An Internet marketing book to get you started
There is no formal Online Marketing Degree, no email marketing template to get you rich quick. Many of the internet’s most successful marketers learned their trade by trial and error. Those that come along afterwards looking for a more structured approach to internet marketing management are presented with a chorus of expert advice and it is sometimes difficult to separate the pearls of wisdom from the rest of the background noise. What is needed is a simple internet marketing book that covers the keep topics with guidance on where to go next.
This guide is the first step in that direction. It may not be an Online Marketing degree but it should be used as the first step, an introduction into the key concepts of internet marketing management.
Online Marketing Degree 1 – Customers
Internet marketing management is all about customers and any good internet marketing book will tell you that the best way to sell successfully to customers is to keep them happy and coming back for more. It’s always easier to re-sell to you existing clients than to try to find new ones – which is all very well, but where do you start?
It’s all about pain and pleasure. What pain are you trying to solve and what pleasure (benefit) are you providing to ease the pain. Both are important to keep the customers coming back. To find out what is important to your customers you have to do some thorough digging around. Research is the key to success.
- Silos – Break down you market into smaller and smaller sections. When you get down to the smallest divisions then go out and find the discussion groups, social network sites and niche forums where they hang out. Learn the Jargon, they real keywords that this group uses to describe itself.
- Keywords – When you know the terms that are being used in an industry you can take the next step and find which phrases are actually being used in the search engines to find their products. It will do you no good to be #1 if no-one is searching for that term. There are some great tools out there that can help. Some of them are even free! Google has a great keyword research tool, Traffic Travis is a gem of a program for internet marketing management and the free version give you 90% of the functionality of the professional product.
- Competition – Some things in life are harder than others! Try to balance the potential traffic generated by a keyword with the existing competition. When you are starting out on your Online Marketing Degree – take an easy course first! Select a keyword with low competition, even if it has relatively low traffic. You can always go after the big fish later.
Online Marketing Degree 2 – Product
When you have identified the pain and found out what keywords and phrases people are using to search for solutions then you need a product. Something to solve these problems. Fortunately the market for products is very mature and there is a whole industry in place to provide you with an unlimited collection of products to sell.
For example ClickBank and Amazon are ideal places to start. Search for products with high commission rates that match your niche.
Online Marketing Degree 3 – Website Design
Now you need a place to sell your products – you need a website. Fortunately you don’t need to be a tech geek to get started. Many sites can be built from templates using sophisticated blogging software such as WordPress which is a close as there is to an industry standard in the internet marketing world. You can build your own site or get others to do it for you and there is a massive ecosystem of tools and addons to deliver the functionality you need.
- Lists – First thing you need to do is start collecting lists of clients. The technology to do this is all around autoresponders. This is software that delivers high value content to your subscribers over a period of time. This builds trust which then allows you to recommend and sell. Autorespodner software is generally paid for as a monthly subscription but there are free version starting to appear. Market leaders in the field are AWeber and GetResponse, but there are many others.
- Generate Trust – by providing value. You need to provide you loyal customers with a constant stream of valuable information. So you need to learn how to write quality newsletters or at least you need to hire someone who can! Outsourcing becomes increasingly important as your online marketing efforts begin to take off.
- Email Marketing Templates – Use of email marketing is the key to success. Very few people will buy a product after hearing about it once. It may take five, six or seven emails over an extended period to entice a purchase. Particularly if the price tag is high. Your email list is your income source, providing you with a steady stream of income. Remember that once you have a successful list it can be used to cross sell other products and promotions. The possibilities are endless.
Online Marketing Degree 4 – Traffic
The final chapter in the internet marketing book is search engine traffic. Traffic generation is a whole industry in itself – known collectively as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. It can broadly be broken down into two sections: Onpage SEO and Offsite promotion with backlinks.
- OnPage SEO is all about making your site ‘SEO friendly’ to the search engines, so they know what it is all about. Proper use of keywords on the home page and making sure these appear in the title, description and headlines.
- Offsite Promotions. The way that the search engines calculate the importance of a page is to count the number of links pointing back to that site, these act like votes. The more votes (links) the better.
- Variety. It would be no good at all to have thousands of links from just one site. You need lots of different links from different types of sites such as social networking sites, blogs, articles and news items. The more the better and ideally they should be from highly respected sites in your industry.
Online Marketing Degree 5 – Getting Help
If you are serious about making money with online marketing, then you need to invest in some software and systems to help. These are the systems that we recommend as the best in their class:
- Affilorama- A complete system for affiliate marketing, build by one of the leaders in the industry and well supported with training videos and feedback forums. Highly recommended.
- WPSyndicator- Promote your WordPress blog for links and traffic. A great way to bring visitors to your site.
- MobileMarketing- Essential if yo want to break into the massive mobile market.
- ArticleMarketingRobot- At some point you will need to get into the business of writing and submitting your articles. When you do you will need ArticleMarketingRobot, it automates the whole process and saves you masses of time.
You can graduate with your online marketing degree if you follow these steps: Know your customers and understand the pain that they have. Find a solution to that pain with a product that you can sell profitably. Use high value to generate interest and trust and use internet marketing management software to help you.
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