Strategies for Success: Making a Living with Online Marketing
FxPremiere.com
Strategies for Success: Making a Living with Online Marketing
FxPremiere.com
FX Signals that work — Online marketing is defined as the use of various channels, both online and offline, to drive sales and promote successful businesses. In recent years, research has shown how the internet can be used to sell products and achieve company success. Established business leaders have used the internet to communicate with shareholders around the world, while a new generation of successful companies are using the internet for all aspects of sales and order fulfillment. These entrepreneurs are able to reach specific databases of retail customers, bypassing traditional retailers.
Online marketing encompasses a wide range of channels, both online and offline, and influences the marketing strategies of individuals, organizations, and intermediaries. It involves navigating, initiating, and fulfilling purchase activities through channels such as party plan, consumer direct marketing, manufacturer direct to retailers, vertical transaction process, and other forms of direct business to the customer. This book introduces these forms of electronic marketing that directly target customers.
Strategies for Success: Making a Living with Online Marketing
Furthermore, many businesses have discovered that online marketing strategies offer the most cost-effective means of communication with potential and existing consumers. It allows for critical communications that influence consumer behavior at a lower cost. Additionally, electronically-mediated business transactions can result in lower costs for sales and customer fulfillment.
1.1. Definition and Scope
As the competition in business and technology has surged, consumer behavior has changed, and new technologies have emerged, a growing number of companies have been using internet marketing to more effectively expand marketing, sales, and service use. No longer just an auxiliary approach, internet marketing has become an important strategy in its own right through the importance of the Internet as the movement of the current business environment. The defining characteristic of internet marketing is its ability to make services and goods marketing more effective or of greater value as higher sales and customer satisfaction, and lower costs. In other words, the extent to which business can capture the marketing benefits of the Internet including the ability to implement customized marketing that adapts to individual customers can differentiate a company from its above average competitors.
1.2. Evolution and Importance
The 21st century has thus far seen the most dynamic changes. New media is bigger, faster, more comprehensive, global, rich in content, diverse, and interactive. Traditional marketing channels served as media through which the content of others (the businesses that created TV programming or who took out ads in newspapers, for example) was delivered to individuals (consumers/viewers/readers/listeners, etc.). On the other hand, the internet is a medium that individuals not only consume, but also create, organize, and distribute. Part of its impact is that it allows for the development of content (and elimination of the middleman, or traditional media) that businesses have found valuable to supplement not only their marketing efforts, but their very business existence.
Since entrepreneurs and small businesses (two groupings which are increasingly the same) lack the deep pockets necessary for ads, they are taking advantage of the increasing opportunities to use the internet for marketing. These medium-sized and small businesses, entrepreneurs, and individuals share a concern for making limited marketing budgets as productive as possible. This paper focuses on individuals, entrepreneurs, and small businesses (who may even work at larger firms) who use online technologies and bold ideas/collaboration/cooperation to not only take a piece of the pie, but to create bigger, more customer-centric pies from scratch. The internet allows businesses to connect with prospects and nurture customers in unprecedented ways, as well as to optimize and grow individual businesses and entire industries.
2. Understanding the Digital Landscape
Several changes from the last section create this digital ecosystem and give rise to new business models. Corporations are learning to treat the internet as a natural market, and they are using it for new business models and recent business functions. Other major changes involve the nature of technology itself: online technology enables the creation of lower-cost applications of traditional marketing techniques such as customer relationship marketing and sophisticated communications tools such as weblogs and streaming media. These advanced technology tools then produce additional changes in consumer behavior. Commerce is increasingly global. The reach of the world is only a click of the mouse away. Cultural diversity and the need for effective communication within the global business community are increasing. Consequently, businesses will benefit from adding specific job-related consumer behavior skills and an understanding of multifaceted consumer behavior processes. Businesses must understand, appreciate, and retain strategic consumer relationships by demonstrating that they understand lifestyles, business-to-business law, and business-to-business consulting.
Word-of-mouth communication across global boundaries builds relationships and encourages trust and loyalty between businesses and consumers. Businesses must consider this emotional investment of trust through bridging language and business consumer behavior into curricula and programs. The world, from a commercial perspective, has shrunk with digital media. Geographic distance, the exchange of skilled labor to control prices within the market, and global economic practices of WTO member states are no longer insurmountable. Distance or location does not necessarily diminish perceived or real differences in overnight business-to-business trade, the availability of life cycles of products, the legal process, or business and consumer ethics, or social responsibilities across the marketplaces of world nations.
2.1. Key Platforms and Tools
Now that we understand the importance of a varied and full toolbox for content creators and online marketers, let us take a look at some of the most important and key platforms and tools at our disposal. There are so many services and platforms that it would simply be impossible to try and provide a full overview of every tool in one book. Therefore, I have chosen the ones that I consider to be the most important and integral for being successful in the online marketing and content creation game. If you feel that I have left out a really important gem or if you have a tool or platform that should be added when this book is updated, then don’t hesitate to send me an email.
To add to this, tools and platforms, even really big ones, come and go. If your content creation plans and success are overly reliant on just one platform, you are at great risk of failure if that service decides to make major changes or terminates its service. This might sound like common sense, but you would be surprised how many content creators I have observed and known who have been largely dependent on one or two platforms and have experienced great hardship when that platform went through a major upheaval. So diversify, and don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. And most importantly, remember that your content resides and can be close to zero if you don’t have your own website and domain.
2.2. Consumer Behavior Online
Sounds easy enough, right? I am sure we would all like to think that the people we are targeting are just like us so we know what they want and can give it to them. This idea may work for many people and many products, but in today’s vast e-commerce environment, we need to go a step beyond.
We need to be able to untangle the spider’s web of diverse cultures and sub-cultures. Age, sex, income level, and geographical area might be some of the most apparent and easiest to define factors, but have you thought about the social strata — the hip, the blue collar, or the elite? Which religion and which church does your audience belong to? It is extremely important to know, for example, the recent changes in US consumer behavior due to the events of September 11, 2001. How are they different now? It is advisable that we contemplate the factors influencing behavior before we start any kind of market analysis or planning.
To contribute to the solution of the problem, there are a few useful models on consumer behavior that I would like to illustrate with some examples. First of all, it is important to become aware of some of the more common factors why people do not buy. These include conditioning, brand image, socially affected buying, emotional decision making, distorted thinking, and expected change. Any of these factors can lead to impulsive, habitual, or brand loyal buying. When we purchase a house, a car, or any high-tech product, we are likely to engage in what is known as a complex decision-making process. However, studies on so-called routine buying have shown that aware, involved, interested, or information-seeking buying are the more common kinds of behavior in consumer markets.
3. Building a Strong Online Presence
As we discussed earlier, markets are conversations. There are many ways to join those conversations online. You need to choose some specific tools or strategies to help you reach your specific target customer. The media tools available vary widely in purpose and function. Businesses use media in different ways to achieve different objectives.
Online marketing requires a healthy dose of understanding of real-world business basics that can vary depending on your business goals. If you are a business owner, you’ll want to design a website that will highlight your company and its products, a website that not only showcases the benefits to the customer but also provides a secure online shopping experience with high-quality customer service. If you work as a marketer within a company, perhaps you need a place to display your resume and some of your marketing ideas to differentiate your skills and expertise from those of others. If you market for a non-profit, perhaps you are working on a fundraising campaign.
Although different kinds of websites are used to achieve these different objectives, they also share a lot of design components that are generally useful. All fairly successful websites maintain a certain degree of interactivity that promotes information sharing among users and helps create a community. Providing timely, useful information online to your customers will really add to the value of your product or service. Doing this cost-effectively is a major job for marketing to pull off.
Not all websites sell online, but properly used they will be part of the conversion process. Of course, many people who shop online start by researching products, a portion of that research completes the purchase decision process, and a subset of that results in an actual online sale. Many of those customers complete their purchase when they find a company on the Internet that meets their needs. All sites must cater to these sales-oriented consumers. Some companies do this very well, without being an e-commerce website. Traditional media companies, such as television, radio, and print also use the Internet to build an audience that can be monetized with lucrative advertising revenue and special event marketing. Media companies that add online to their portfolio of distribution channels are a good example of the issue of managing the channel conflicts.
3.1. Website Development and Design
Building a website requires no formalities. You do not need a business plan or to incorporate it. You do not need a complex mission statement or a board of advisors. You need an idea and some money. In most cases, all you need is $250 for a computer and a telephone line and a little bit of sweat equity. Then spend a week with a tool like FrontPage or Site made web page and add a few code-based tools to it. It is as simple as that. Where can you add complex programming or buy outside help? It comes when your project hits a critical mass. This can be weeks, even months. However, until then, for most applications, you do not need a thing. With this in mind, we will divide web publishing into three areas: building a basic site, adding code-based tools, and final touches, and when to buy help with complex programming and tools.
I. How to Build the Site. First, build your website. In the beginning, there is no right or wrong way to do it; just do it. If you do not get overly complex until you are making money, you cannot lose. Pretend you are a restaurant owner. What do you need most? You need a basic restaurant where you can prepare food. After you make money, you can turn your restaurant into an architectural masterpiece. At this point, a home-cooked meal will do. In line with this, we are going to talk a great deal in this section about the use of instant ready-set tools. Why? Because most people feel at home with them. They often cannot believe that they can look like professionals for so little effort. That is no problem. If and when you make some extra money through your website, hire a programmer.
3.2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The purpose of search engine optimization (SEO) for short is to improve the positioning of a particular website within the “natural” (i.e., not paid) search results returned by search engines. These results are also referred to as organic search results. SEO involves optimizing the website such that it can be found by the search engine more easily and thus is ideally listed as one of the top ten search results for certain keywords, so that most of the search engine users visit the website.
To optimize your website for Google, the most widely used search engine, it is crucial to understand how Google works. How does the search engine recognize that there is a new website? How does it list the website? How does it find new content? How can the owner make the search engine index its website more often or more quickly? This and much more is part of the discipline widely known as search engine optimization (SEO). No one really knows how Google’s search algorithms work, as they are top secret. However, knowledge-based assumptions and Google representatives have provided plenty of information about this. These can be divided into specific technical measures on the one hand, and more strategic measures on the other.
4. Content Marketing Strategies
Many small business owners, like us, work from home and sometimes our only connection to the outside world is the internet. With it being such an important part of our business, you would think we all would be online marketing geniuses and have a website that delivers a successful outcome. That is, unfortunately, not the case. Once we have a good-looking site, we need to get people there! There are countless ways to make this happen. But, you will need to not only attract them to your site but keep them coming back. Our visitors are our livelihood, and we need to cultivate relationships with them. To do that successfully, we need to narrow down our focus and decide who we need to target, decide how we will communicate with them, and give them a reason to respond to our efforts. Social media is a fantastic way to do this, along with email marketing and mobile marketing. With social media, people can see what your company is up to and will talk about it. The more they talk, the more your name will get out there, and more people will come to your site. In return, they may give you their attention and even give you their business.
People want to do business with people they know, like, and trust. Just think of your closest friends. Why are they your closest friends? It’s probably because you have the same values and beliefs, and you know a lot about them, right? This is what we want for our clients to know about us. In the end, this relationship will help them grow their business. With email marketing, companies can add value to their website as well as create exclusivity. This gives the customers a reason to stick around and keep coming back. With mobile marketing, there is a tool that combines the social media features, select marketing, and the audience’s close relationship to their devices. With this, coupons and reminders are sent, and there is a high chance that this person will use this information because they are always kept up to date in their hand. Always keep in mind, one of the most effective ways that you can utilize these platforms is through the sharing that they offer. Always make it easy for a visitor to market for you.
4.1. Blogging and Article Writing
Inc. Magazine has reported that some experts earn as much as $25,000 a month or $300,000 a year for blogging and online writing. As a writer, you probably won’t make nearly that amount when you start out, but you can work steadily to increase your income. Along the way, you’ll also learn a lot about good business practices and develop many new business ideas.
When you decide to go online in order to earn money as a writer, be sure to focus on business topics and services as much as possible. Business folks are willing to pay a premium for high-quality writing because they know how important it is to communicate their ideas effectively. Once you gain writing expertise, you can earn a good living writing about many other job-related topics as you quickly ‘learn the ropes’ and update your knowledge about markets and different job sectors. Some of the cities in which you’ll find the most freelance employment include New York City, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. However, many top content providers for blogs and up-and-coming new online media come from other cities, and many find freelance or permanent employment with companies in other parts of the United States, and sometimes jobs in other countries as well.
4.2. Social Media Engagement
Social proof creates resonance and builds strong relationships with others, which can be very important. Emphasizing social media-oriented initiatives can play a pivotal role in achieving shared goals. Making a consistent appearance is very important, as it encourages others in your field to think of you easily and follow you wherever possible. Your followers will automatically be attracted to all the values you represent in your posts. Getting clear and imperative ideas about your followers’ needs is helpful. If you have clarity about current trends, cleverly threading your interactions with trending topics can be helpful without risking excessive strife.
It is vital to remember that access to the various digital streams around you should always be your top priority. A number of scheduling programs are available in cyberspace, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social. With these in your social media availability toolkit, your business will never lack the necessary social sugar to sweeten its overall taste for everyone. These programs are useful time-saving tools, but are not necessarily the perfect solution for everybody to automate all social posts. They do effectively help in displaying essential content across all available time zones and can be suitable for a whole range of social media accounts, making them useful for both amateurs and professionals.
5. Email Marketing and Automation
The last strategy we are going to talk about here, and the most interesting in my opinion, is the use of email marketing together with automation to get more customers and sell. An email list of people genuinely interested in what you are offering is a real treasure waiting for the best moment for you to take advantage of it.
Automatically delivering content that we have prepared in a personalized way, sending offers according to the actions of previous interaction, optimizing the triggers that we have in place so that each person has with us a unique journey individually, preventing communication with people who have an increasingly low risk of obtaining something from us, and proactively reactivating those who do not respond.
This can seem a little scary, but many automation tools help us to trigger actions from various channels to optimize our time and the speed of our communication, improving the user experience. And believe me, users value and are very grateful to receive special treatment. The general rule is that you enjoy the red carpet more than the Xiaomi headset I have at home.
6. Paid Advertising Techniques
If banner ads won’t capitalize on that 5–20% conversion rate and make you rich, what will? The truth is that your chances of becoming that most-sought-after of online entities: The millionaire Webmaster are virtually non-existent. Economists agree: nothing can satisfy the increasing demands of our maturation as a species. But fear not, we have highlighted some of the finest pearls for you to collect, rest assured, Web developers who are making their living working on the Web are using at least six different methods to generate revenues. One such category is our topic today, “Paid Advertising Techniques.”
The Web is the most effective vehicle invented to date for targeting potential customers. The internet is woven tightly around the world. With just a click of the mouse, you can switch languages and currencies, and see your audience immediately jump world wide. No brick and mortar sales organization can even come close to the marketing muscle available. While advertising is seen as expensive by some, and using various techniques does take that which many of us have in scarce quantity: time, we know the real truth…the internet is merely a somewhat deceptive back alley creation of the U.S. military. Every programmer worth the name, it seems, ‘grows up’ thinking: “What would I like to be able to do, myself, online?” The true strength of the internet lies in diversity of community and in its flexibility. Advertisers are making as good a living as other businesses by getting the advertising message, consisting of words and images (animated or otherwise), to their potential readers. This chapter will explore the amazing flexibility of internet advertising.
6.1. Google Ads
The most popular way to promote a business online is by using Google Ads. Google Ads is based on the pay-per-click (PPC) model. PPC is not only one of the most effective online marketing strategies, but it is the fastest way to advertise your business, as long as you have the budget to make it work.
The most effective Google Ads have the right keywords. Make sure you know how to develop a keyword list and how to choose the right keywords for your target market. Google Ads help you reach the right audience, which is important because when you market anything online, your marketing has to be very cost-effective. To make this type of advertising as profitable as possible, make sure that you are targeting the right keywords so that you can include only the people that you really want to show your ad to. When you are using the Google Ads program, make sure that you have an extremely relevant ad on an extremely targeted keyword group to increase the efficiency of your campaign.
6.2. Social Media Ads
As for paid advertising, sites like Facebook and Twitter have account management tools which allow you to control the process, and through which you can make substantial money. It’s relatively easy to set up an advertising account within these services and to sign up to pay only when your ad generates click-throughs to your site. These terms can be set on a per-click or per-impression basis. Also, if you choose per-click, you can set a limit on the daily cost. We also have the issue of promoted tweets on Twitter. These products are shown to a wide user base depending on the targeting criteria you define, which can include interests, keywords, geographic location — even a specific person’s followers. This is an important part of influencer marketing, which will be discussed in the next section.
It is important to ensure that metrics on any potential ad site’s blogs are transparent and candid. The availability of timely, accurate information can be important in making informed advertising decisions. Also, the targeting ability of an ad service can have a major effect on the success of a campaign. This can build on the high degree of user information available from profiles and past interactions. Optimizing these elements of performance in a mutually beneficial situation is well recognized as being of major importance, and so the available tools are likely to be intelligently constructed. In other words, if measurement can help you, the site with the data can usually help you measure.
7. Affiliate Marketing Programs
The business of affiliate marketing works quite smartly. To earn an income with this form of marketing, website or blog owners can feature links on their sites to promote popular products or services. Interest in these companies is increased when valuable options are developed for their customers. When purchases occur, both the company and its affiliate contributors are rewarded for their participation. Affiliate marketing is effective on both commerce and service platforms.
There are two primary types of affiliate marketing programs. The pay per performance or “PPP” model rewards profits to affiliates who generate sales by pre-selling, selling or providing leads for the merchant business. Alternatively, the “pay per click” or “PPC” option rewards affiliates who increase interest in the new offering to visitors. It’s a very web-savvy group of people that can make this form of earning work. Websites that contain engaging, informative text which supports smartly placed ads have the greatest chance for success.
8. E-commerce Fundamentals
Shopping cart technology — which choices are best for your site.
At its most basic level, shopping cart technology provides for the catalog display of merchandise, online orders placed by customers, and the processing and capturing of sales transactions. Some of these choices can be incorporated into marketing packages. Established e-commerce service providers, other than assisting you with a shopping environment, may also be able to help establish credit card processing services, access to the internet, and with site design and marketing assistance.
When deciding upon an appropriate provider or service, look for the following features:
- Does this system work with the web server that I already have? — Can the package be customized and/or modified to operate business-specific functions? — What kinds of reports can I receive and are they customizable? — How does the e-commerce vendor resolve conflicts? Does it use a human being with the authority to make decisions?
8.1. Setting Up an Online Store
With the aggressive movement of traditional brick-and-mortar businesses onto the World Wide Web, today it is becoming more essential to have an online storefront in order to remain a competitive force in the business world. An online store is almost a duplicate form of an offline store complete with window decoration, sales personnel, and the ambiance which you would like to reflect. However, running a business on the World Wide Web may require having someone in your staff or having someone who was hired to do that specialty — web designing. This responsibility carries with it many fundamental factors to consider, such as: the general appearance of the storefront, the ease with which the shopper can navigate around, the upload time in the shopper, and the quality of scans you provide. Additionally, the ease of actually writing a program which will enable the everyday just click and order would be a very heavy programming in order to pay.
There are ways and methods to do this that are not only simple but also cost-effective. Know that there are service companies like and Triple-A Booksellers which provide an array of professionals to help you get up and running. These companies are also provided, or are agents for, all the financial transactions that you were required to do business on the Internet immediately. Furthermore, their web template well function as a ready-made online store but also, for a fee, they can provide additional services to upload speed of the purchase function. Ask if they also provide alternative supplier services. Optionally too, for your target service group, you can mail a printed catalogue, collected from the website. With difficulty in designing, the two best solutions are to have either database-driven web pages inserted into the site, or pages that use the CGI script, one of them being one of the above service companies.
8.2. Payment Gateways and Security
Lastly, let’s talk about some of the components of an e-commerce site that you need to go out and procure yourself. For instance, if you are going to be processing payments from your clients on a website, using your shopping cart software, you are going to need something called a payment gateway. Here’s how it works: After your client enters their credit card information and clicks “submit order,” a secure connection is made through to your web server that sends the information from your client to a secure page on the payment gateway server computer, which is protected in a bank-class secure co-location server environment that has been certified as secure, to the credit card processing banks. This server relays this information to the credit card banks that either approve or decline the transactions based upon a number of factors, such as whether the account is in good standing, the address of the shipping destination matches the cardholder’s billing address, etc.
If, for example, you wanted to get into e-commerce tonight, you might think that you could just hand out a phone number for your potential clients to call with their credit card information. Not true. For Erich’s e-commerce site to collect and process credit card transactions on his website, the following items have to be purchased and integrated into his shopping cart software so that his website can process the transactions itself without the customers having to hop out to another company’s server and back: A merchant account confirms that you have made a leasing agreement with the various credit card banks to accept credit card transactions and use their networks. A payment gateway, like VeriSign, directly connects the secure order form on your website to the secure server of the bank from which you are leasing your merchant account, so the transaction goes through the net in real-time and you don’t have to do it by hand.
9. Analytics and Performance Tracking
Keeping careful watch on tracking and analytics is the most important difference between online and offline marketing. In business school, students learn that successful businesses hit their numbers; in the web business world, you need to check your numbers at least daily, and possibly much more frequently. You have instant information on leads, sign-ups, and sales, and that course-correcting ability, while even more important in large or mature businesses, applies to start-up endeavors as well. Most businesspeople know their revenue and expenses to the penny with monthly reports, but successful web-based marketing demands that you track expenses and incoming revenues daily.
In a brick-and-mortar store, you can easily keep track of how many people come in and how many make a purchase. But online, you can tell where the customer came from (for instance, his or her state or what search terms were entered), where the customer goes on your site, the path taken, and where and why he leaves. It’s important to keep very careful track of such important information, so that you can make the necessary adjustments as soon as possible. I can’t stress enough the importance of paying attention to these performance indicators, so that you can make the necessary adjustments quickly and measure the effect. If you make a change to a page or email creative, you’ll be able to see the effect almost immediately. After a short period of time, you will clearly see its impact. Even if you only have 100 site visitors a day, you can measure the change in the percentage of leads each day, and watch the trend of resend and unsubscribe numbers. For a start-up customer with a brand-new list of 2,500 rented email addresses, one changing line of written copy caused a 22% increase in rental revenue during the last two weeks before the trade show; just imagine what you could do once the list is qualified, opt-in, and truly engaged in communicating.
10. Building and Engaging an Audience
The fourth 800-pound logistics gorilla is to not imagine that just because you are loitering around the web you are effective. Being present is not enough. You have to be heard and, indeed, loud and continuous. Instead, the 10,000-person auditorium is needed, but you don’t get it from your web site. You get it by creating dependency on your web site. You get it by creating an “ecosystem” that surrounds and feeds off your web site. This means constant visibility and additional value. If you are running a contest, have everyone respond to your site. If you are offering your knowledge or expertise, create countless opportunities for people to interact with you or others on your site. Let your site be the ongoing conversation piece that draws everyone back continually. Remember in the age of internet frenzy when sites regularly sought to create “stickiness”? Today stickiness is the rule, and it’s not an easy condition to attain. Be prepared to work at it. Finally, all this doesn’t work if it does not dovetail with the nature of the actual business you are involved in. The web offers huge marketing potential. But it seems to punch even higher than expected when it reflects the character of your business operations as well.
11. Creating and Selling Digital Products
We’re now entering the digital generation where bits of information are creating a new dimension of activity with powerful tools and channels of e-commerce. While we can certainly expect these tools and channels to undergo several changes over the next 20 years, we can accurately predict that globally linked networks and the information contained in them will continue to shape events across all economic and political boundaries. This digital transformation has become the defining factor of the era in which we live. Businesses such as robots, avatars, real-time news and entertainment and shopping, gene chips, and the Internet and World Wide Web have arisen as a response to the continuing development of the Information Age.
In recent years, the barriers to digital entry have been coming down, enabling those with creative ideas to take their own finished digital product to market without the need to invest in middlemen or inventory. Resultant products fall into the category of intellectual property and include software, games, music, screen savers, e-books, and a variety of movies, although various production tools and size of finished product differ. Characteristics of digital products are: 1. High profit margins: A near zero cost to reproduce and distribute a digital product creates an unprecedented opportunity for healthy margins. Upon developing and testing a product, selling multiples are practically free. 2. Creating and Selling Digital Products. This enables a business to concentrate; however, businesses dealing with the public will eventually need customer service personnel regardless of the quality of product. Buildings and employees are not required to warehouse and ship digital products. 3. It’s both cost effective and positively encourages risk taking since the amount of cash tied up is only a small fraction of what’s necessary for a stock-based business requiring substantial investment dollars and 9-month lead times before recovering costs. Small businesses that operate on slim margins and can’t afford to place large orders are actually at a great disadvantage. 4. Placing product demos on the Internet relieves some of the pressure and anxiety associated with product purchasing since people can now virtually inspect a substantial part of the product before spending any money. Chances for a refund are reduced as well since customers will know exactly what they are getting. 5. Due to sharing, a digital product can become very popular and economically rewarding. Traditionally, growing popularity has only been possible among mass-production based products, meaning only a few international best sellers were able to afford advertising to achieve the necessary status. 6. In the age of broadband, Internet-based multimedia promotes a highly appealing and visually exciting way to sell digital products. 7. Base product development on downloadable software which can be personally guided by support staff, and encouraging smaller order size offerings.
12. Freelancing Opportunities in Online Marketing
Freelancing opportunities in internet marketing are virtually boundless. The quick and sometimes overwhelming success of the internet has often been cited to explain the surging interest in the freelancing lifestyle. Freelancing offers the option of working from home part-time or full-time. Many people must make revenue within a 12-hour period including commuting, thus limiting available time for making money online. Internet freelancers tend to work part-time as they balance traditional workloads or attend college or do volunteer work.
The expanded bandwidth that competitors offer continues to alter the skill level needed by internet marketers in the 21st century. Some desired skills can be learned by purchasing a single book or borrowing from a library, and others require extensive and continuous study. Engineers and computer scientists often find work available on the internet. Accountants and others skilled in desktop publishing are in demand. Some homelands and territories have specialized laws or regulations about accounting, legal advice, and engineering services and those of other professionals. Experienced professionals contemplating the freelance life or the location-independent career option should explore these laws and other factors that influence the desirability of relocating the freelance practice to the locality where they are located. Strategies for Success: Making a Living with Online Marketing
Although the work of freelancers is similar to that of employees, freelancers work with clients as opposed to employers. According to Lesley Sheppard, those who initiate a business may first need to sign a lucrative long-term project from a former employer or another acquaintance. -and marketing consultant Cliff Ennico believes that many successful freelancers have been laid off from traditional jobs, DWAM -Doing Web Projects- is an effective tool for attracting several quality freelance clients. The proper mix of projects makes freelancers a good source of new clients for internet entrepreneurs. Employer-employee relationships may have limited the former work they did while employees due to lack of opportunity or disinterest. In contrast, the entrepreneur outsource worker attempts to perform the least amount of work to achieve the most profitable result.
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13. Building a Personal Brand Online
Your personal brand online includes everything that represents you on the internet. It is your online persona. There are many ways to create a brand and get people to take notice and interest. You want to build your brand so that when people think of you, they think of a certain quality and reputation. With online marketing, your brand is tied to who you are and what you have to offer. As the saying goes, people buy from people. They also buy from people they like and trust. That’s why it is so important to be yourself when you market your product or service. Sincerity counts for a lot.
The first thing to consider when building your online brand is your website. Your website is your storefront in today’s connected marketplace. Just as a store sign and window display give you an idea of what a store sells, a website lets consumers know what your brand is about and what types of products or services you offer. Your website should be attractive and easy to navigate. By that, I mean that whatever the purpose of your website is — whether to sell products, software, or financial services — it should be easy for visitors to come to your site and to find out what they need to know in order for that visit to result in a lead or sale. Informational sites need to be easy to navigate, too, but their objective is to draw you back to the site for updates. A good example of the different navigational approaches is the difference between e-commerce sites such as and educational sites such as MayoClinic.com.
14. Scaling Your Online Marketing Business
If you’re going to make a living with online marketing, you will need to scale your business up to a certain income level. No matter what you’re selling, you really need to see yourself as a business owner. This article, and the next few in the series, deal with the topic of scaling your business as you eschew the employee mentality and instead embrace the entrepreneur mindset.
At a very basic foundational level, when you’re selling a product or a service or a system that delivers a product, you are really in the business of marketing. Don’t let anyone tell you anything different. That’s the big secret. That’s why most people fail to make a living at this. Let me repeat this point. You are not in the business of delivering products or services. You are in the business of marketing. In other words, to succeed at the delivery aspect of your business, you must first succeed at the marketing part of the process. Given the tremendous amount of false economic beliefs floating around the online marketing scene, it’s easy to believe in the popular misconception that you are in the business of selling specific products and offering specific services. You’re not. That’s just window dressing. At the end of the day, you are in the business of selling the idea that your product or service effectively addresses the problem that your target audience wants to solve. The sooner you recognize that it’s not really about the product or the service, the sooner you will come a long way toward lasting business success. Strategies for Success: Making a Living with Online Marketing
15. Legal and Ethical Considerations in Online Marketing
Because online marketing involves offering products and services on the World Wide Web, it is governed by federal, state, and international laws and regulations. A marketer engaged in a commercial dress-making business and an online company reaching out to 3-year-olds face similar obligations, yet different legal issues. Consumer protection, privacy, taxation, and ethical considerations all have special implications in online marketing.
There are various laws that regulate online marketing activities, and when conducting business online, market makers must be sensitive to what is legal and ethical. Privacy is a major issue. When selling on the Internet, it is much too easy to monitor and record the activities of people transacting business. Thanks to cookies, marketers can track the searches a user performs, the sites a user visits, and even the search terms that user enters — such as “cheap” and “inexpensive.” The information obtained can enable a marketer to profile a user’s habits, interests, fears, and activities. It can also enable a marketer to send a user unsolicited e-mail. And with the growth of wireless devices, direct access to private individuals can occur at almost any time.
