Internet Marketing 101

First, let’s look at our definition of marketing:

Marketing is having the right product in front of the right person at the right time and at the right price.

The rest is strategies, projects and tactics to accomplish all four of the above. Using Internet marketing makes some of these objectives easier.

“Marketing to the masses” is becoming obsolete. Internet marketing specializes in one-on-one relationships. The objective is to maintain that one-on-one feel even as your business grows.

Before the Internet there were two types of marketing. The first was to be in the right place at the right time, meaning when someone was ready to buy a product that you were selling. That meant advertising all of the time through newspapers, radio and television so that when a person thinks “I need this now” they will have seen your ad and buy from you.

The second method was the Yellow Pages. The Yellow Pages were great for businesses because people who use the Yellow Pages are looking to buy something now. But, the market is limited to people in your local area.

Internet Marketing has opened up a whole new world.

For example, companies like GM and Ford use TV ads to market to the masses. The ad is seen by people whether they need a new car or not. But if you go to their web site the odds are very high that you are looking to buy a car.

The car company strives to personalize the visit. What is it you are looking for in a vehicle? They may offer some choices. Truck, SUV or car? Two-door or four-door? What color? What, specifically, are you looking for?

They know you’re the right person at the right time. They provide, as quickly and easily as possible, the right product and the right price.

Heck, they’ll let you choose the model, pick the color, the engine, add any options and order it. This is personalized service from a giant company through the magic of the Internet.

There are three HUGE advantages in Internet Marketing:

  • The speed and ease of researching and testing your market
  • The ability of just one person to market to the whole country, or even the whole world
  • Your web site can be a complete broadcast medium, combining print, radio and TV.

By the same token, the whole world contains your competition; it’s not just one other store a few miles away. But there are tools you can use to gain an edge, to find out exactly what people are searching for, and respond with your solution to their problem.

Marketing research is finding out what people want, what keywords they are using to search for it, then providing it to them. It’s not rocket science. The trick is doing it better than your competitors.

Once you know what people want, the next step is to attract them to your solution, convince them it will solve their problem, and keep them coming back for more.

The number of ways you can accomplish this is mind-boggling, however.

If you type “Internet Marketing” into Google you’ll get about 250 MILLION search results. Obviously, there’s a lot of products and information out there. The question, as always, is where do you start?

The idea is to:

  • Get the right people to your web site (Traffic-Generation)
  • Get them to use your monetizing strategy, whether it’s clicking on an ad, an affiliate link, or buying a product (Profit-Generation)
  • Keep in contact by having people come back to your site or receive your email,  increasing your chances of being there at the right time (Prospects and Repeat-Buyers)

There are all kinds of marketing strategies like the Funnel or Hub-and-Spoke, but what you are looking to create is a market path, a series of products that take your customers to the next step, the next level. If you sold someone a set of golf clubs, look at a golf lesson video series or a golf resort vacation as the next step. Find the path.