Online Marketing is Not Just about Making Money Online
You can operate a business online and still not be an online marketer…..
You can make money online and still not do internet marketing…….
There is a difference between the two, ya know. Most brick & mortar businesses, even the successful ones, don’t have marketing plan for their business. It is an afterthought and most of the time, any attempt at “marketing” tends to come across as an after thought as well.
And if you ask most businesses offline what they do, they will tell you something like “I am a restaurateur“, or “I am a small business owner“, “I work in the import/export business“, ect. What you won’t here from them is something like “I am a marketer….” even if they market their business.
I say this because there seems to be a lot of confusion when it comes to what is internet marketing and what it isn’t. People like to lump online marketers with making money online because they think the two are synonymous. They are and they aren’t.
The reason why I even mention this is largely from the scathing third tribe review that Lissie wrote recently as well as Andy Jenkins Beard recent blog post that kind of dissects the ad copy at the afforementioned website.
So if you can make money online without marketing, what good is internet marketing in your business model?
I will get to that in a second. But first what does “making money online” really mean? For most, it is selling something; whether that is a service, your product, someone else’s product, or ad space on your website doesn’t matter. If you can manage to do any of those things, then you will make money online. If you can do it well, you will make A LOT of money online.
Most make money products and membership sites don’t really focus on the marketing aspects of business….
They don’t because it is unsexy. Let’s face it, unless you are a copywriter, developing solid ad copy or a landing page that converts is not fun. I can’t think of a single time when I woke up in the morning thinking, I can’t wait to write this ad copy and take it through the rigors of testing.
What is “sexy” are blueprints for success and you can find them in abundance in the internet marketing world. Third Tribe Marketing claims that they have the answers for bloggers wanting to become hugely popular and make money online; as they put it, marketing strategies that work (without being obnoxious). Yaro Starek has the answers for those who want to become great bloggers as well, or so he claims. Court’s Keyword Academy has a step by step blueprint on how to make money online through SEO.
But most of these “models” don’t focus on the “marketing” aspects of making money online. Instead, most are just watered down connect-the-dots blueprints of business models (in the most elementary sense) for what could work IF everything fell into place just right.
And judging from the emails I get on a regular basis, I can understand why they don’t. The regular Joe who is hoping to earn a living on the internet doesn’t really want to think creatively. They don’t want to question anything. They would rather have someone hand them the hope or dream of doing it by following a blueprint that could work.
It ain’t marketing folks….This is hardly a business model.
Adsense is NOT Internet Marketing
There are some that believe that building several hundred adsense sites will make them internet marketers. It won’t…no matter how successful they are. The folks over at wisegeek aren’t internet marketers….Neither is Court’s Keyword School. It is a business model sure (and a very good one at that). But it has very little to do with marketing.
Now, the people who ARE marketing are the ads that are competing for the space on your adsense site.
Neither is SEO….
I mentioned this on my SEO is not marketing post a few weeks back. Getting ranked in the search engines is hardly marketing because anyone can do it. It is just a matter of building enough backlinks (or out linking) your competitors. If you think that ranking automatically makes you a search engine marketer, you are wrong.
Now, placing the right message in front of the right market using the right conversation….now that is marketing. And where marketers can use the search engines to their advantage is by making that little snippet of text in the search results match exactly with the most qualified searcher with a strong call to action to boot…..Now THAT is search engine marketing.
Getting there is just mundane mechanical turk work.
So, What is Internet Marketing and Why Should You Care?
Now that you know what I think Internet Marketing isn’t, and since it is likely that what you think online marketing is falls into one of those categories, you have to ask yourself how adding marketing tactics and strategies would be beneficial to whatever business model you are following.
First, an offline example. A buddy of mine (whom I have spoke about before) has been a restaurateur for over 15 years now. 5 years ago, his business was floundering. To put it bluntly, his clientele base was dying off or moving away and as a result, his business was dying a slow, agonizing death (more common in the small business world than you think).
Last year, his business had a record year….he had a 47% growth rate in a time when the other restaurants around him were closing. This year looks like he will easily top this mark….how did he do it?
Through MARKETING but not in the traditional sense of the word. He knew he needed two things to get things back on track….
- Customer acquisition
- Customer retention
He solved the first one by simply buying a list of potential qualified customers (those who lived within a certain radius of his restaurant and that made above a certain yearly income) and sending them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Once they arrived at his restaurant, he made them another offer. Join his birthday club and get free stuff (on your birthday) AND possibly win $50 to boot.
It didn’t stop there though. He started creating newsletters…and not the kind you would think…his first one was 8 pages, full color with coupons inside. 2 months ago, it had grown to 30 pages full of content, with pictures of people who came in, insider glimpses of the staff that worked there and of course coupons.
Today he sends these out quarterly to over 30,000 people in the Memphis area.
He added an email list where he could send even more valuable coupons to. The result? Add another 9,000 customers that open his emails and RESPOND to his offers.
The offers are good too. 25% off entrees. He can do this because he understands the psychology of marketing. Increase your prices to offset the costs and give the illusion that the offer is VERY good.
Now THAT is marketing.
I could probably write a small book on my friend’s restaurant and his marketing strategies that he employed. I think that the best marketers, whether they are of the offline persuasion or online, think creatively. Ultimately, there are two things that they are concerned about….
- How to acquire the right customers that will respond to their offer….
- How to turn them into loyal customers….
This doesn’t matter whether you are a blogger looking to just brand yourself as the next Darren Rouse. It doesn’t matter if you are simply trying to pad your list by creating the perfect landing page.
What does matter is either creating (or affiliating with the company that makes) the product that speaks with the majority of those who will be most likely to respond. How you make yourself “visible” (whether this is through Word-of-mouth marketing, which seems to be the blogger’s modus operandi, through SEM or some other marketing paradigm) is part of your business model…..
What the person does when they get there…that is where the marketing strategies come into play….
In a sense, it is why adsense works. It kind of takes the guesswork out of what is working and what isn’t for publishers. If you follow the ads week to week, you will soon discover what is working and what isn’t because the ones that are working are the ones that are consistently advertising on that particular conversation.
People looking to make money on the internet without a clue on how to target niches and markets can easily gravitate to adsense because it spoon feeds you the “winners”, product wise without the work. Are you leaving money on the table? Probably. But hell, at least you don’t have to think outside the box.
Who are You?….What do You do?….Why Should I Care?…What’s in it For Me?
For those of you who are more advanced and understand the basic principles of business and marketing, you know that acquiring and retaining a potential customer is much better than a one and done acquisition. And it is primarily where Marketing online kicks in.
If you look at the marketing models for any of the big successful companies online, you will see that they all follow the same principles.
- Get them to your offer.
- Give them a reason to be acquired.
- Find ways to retain their interest.
How you do that is the creative part of marketing. It is primarily why I love internet marketing. In a sense, it is art at its finest. I get a charge about thinking outside the box but the spark really hits when an idea takes its own shape and develops a life on its own.
To be perfectly blunt, it is the journey that is the most enriching.
I think that that is what most people who are just looking to make money online miss…..the creative part of marketing; it is the coup de grâce of online marketing.
So where do the two meet?
For someone who is simply looking for a quick way to make money, they typically will take a blueprint and be happy (or unhappy) with the results.
An internet marketer will take the same blueprint and will usually ask the question….okay so what, it works….how do I make it better? How do I squeeze every last inch of money out of this? How can I increase my margins by adding this upsell? How can I improve customer (or visitor) satisfaction more? How can I modify the blueprint to make it better? What can I say that will make my customers trust me more? How do I create raving fans that will advertise my site, product or brand without me asking? How do I become synonymous with my market? Can I scale this to reach other niches within the market?
In other words, an internet marketer is always changing to suit the needs and demands of his market better. He or she is never truly happy with the results because there is always room for improvement. The business model may work but the online marketer knows it could work better tweaked just a little more.
That is the difference. Someone wanting to make money online is simply elated when they do. A marketer on the other hand is incessantly searching for ways to improve their marketing. After all, Marketing is ART.
10 Responses to “Online Marketing is Not Just about Making Money Online”
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True. Adsense is not internet marketing. I think that marketing is for people that have a product to offer. For instance, your friend was able to do that because he had a product and he knows that people would like to do something if the cost is cheap (or if they believe they are getting a deal). But in affiliate marketing, the product is not yours. The only thing you can do is to write good review about a product.
Just curious, would you write any post about how to be an internet marketing. For instance, how can someone entice his visitors to buy a perfume or a shoe?
Right now, I just think, that the person just have to write good reviews of the perfume or shoe. Is there any other way??
I actually think that affiliate marketing is marketing as most of the time there is an art to “setting the tone” and there are usually elements of marketing (a call to action, benefits, ect.) scattered through the copy. In other words, typically when you are selling a products (even someone else’s), the page is pushing what you hope will be the end result….the person clicking the link to the sales page and making a purchase. And the page is really nothing more than copy centered on that fact.
As far as copy for selling perfume or a shoe, you could do a review page but that is the lazy marketers way out of things.. You could build the page in a storyboard format (write a story that centers on a character that has an issue and solves the issue using the product. I have seen story format ad copy that didn’t look like an ad that I was very impressed with; one in particular was a squidoo page that was ultimately selling an “increase your vertical jump” product.
The technical side of SEO such as knowing you shouldn’t have the first link to your homepage nofollowed with home anchor text isn’t really marketing, I agree.
But then there are technical aspects to viral marketing which most online marketers haven’t really perfected.
Various forms of automated linkbuilding probably aren’t
Writing a post about why it isn’t a good idea to nofollow a first link, explaining other examples of how it can affect SEO on a blog, and also pointing to some more videos to learn, with affiliate links could be, especially if it became a term people searched for more information about, and the authority links gained to the content means you dominate the serps with a double listing.
I don’t know what Court is teaching, but even keyword research or testing different forms of advertising on sites is marketing because you have data and can make decisions based upon that, even if it is to maybe move into creating a product for a niche, promoting an aff program instead of adsense etc.
I am borderline on situations where you are managing lots of content, and deciding what needs to rank to maximise monetization, and the challenge of making it rank.
How about changing site structure and promoting different content based upon seasons or performance in social media, or trending topics?
@ Andy,
Yeah, in a sense, that IS marketing as it incorporates a soft sale approach (in most cases) to the offer, guerrilla style. I think that that is probably the most used approach on the web though. But the SEO side of things isn’t really marketing. It is just a tactic to make yourself more visible. On the other hand, when you do rank for a targeted conversation, then you have segmented your audience to the most qualified to the offer, provided you aren’t simply shooting arrows in the dark. Geesh….I can see the argument on both sides.
Court’s business is showing people how to find keywords that are easy to rank for using Pagerank as a qualifier and then doing the math to build up a profitable keyword list for a website and then monetizing it with adsense. I won’t argue that this isn’t a good business model, especially for folks that are new. But it IS adsense, and I believe that most new marketers are cutting themselves out of the bigger piece of the pie by partnering with google….that’s just my opinion.
Plus, aside from keyword research and content development, the only question that you have is what place on the page do the ads perform the best? It is definitely dummy proof but once again, you have to wonder what you are losing by going this route. I guess you could call that marketing. Personally, I don’t.
Court’s business model and how he promotes his keyword academy…now that is marketing. Putting out an hour and a half video on “Marketing 101″ in which he discusses how he builds sites for free and then following up with an email announcing that he is about to do the second part of his video series (he calls it “201″) for his members…oh and by the way…if you aren’t a member you can try it out for $1…….now that IS Marketing…and he is doing it the right way.
Yeah, I am too. I don’t think that Ranking Organically is necessarily the end all for marketing though and tend to try to look at a marketing plan based on a case by case situation. After all, it seems like everyone pigeon holes internet marketing with ranking online when there are so many other ways to become visible. In some cases, it is simply worth it to run a PPC campaign and start leveraging whatever it is you are selling immediately. In other cases, there are other avenues to explore. I think that people choose SEO as the only solution because of the belief that it is passive. In some cases, it may be. In other cases, you are fighting tooth and nail with other marketers. At that point, I think you need to take a step back and ask yourself, is there an easier way to get around this without having to have a marketing brawl on the first page?….I think that there are always alternative solutions. It is just a matter of discovering them.
Never thought about changing actual site structure to fit something seasonal because I typically choose evergreen products. Trending topics are good for linkbait but the ROI, from an actual monetary measurement, for them is typically not good (at least from my tests…or maybe I am not doing it right, lol). That is definitely a topic that maybe I should look into.
The real problem is the following:
!Lack of salesmanship!
While many of the successful — now trashed — so-called Internet marketing gurus have a sales background, most of the “wanna make some extra cash crowd” don’t even want to attempt to learn the skill.
They think selling is evil.
Okay, then let them go ahead, build a blog where they can write about themselves, and attract followers that don’t want to buy anything as much as the “self proclaimed authors and follow my passion believers” don’t want to sell anything anyway.
I guess the third tribe will teach that it’s not about them and that it boils down to selling something. … Oh, boy I already see the big disappointment.
P.S.: Is it on purpose that you say Andy Jenkins but link to Andy Beard?
@ John,
The Andy Jenkins thing was a complete oversight….It was not to slight Andy Beard in any way, shape or form.
Twisted question : Was the mispelling of the “gurus’” names (Yaro, Darren) made intentionnaly ? Can’t figure out the reason why, but it it’s true I’m sure I will learn something valuable…
All the best Leo,
Dushan, from Switzerland
LOL…not intentional…just a bad speller and even poorer editor…
Something else to ponder
Sometimes I work with or just help some pretty big sites which is why I think about testing trends, predictive seasonal changes etc.
Another thing I think about which might not be obvious are navigational elements to pages you want someone to visit.
A simple think like changing the size of tag links can boost CTR – splitting content might give you multiple ad impressions, but also a chance of multiple “first ad on page” displays which normally pay more per click.
If you can somehow do these things metrics driven, then it is marketing.