Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing is the Big Revolution of the 21st Century.

Never before in the history of the human race has it been possible for a high-street businesses to be advertising their wares to buyers thousands of miles away in real time and having the whole sales process and delivery instructions being handle entirely automatically… and practically for free.

Website hosting is now so cheap and the quality of freely available Content Management Systems like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal mean anyone can have a website up and running in just a few minutes that’s practically indistinguishable from the website of a multi-million pound and long-established business.

Similar advances in Search Engine Optimisation means those same websites can be listed in the Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo within hours, and not long after that, can have traffic landing on the site’s pages and buying products and services from them (even something as simple as a personal blog can be the source of an annual £20,000 in sales, just of a simple “how to” PDF).

And if you choose to use Pay Per Click, those sales can come in minutes, not hours, because the traffic is practically instantaneous. You don’t even have to pay for your advertising and marketing upfront because as the name suggests, Pay Per Click means you pay only when someone responds to your ad by clicking on it.

Finally, even more recently the explosion of cheap high-speed connections, free and easy-to-use video hosting sites and technology, has meant it’s possible for anyone to use some of the most powerful marketing strategies and tactics ever invented.

In other words, for the budding Internet marketer, the barrier to entry in this extremely lucrative and profitable marketplace is so low as to be practically non-existent.

No surprise, then, that there is so much money being made on the Internet.

But all is not what it seems, because the days when you could put up any old website and make a lot of money have gone. Nowadays the very simplicity of it all, and the low barrier to entry, means that competition is fierce, and for every Internet millionaire out there, there are a thousand exasperated and frustrated business owners losing money and licking their wounds.

And it’s all so unnecessary because the fundamentals of marketing online are really no different from the fundamentals of marketing anywhere else: it’s all about putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time.

No mystery, and no magic.

The first of these, the right message, we achieve with relentless testing – changing the words in our ads and on our web-pages to see what works the best and gets the highest response. PPC systems such as Adwords makes this easy, with split-testing built into the system itself. For the web-pages, you have split-testing software like Google Website Optimizer – it’s free and allows you to test different combinations of text and graphics and even completely different pages against each other.

Identifying the right person is a matter of keyword research – finding out what people are looking for online to solve their problems and challenges. Keyword research is an art as much as a science and there are lots of tools, free and paid-for, to help you find the people who are trying to find you.

Finding the right time is as easy as doing what you can to get their email address and then marketing to them relentlessly over time. You can never tell at which point any individual will buy, but statistically, you’ll find maybe 10 times as many people do buy from you when you do it this way as buy from you when you make the offer on the page they first land on.

If you pay attention to these three things, and do so religiously, you’ll find your Internet marketing results improving dramatically and with startling rapidity.

Written by Chris Cardell of Cardell Media