drags in various tools that only the Internet has. These unique tools include web pages,email,ezines,banners,blogs,RSS,text links,search engine optimization (SEO),affiliates,autoresponders,and other e-commerce applications.
What about the costs?
The sheer range of costs of Internet marketing can be daunting. There are marketing projects that can cost nothing or just pennies a day and others that potentially cost thousands per day.
It’s important to evaluate your objectives,long term and short-term,and how much each potential customer is worth to you. This will help you determine the operating budget for the marketing campaign.
Many campaigns can be found on the Internet that are free,but instead of paying you need to take time and effort. Don’t reject them all though as not all are a waste of your time;there are many that are well worth the effort. I mention some in my previous post. You can buy text links for $10 a month or you can easily spend $25-100 per day or more for pay-per-click advertising for instance. There are many cheaper possibilities for advertising of course.
What ever method you choose you must absolutely test the results. Don’t waste time or money on the duds,test,test and test again. Start small and slowly find the winners and losers. There is no perfect advertising solution that works for everyone or everything. Each product and service requires a different approach.
What benefits are there of an Internet marketing business?
Internet marketing offers many advantages over traditional methods of marketing. The nature of websites and blogs is that they continue to work to promote and market the product for a long time after the initial marketing effort is over. Similarly,on-line advertising endeavours,such as viral ebooks,ezines,newsletters,banners and text links can also increase in potency over time.
Email marketing can lead to an enormous surge in contacts and sales. It also offers the ability to personalize your message. Email campaigns can be easily be directed at a targeted audience so your chance for sales increases substantially.
Other advantages of online marketing are that it offers convenience and instant gratification. Potential customers will see your marketing message when it’s convenient and often when searching for information about a particular subject. Internet marketing,when automated offers potential customers the opportunity to act in their own time. They find and buy your product at the time it would take to watch a commercial on television or flip through the pages of a newspaper. IM takes full advantage of the impulse buy.
The power of internet marketing includes fully automated delivery of the message,automated payment collection,auto order processing and in the case of digital items auto delivery too. Want to know more? Look out for future posts that discuss the various free and paid-for emarketing methods. To your success.
How this site works: Access to this blog is free and within the articles I recommend free and paid-for products and services and provide links to them. Where a link has an asterisk(*) attached I get remunerated if you make a purchase. I test and/or use the products I recommend.
Turn PLR articles into gold by changing them,mixing them and combining them to make so many different products. Six ways to do just that are listed here:
How To Get Free Traffic To Your Website Or Blog
The answer is to get free traffic –visitors you don’t pay for. This article details how to get free traffic to your site or blog. In fact,some of these methods are much more effective than many paid choices.
1. Blog Commenting
I’m a big fan of blog comments. First,it allows you to engage the target audience and build a relationship with them. If you provide useful,intelligent comments,you reveal yourself to be an expert in your market. Find good blogs in your niche and comment on posts. Join the discussion and never “sell”in your post,usually there is a section above the comment box to insert your site address. The traffic comes from that link you provide when you submit a comment.
2. Article Marketing
Article marketing is one of the best-known methods of traffic generation,but it is still very effective. Write good and solid articles and submit them to article directories. Contact blog owners and ask if you can submit your articles as a client. Find similar sites to your own and offer to submit your articles to them as well.
3. Viral marketing
Viral marketing is a method very under used and undervalued. It is a very effective way to get free traffic to your online business. Create a quality e-book with a solid content and provide links to your websites come. Distribute to as many people as you can and urge them to pass it on. Give it away on the Warrior forum and send it to eBay sellers.
4. Build a list
Any online business needs a mailing list. You will need a professional autoresponder such as Aweber* for this. It will cost you of course but its worth it because then you have traffic on tap. Getting traffic is not easy but an autoresponder exploits your mailing list and generates income.
I will expand on these traffic generating methods individually in future posts.