The Associate Reference

Ten Reasons Why Internet Marketing is the Best Marketing Model

You are not convinced that internet marketing could be your marketing model of choice? Here are ten reasons that will convince you why internet marketing will be the best marketing model, no matter what type of products or services you offer.

1. No other marketing method can work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Also, no other marketing method has the potential to reach customers all over the world, instead of the limited circulation area of whatever traditional avenues you choose.
2. Though it is not free, the Internet is the most cost-effective method of advertising your business and your products. Your investment in Internet marketing will involve much more of your time than your money. If you think there are cheaper methods of advertising, call your local newspaper and ask about display advertising rates.
3. You can reach a broad, diverse potential customer base, particularly if you set up multiple websites.
4. You can have a seamless vertical and horizontal business integration using the internet and spending the least cost. This can be achieved by having various websites in different niches and promoting relevant products in those niches.
5. Even those visitors who don’t become immediate customers can be added to your database, and likely translated into future sales.
6. The Internet brings your products and services to life like no other media. Only television commercials can provide as much motion as a website, and television is not interactive—you can’t click on a TV screen! (Besides, can you guess how much a television commercial will set you back financially?)
7. Just imagine the expenses that you may need to incur if you were to have a network of offices around the world. But, on the internet, by enlisting professionals, who are into affiliate marketing, you will have a bigger network of web publishers and affiliate marketers (in fact, millions of them) and at, practically, no cost to maintain the network. They will be able to do a much better job of promoting your products as they will earn incentives.
8. More than 1114 million people have access to the Internet and that number is growing every day. You have the potential to harness far more customers than a strictly land-based business ever will.
9. This is the only marketing model which is the most cost effective, requires least capital, generates the most revenues, with practically NIL overheads, requires no special skills except for common sense and with the highest growth potential.
10. With the latest Web 2.0 technology catching on like wild fire, it has become even more easier to market and monetize through internet marketing.

To achieve excellence in Web 2.0 techniques, you need to tie up with the best possible technology providers in this arena.

To learn what Web 2.0 techniques are all about and how it will help you to exponentially grow your internet marketing business in the shortest possible time, please download the Free Ebook Authority Black Book.

From the next chapter onwards, we will discuss specific techniques you can use to make Internet marketing work for you.

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Create an Internet Marketing Plan

You now have your website goals and your budget.

Now is the time to create an internet marketing plan or timetable for your business.

1. Where do you expect to see yourself in a year?
2. Five or ten years?
3. What are the types of advertising that you will be willing to spend on?
4. What are the niche areas that you are willing to consider for your websites over a fixed time frame?
5. What marketing and monetization models that you plan to adopt?
6. Are you planning to create your websites in a static platform or create your websites in a dynamic platform using the latest web 2.0 techniques?

Don’t make the mistake of relying solely on Internet methods to advertise your business. You will be able to get started that way, but you probably won’t be able to expand without seeking alternative advertising venues.

These are some statistics that you need to keep in mind:

• As of 2007, 1114 million people had Internet access.
• 96 percent of those with online access use the Internet as their first and preferred method of researching product information.
• During 2004, major search engines had an indexed around 20 billion pages.
• 74 percent of those who use search engines research local information through them.

(Above statistics are taken from various sources)

Simple math dictates that many more potential customers will find your business by virtue of your online presence alone. Combine that with a carefully targeted and well-researched marketing campaign, and it is easy to see why Internet marketing and online businesses succeed!

Be prepared to capitalize on your website. Every visitor who finds your website is a potential customer. It is important to capture as much information as possible whenever someone visits your site. The average consumer must be exposed to your marketing message between three and seven times before they are convinced to buy, so the more often you can put your business in front of them, the better your chances at making sales.

Some tips on capturing and using visitor information:

• Offer opportunities for visitors to add themselves to your list. Ask them to register, sign a guestbook, subscribe to a newsletter, or request to be notified when you have sales or special offers.
• Place a subscription box on every page of your website, not just your homepage. The more often visitors see the box, the more likely they will be to check it out.
• Give away premiums such as free gifts, newsletters, e-books and reports as incentives for signing up for your list. If your product is not an e-book or can’t be given away, run a search for free downloadable e-books that relate to your product or service and give those away.
• Get recognition, credibility, and new customers by writing an e-book, how-to book or article series that you allow to be distributed free—with the provision that the material includes your byline, URL and subscription information.
• Add every address you collect (with permission from the subscriber) to your double opt-in e-mail list. The best service provider to use for this purpose is Aweber. They are by far the best autoresponders available in the market today.

Developing and maintaining a list of customers is vital to your Internet business. Whether you use your list to send out regular newsletters, communicate special offers, or simply touch base with new and existing customers from time to time, you must have an ever-growing database of contacts.

I know we are still in the drab theory part of the Internet Marketing Success Course. But, very soon, probably from the next post, we will start with more interesting aspects of this course.

So, keep reading, keep learning… And, I am sure you will be on your way to a great internet marketing success story.

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Internet Marketing Budget

Go Ahead, Download The
Above Ebook Free…

You need to decide on your internet marketing budget to be able to carry on your business more effectively.

Even though, it is known that you can start an Internet Marketing business with just a little initial investment, you should expect at some point to establish a realistic and firm budget. You have to plan to reinvest some of your profits in your company.

At the first stage, you may start the internet marketing business as part time along with a full time nine-to-five job. Or, you may start it as a full time business. Either way, you need to decide what is the amount of money you will be able to set aside every month for your internet marketing business.

Secondly, once you start making money in the internet marketing business, you may need to decide on an internet marketing budget for advertising spends and a budget for other expenses.

Also, having a small initial advertising budget can help get things moving faster. Once you have your website set up to accrue profits, you might want to consider advertising in a few “traditional” ways to start attracting visitors. These traditional advertising methods include:

1. Post cards
2. Flyers
3. Direct response mail
4. Yellow pages
5. E-mail blasts
6. Billboards
7. Newspaper ads
8. Fax blasts
9. Magazine ads
10. Television commercials
11. Radio commercials

Some of these avenues may be more expensive than the others. You also need to consider low-cost or free online advertisements, and consider placing more traditional ads when you have some profits to roll back into your budget.

Some of the online advertisement methods that are either free or costs very little are:

1. Free online advertisements using US Free Ads

This is one of the biggest online advertisement agency on the internet. The best part about US Free Ads is that Google loves them. So, you can quickly get lot of visitors to your website by advertising with them. Apart from getting a hook for your website, you can also advertise about any affiliate program and start earning commissions. For a very small fee, they also have a premium membership with lot of additional benefits.

2. Use Traffic Swarm to advertise

Traffic Swarm is a simple and a great idea and it works. You may attract visitors for your website as well as promote various affiliate programs. It is also free to register and use but if you would like several premium benefits, then you can upgrade to a paid member.

3. iSnare Article Directory

iSnare is an article directory search engine as well as an article distribution service provider. You can submit articles, free of cost, to the article directory but the power of iSnare becomes visible when you use its article distribution services. What exactly it means is that they will distribute your article to 40,000+ publishers and hundreds of article sites. They charge less than $2 per article for this distribution service. This is an extremely powerful facility which will attract 100’s and 1000’s of visitors to your site apart from the facility of affiliate commissions.

From the word go, you should start using all of the above online advertisement avenues to jump start your internet marketing business and to promote your websites. This will give you a chance to earn some quick revenues thereby earmarking a bigger internet marketing budget for your online and offsite advertisement spends.

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Basics of Internet Marketing

The very basics of Internet marketing requires you to consider and fully believe your internet marketing to be a business. In other words, you need to get the mindset of a businessman. Internet Marketing Basics will give you the basic steps on which your internet marketing success hinges on!

Before you can decide about the various Internet Marketing campaigns that you plan to pursue, you need to invest a fixed amount of time into this activity.

1. Decide what you want your campaign to accomplish
2. Prepare a plan
3. Establish a budget

The above steps are critical to your internet marketing success. You need to remember that strategy is the key issue here. You are headed into unfamiliar territory, and without a map, you’ll probably get lost! So, the above steps are your map.

What Are Your Goals?

What do you want your website to accomplish? You may want visitors to buy products or services directly from your website, or you may only want to provide more information about your brick-and-mortar company and give your customers a place to learn about sales, special offers, business hours, and other information. Your first step is to determine your goals for your website, and plan to design it accordingly.

Research and Plan

Plan to spend a lot of time researching information, both for your company and about your competitors. The more you know about the competition, the better equipped you will be to offer something unique. Internet users typically make Internet purchases for one of the following reasons:

1. They recognize the name (branding)
2. The process is convenient and the deal is better than other companies offering the same product or service
3. They can’t get the particular product or service elsewhere

If you can offer something unique and original, even a new spin on an old product or service, you can succeed online. With good advertising practices, you can also be successful with not-so-unusual products by increasing your visibility and offering better deals than your competitors.

Establish A Budget

Now that you know what your internet marketing goals are and you also have a clear plan after doing adequate research, you need to decide on your short term and long term budget. Ideally, you need to have a budget on both expense as well as the revenue. If you are a new comer to internet marketing, then it will be difficult to predict the quantum of revenue. But, at least you should have a clear goal for achieving a certain revenue within a certain period of time.

For example, you can set yourself a goal to earn $100 in the first six months of operation. You can then revise this goal to $1000 in the next six months of operation. Again, you can plan to proceed to earn a revenue of $10,000 in the second year of operation. This is a very viable and achievable goal in internet marketing. An exponential revenue increase is achievable in internet marketing. For this example, I have specified, rather, modest amounts.

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Is Internet Marketing For You?

Till some years back, Computers, Internet and Internet Marketing were the exclusive preserve of computer professionals and internet geeks. But, today if some one poses the question - Is Internet Marketing For You?; I would confidently say that internet marketing is for everyone including, you and me.

Whatever be the type of business you may be involved in, you have a place to start business on the internet. E-commerce, which is a fancy term for online selling, has enabled companies large and small to reach a bigger customer base than ever before. Not only companies, even individuals, can sell product, service or information on the internet.

There are literally billions of people who use the Internet every day, and buying goods or services online is no longer intimidating or threatening. In fact, many people prefer to shop on the Internet for everything from books and videos to big-ticket items like cars, boats, and real estate. You can even buy groceries online and have them delivered to your house. Now that’s convenience!

There are two main categories of Internet marketing: strictly online businesses, and expansion of traditional brick-and-mortar (offline) companies. Offline businesses are companies like Coca-Cola, Reebok, Neiman-Marcus, and Honda: businesses that exist in the “real world” and use Internet marketing to reach more potential customers as well as give their existing customers access to information about their companies. Business websites for offline companies also offer a chance to interact and offer feedback on products or services that worldwide customers would not otherwise have.

Online businesses include giants like Amazon and eBay; they are companies that don’t have physical store locations, but sell goods and services online. Companies based on e-book sales or various Internet services are typically online businesses, as they have no need for a physical store.

Regardless of the type of business you’re running or planning to run, the Internet is a powerful marketing tool. Everyone uses the Internet for business today, and if you aren’t online, you are missing out on potential customers. Go ahead — come up with the most obscure type of business you can think of and enter it in your favorite search engine. You’ll be amazed at the number of results you get.

Your website doesn’t have to be just a sales tool. In fact, it should be more than that regardless of whether you plan to sell through it. The most successful websites are informative and interesting to visit, providing information about your business whether or not you actually offer online purchases.

How can we decide as to what should be made available on our business website? It depends on the nature of your company, the product lines you have or you plan to have and your personal or business goals and strategies will decide the type and extent of online presence that you should have.

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