The Truth About Online Marketing

I’ve been ripping the CDs I received when I joined Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club to listen on my MP3 player while I jog and walk. I originally joined the Renaissance club to get a cheap copy of Perry’s Definitive Guide To Google AdWords for $29.95 rather than the $49 price you pay when you buy it separately (you can read my ramblings about this special deal), but I’ve since realized that the club itself is probably of more value to me. The CDs and paper newsletter have lots of advice for small businesses, and while AdWords is very important, getting fresh marketing ideas is more valuable.

I just completed listening to the Part 1 CD by Ken McCarthy from a marketing seminar with Ken, Brad Fallon (search engine optimization expert), Perry Marshall (AdWords pay-per-click advertising expert) and Jay Abraham, who convened the whole event.

This CD was titled “The Essential 20% that Produce ALL The Serious Results On The Web”, and if you know me I love 80/20 rules and this is a good audio presentation that cuts to the chase about online marketing.

An Introduction To What Really Matters When Marketing Online

I won’t repeat the whole CD here, just the really good stuff I took away from it. This is beginner style materials but with enough depth that you feel you have learnt something. Probably the most important point made, or should I say the most important THREE points made were these –

1. Online marketing is a direct marketing medium – Ken really stressed this point and I understand why. Many business owners tend to look at the Internet as this frontier of marketing with everything being very new and technical. While there certainly are technical barriers to cross, online marketing is really just direct response marketing. That’s why many of the best old-school offline direct marketers are doing so well – you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to market your business on the web.
2. Internet marketing is about traffic AND conversion. – This point was stressed because many people when they enter Internet business tend to focus on traffic – just getting more and more of it – while the process of optimizing the conversion system is forgotten. Very important point this one – it’s all about converting your traffic, not just increasing it.
3. The methods you use to sell products online is different to how you would sell services or information. – This was definitely the most interesting point for me. While I consider myself quite the veteran of online marketing I’ve never made a clear distinction between selling the three different types of commodities online. I’ve been selling services for many years. I’ve occasionally sold products, but never as a proper business and I’m only now getting into the information marketing business. There definitely is a different methodology to use when marketing each of these items and you need to be certain you are applying the right system for what you are selling.

How To Get Traffic

Next up Ken reviewed the five essential ways to get traffic to your website.

1. Joint Ventures – Probably my favourite since you can really get huge amounts of traffic very quickly. This is when you partner with other businesses/individuals in a win-win relationship to send targeted traffic to your website where you share the revenue from resulting sales with the venture partner.
2. Home Grown – Probably the slowest method is when you work to create your own traffic. Usually this is achieved by offering free valuable content and keeping it up for many months to build an audience.
3. Buy It – From day one if you have money you can have traffic. There are many ways to buy raw traffic or filter advertisements out on the web to bring in audience. Google AdWords pay-per-click was the method on the CD they recommended to business owners, and Perry Marshall went on later on another CD to discuss pay-per-click advertising.
4. Seize It – This was how they described search engine optimization. Seizing traffic was by making sure your website was in the right place in search engines to seize traffic, which doesn’t cost money, but is a tricky business sometimes. This was of course Brad Fallon’s expertize and on another CD he discussed SEO, which I summarized in – The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques.
5. Public Relations/Publicity – Using media to generate attention is a classic tactic for marketing a business and it applies online. You can attempt to drum up some news yourself (submitting press releases, promoting on blogs, etc) or by hiring a specialist PR agent to do it for you.

You Must Be A Writer

One last point I thought worth mentioning was that if you intend to sell online you really need to a be a writer or be prepared to employ one (or many). The web is a text medium and despite the increasing presence of video and audio the web will always rely on text to sell. If you want to succeed online you need to be able to tell a good story using text, just as you always have in direct marketing.

Yaro Starak
Word-Weaver