Marketing on the Internet is the use of the Internet to communicate the ability to purchase products or services that they desire. Sounds simple right? Well maybe. The art of marketing online is a new one and there is much debate throughout the industry around the best practices in Internet Marketing.
There are a large number of people new to marketing on the internet that will simply be regurgitating what they heard on a course they bought, or something they read, modified by their perceptions and not thoroughly tested. On the other hand there are people out there that have been around for long enough and have been doing more than just teaching Internet Marketing, they have been actually practicing what they preach and have real world experience. These teachers do so to help, to research their market and because they enjoy it, besides the fact it is great promotion for them and lucrative as well.
I have spent a lot of time in the past few months learning marketing on the internet so that I can generate a passive revenue stream and hopefully one day become influential. The thing that I have found is that there are so many different options that I had a tendency to get so much enjoyment from the learning aspect, especially the fact you are able to get quite enthusiastic about some products, and then not allow the time to actually implement the strategies you learned.
Also what I’ve found, and this is what scares a lot of people away in my opinion, is that there are a few ’snake-oil salesmen’ in the industry who are not genuine and are simply selling products that no longer work. In actuality there are plenty of them, but it is fairly obvious that they aren’t still working their systems when they fail to show you up to date records of their current accounts and they spend all of their time selling you on their program and none teaching you what actually worked for them recently.
Learning to market on the internet is a worthy goal for many reasons. It is not location dependent, it can be done part-time while still working your normal job and it can teach you what I have found offline as well as online, that finding a market makes a lot more sense as a first step than producing a product. Understand that I have had a number of businesses and this is one of my first online.
There are a number of ways you can get people to buy, but the more important thing is to ensure they come back and that can only be achieved by giving value for money and value for time. I base this understanding on my own experience as well as in the businesses I have owned and worked for including large corporates with over 100k staff globally. I am also a software engineer and have a background working with eCommerce websites selling physical products and services. These skills help me to create sites but do nothing to teach me how to Market On The Internet, that is the role of this site to give you the resources to choose the best mentors you can. And to encourage you to come along to the events and network with other people in the industry. I can assure you that is one of the most fulfilling aspects of this business.
To your success
Michael Smale
Editor
