I remember in the early days web sites were very unsophisticated and shopping karts and Paypal and Google didn’t work like they do now.

People seemed to have very little trust that the Internet would deliver the goods they chose and bought. There was the twin fears of being scammed and of not getting the goods in a timely fashion.

And yet there’s no doubt that in the last 20 years the Internet has grown massively in the amount of money spent through it. #

Fundamentally Internet marketing has driven prices down and allowed people with virtually no capital to start a new business. That means the gene pool of people trying out whether they’re any good at business has increased massively. Many of them would never have been in business without the Internet. And yet a lot of them find that they can do business.

And of course as more and more people come online the rush to get their money continues. That means that in order for their site to be chosen as the buying site they need to be different/better to the other sites.

That means the use of marketing. Initially marketing was pretty much what was being done offline – long form sales letters and the creation of lists.

However, with the power of the computer to see exactly how people were behaving, rather than relying on focus groups, marketers could do thousands of experiments on headlines, colours, offers, body copy and page placement. All of which meant that they could then do the same for another site, more easily using these results.

Google helped in a variety of different ways to allow people to measure their marketing results. They also helped by introducing a straight forward RSS reader. RSS was very useful as it meant you didn’t have to go to someone’s site to find out their latest tale. Instead the RSS feed would keep you up to date with any changes. That meant you could stay informed and up to date more easily than in an offline marketing environment. That also meant you could stay at the leading edge of marketing more easily too.

So as a marketer you just kept learning and earning. The money being earnt was talked about in all the presentations and events held for Internet marketers. And of course this attracted yet more people into the Internet marketing field. Everyone could have an opinion on Internet marketing.

And then blogs and social media in general (such as Twitter and Facebook) arrived that allowed everyone to have a voice. It also meant that many blogs could be monetised with Google ads, text link ads and other advertising services.

And through all this affiliate marketing was running. Clickbank is probably the best known of the many affiliate marketing sites. Using the affiliate strategy meant marketers didn’t need to do the hard work of designing a product, they could simply choose one that looked to be doing well and market it on their site and watch the money roll in.

So Internet marketing became a beast that was fed by the people who trawled the Internet looking to spend the dollar in their pocket in the most cost effective way to buy the product they wanted.

If you’re not involved with Twitter or blogging it’s probably because you’re scared that the time you invest in getting interesting content together is actually a waste of time.

Twitter’s A Time Waster

So many people have denounced Twitter as simply navel gazing. Or they say they’re  completely uninterested in the fact that someone is making a cup of coffee, or is saying hello to everyone who follows them, or is going for a walk in the park.

That means they’re looking at it in the wrong way. Twitter is a relationship builder. It builds your profile for prospects and clients alike. It shows what you’re like when you deal with customers day after day.

Using Twitter properly is a definite advantage to business, check out my Twitter Action Guide for Business to see the tools you’ve got to help you.

Blogging Is A Dead-End

Maybe you’ve heard people say that blogging is a dead end, people run out of things to say. And anyway, “it’s impossible to make money through a blog.”

I make money through my blog, I know plenty of other people who make money from their blogs. And the important thing to remember is that a blog is really almost (but not quite) like a web site with content that’s continually changing. That changing content is the golden key to the Google front page ranking. Because Google likes fresh, relevant, content.

What’s Squidoo and HubSpot?

Are you aware of important social media sites like Tumblr, Squidoo or Hubspot? They’re all very much like blogs but use different terminology. However, they’re liked by Google and therefore your content can get good rankings, if used properly.

I Don’t Need The Internet

You’re right not everybody really needs the Internet. However, you can bet the number of people using Yellow Pages to find your product or service is dropping.

You can bet that even if you’re referred by word of mouth they’ll be able to check up on you on the Internet. If they dislike your site, or its content, that’s a referral you’ve lost.

If they’re referred again and they re-check your site and it’s still the same, they’re going to think nothing happens at your company. And they use Google to find another company.

Wouldn’t you rather be the company that hoovers up prospects disappointed by another company’s web site or lack of Internet presence?

Are You Missing The Point?

If you’re not taking advantage of these low cost ways of exploiting the Internet you’re guilty of not exploring and testing other ways to get new clients and to address previous and current clients.

Where To Start Social Marketing…

The best place to begin social marketing is to think strategy. You need to incorporate social marketing in your business. Do it half-heartedly and it’s totally pointless.

The other thing to bear in mind is that social marketing is evolving, you need to test what works for you. Incorporate it in your marketing arsenal and keep up to date.

That way you wont miss out on changes to how to use the Internet. Alternatively, of course, subscribe to this blog because I tend to be at the bleeding edge of marketing. Although I rarely advise my clients to go that far until I’m happy things are working.

Whatever you do remember that Peter Drucker said that in a cojpany there are really only two things that are important: Marketing and Innovation. And the Internet incorporates both!

Some I’ve seen say they believe that marketing is pushing out the relationships constructed through social media sites, before marketing was used.

And yet good marketing is all about building relationships with the people you know are the right ones to buy your product or service.

Think about it…

Marketing Trust

Would you buy if you didn’t believe it would last for the time you wanted it to? Would you buy something if you suspected you were being led up the garden path?

You wouldn’t. And they key to getting comfortable with buying anything is making sure that you trust what is being sold to you. And a major part of that trust is through the relationship you have with the supplier of the goods or services.

I don’t mean one where you slap each other on the back, or one where you go skiing together.

What I mean is that you build a business relationship where you feel you can trust what the other is saying.

And the problem with business is that it’s actually quite difficult to build that relationship.

And that’s where marketing comes in.

Marketing is there to inform, educate and build trust in your customers and prospects. Build trust in what you’re saying through all the mediums you say it.

Marketing Builds Trust

And the key point is building trust through all the mediums you say it. Because your target market has a choice over which communication channels it uses. Therefore your communication will only be seen, heard or read if it goes through the right channel.

Social networking has helped to differentiate groups of people and sites like Twitter mean that you can actually proactively find people who match your target market and begin to build a real relationship of trust with them.

Marketing Can Abuse Communication Channels

Granted people can abuse routes such as Twitter. However, Twitter’s openness means that marketing abuses get short shrift and the likelihood of anyone buying from a company perceived to spam or overly “market” through Twitter is low.

Instead Twitter can provide a better service for clients. Interesting items in social sites such as Digg, Twitter and others can lead to massive spikes in traffic. Those spikes in traffic can bring prospects who are actively looking for what you sell. And are pleased to find you.

Marketing Can Be Bad

In conclusion, marketing can be “bad” in any medium used. Equally, it can be very helpful to prospects and customers when it is very well targeted. Social media allows companies to get better at targeting who they build relationships with, which must be a good thing.

Some I’ve seen say they believe that marketing is pushing out the relationships constructed through social media sites, before marketing was used.

And yet good marketing is all about building relationships with the people you know are the right ones to buy your product or service.

Think about it…

Marketing Trust

Would you buy if you didn’t believe it would last for the time you wanted it to? Would you buy something if you suspected you were being led up the garden path?

You wouldn’t. And they key to getting comfortable with buying anything is making sure that you trust what is being sold to you. And a major part of that trust is through the relationship you have with the supplier of the goods or services.

I don’t mean one where you slap each other on the back, or one where you go skiing together.

What I mean is that you build a business relationship where you feel you can trust what the other is saying.

And the problem with business is that it’s actually quite difficult to build that relationship.

And that’s where marketing comes in.

Marketing is there to inform, educate and build trust in your customers and prospects. Build trust in what you’re saying through all the mediums you say it.

Marketing Builds Trust

And the key point is building trust through all the mediums you say it. Because your target market has a choice over which communication channels it uses. Therefore your communication will only be seen, heard or read if it goes through the right channel.

Social networking has helped to differentiate groups of people and sites like Twitter mean that you can actually proactively find people who match your target market and begin to build a real relationship of trust with them.

Marketing Can Abuse Communication Channels

Granted people can abuse routes such as Twitter. However, Twitter’s openness means that marketing abuses get short shrift and the likelihood of anyone buying from a company perceived to spam or overly “market” through Twitter is low.

Instead Twitter can provide a better service for clients. Interesting items in social sites such as Digg, Twitter and others can lead to massive spikes in traffic. Those spikes in traffic can bring prospects who are actively looking for what you sell. And are pleased to find you.

Marketing Can Be Bad

In conclusion, marketing can be “bad” in any medium used. Equally, it can be very helpful to prospects and customers when it is very well targeted. Social media allows companies to get better at targeting who they build relationships with, which must be a good thing.

And of course I just had to follow the David Ogilvy character!

There have been other cases of brand hijacking, fans writing further stories about Star Wars for example. And the Internet has made it easy to share your own stories based around other famous characters.

However, as I’ve said before the brand becomes what your fans/users/customers/clients want it to be. So you need to think long and hard before coming down on anyone who does "hijack" your brand. Because they may enhance it for you and even take it in new directions you weren’t even aware of.

And of course brand hijacking does matter, so it’s important that you keep abreast of new ways of working that could affect your business.

Currently it’s social media and Twitter. So if you’re in Film, TV or you’re writing books you need to reserve your names in Twitter before someone else uses them.

Registering Your Twitter Name

And you need to do it quick because people are registering a lot of different names, I suspect in the hope that they become valuable in the same way domain names have!

Names like Winston Churchill, Leonardo Da Vinci, Washington, Manchester even a Motorway (the M62) and try registering CarInsurance – yes, they’re all gone already.

There appear to be no country names available…

So whether Social media is here to stay or vanishes forever in a year’s time it’s important that you put a little effort into registering the names you want on Twitter (and on the other social media sites too).

Get my Free Guide to Setting up and using Twitter in business (before I revise it and start selling it!)

10 Essential WordPress Plugins is aimed at Internet Marketers.

Good work by Tim & Anthony Buchalka yet they have missed what I consider to be some essential plugins.

So without more ado I add my own top 10 to theirs, and these are in no specific order:

Another plugin that I find very useful when I’m writing about The Apprentice (with Sir Alan Sugar) is the InSeries plugin which allows you to link a series of posts and to show a table of contents to each post. See here for an example of The Apprentice Series

After all you don’t get any sales from your web site. You even write a blog and nothing happens there.

So you may be asking why you should be investing anything into the Internet.

Let me give you a couple of good reasons.

The first is that the Baby Boomers, and I count myself amongst them, are used to using the Internet to search and buy things now.  The second is that there’s a new generation coming through. No not Generation ‘X’, Generation ‘Y’ and they are completely into electronic communication. I was on a video conference call this afternoon and people were using Twitter and the conference call to make comments about the video, the presenter,each other and the content.

What does that mean to “normal” making and servicing businesses?

Let me make a few predictions:

Yellow Pages Advertising Is Going To Die Out

Yellow Pages is going to go out of business or be bought out. How can a book compete with the ease of an Internet search engine? Especially as we’re all moving to using a phone over the Internet. In addition you need to look at multiple books if you live in a city.  It’s become too cumbersome.

So what does your business do without a Yellow Pages entry?

Deliver Great Service Or You’re Dead!

Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and all the other social networking sites have the power to either recommend you to the high heavens and everyone in their network or they can lay into you for a poor service or product. You need to manage your reputatation. If you don’t know what’s being said online what are you going to do to prevent it, rescue it or respond to it?

No Web Presence Is Like Not Having Cable or Satellite TV Now

In the West, even the poorest people have cable or satellite TV. In a similar way everyone now has a mobile phone. That’s why BT is removing more and more phone boxes – they’re hardly ever used anymore.

With no web presence, with no reputation management you’re in severe danger of being the buggy whip of your industry. And for those who don’t know the buggy whip became obsolete because the car was bought by everyone. The car was bought by the very wealthy initially and then its price came down until the mass market could afford it. And that left the buggy whip manufacturers with no market.

Don’t be a buggy whip business, you need to look into the Internet before it’s too late.

This Social Media Article from the New York Times shows that the social media sites themselves are not making as much money as everyone expected.

There’s no doubt that they will make more money as they go on because there’s been a recent upswing in interest in social media sites, advertising and marketing on them.

At the moment if you’re a traditional off-line business it’s difficult to see how you can use social media.

However, remember how satellite TV had vast rivers of cash poured into it. Satellite broadcasting lost money hand over fist for years. Think what Sky is like now? If you’d invested in Sky when it launched you’d be sitting pretty today. And yet everyone was shaking their collective heads saying it wasn’t something anyone needed, or could afford.

Equally the offline businesses who can move online and into social media before their competitors stand to gain significantly. Social media applied properly will get customers their competitors don’t even see.

History is littered with examples of businesses who assume everything will remain pretty much the same year after year. Yet regularly something comes along to upset that happy view. Think of the buggy whip manufacturers who thought cars would never be taken up because they were too pricey. What about the US rail tycoons who thought rail was the only transport system anyone would ever need.

Or nearer to home, IBM who assumed that PCs would be a useful little desk top monitor that would take some processing off their mainframes and maybe act as another inroad into their clients. Now many companies use PC servers, whereas previously IBM might have expected to get their computer business now it’s an open market. In addition IBM assumed the operating system for something so low budget (compared to a mainframe) would be irrelevant. So they let Bill Gates keep the operating system. And now look – Bill Gates and Microsoft are doing very well thank you.

Firstly, marketing should be looked upon as an investment which should pay back 2, 3 or more times the investment.

Secondly, many companies try so many different marketing techniques and tactics. They’re looking for the silver bullet that will nail the customers they want. Or they simply try and keep up with the same marketing everyone does in their industry.

As Jay Abraham might say, “that’s just dumb, dumb, dumb..!”

Marketing Like Everyone Else

Maybe you’re wondering what’s so wrong with using the same marketing tactics as everyone else in your industry to get customers. After all “if it works for them why wouldn’t it work for me?” is the thought that crosses many business owners minds.

Think about this …

If you’re using the same tactics as everyone else you’ll get a proportion of the available market because your customers will see a fairly homogenous mass of suppliers who’ll they’ll have difficulty differentiating between. And that will be that. You’ll find it difficult to grow because everyone uses the same tactics and the customer pie is looked at in the same way by everyone.

And of course you worry that if you try a different tactic it might not work and that would cost you money and possibly you’ll be embarrassed at the next association meeting when everyone laughs and points at you for thinking such a marketing method could work!

Marketing Differently

And yet, if you did market differently in some way you’d immediately stand out from the crowd.

And by standing out from the crowd you’re noticed and being noticed is part way to get yourself new customers.

There’s no doubt that marketing differently means trying things that aren’t standard in your industry.

And because they’re different they may not work immediately. And even after a tune-up they still may not work. Finding that out means you know what doesn’t work and you can go on and try another thing that is different to your competitors and may suddenly bring you an avalanche of customers.

And if a new method works…

You’re the only one using it. Every customer you get through the new method is being drawn from the pool of customers from your industry and they aren’t deciding whether you’re marginally better than all the rest, because your marketing method has pointed just to you.

Marketing For No Cost

You can do a lot of guerilla marketing, which is low or no cost marketing. Although again if you’re not careful you end up with a load of tactics that don’t work well together.

Better is to stand back from your business, decide your business and marketing strategy and pick the tools and tactics you want to use. And those tools and tactics can be the ones you use now. The only difference may be that you integrate them to provide a consistency to your marketing.

So that means rather than each marketing component running separately you make sure that the sales letters, web sites and other copy use customer testimonials and PR that’s appeared in the media. PR uses some of the research that marketing has conducted through web or phone surveys. And so on. So that each component feeds all the others which makes the whole marketing message much stronger.

Feeding between different aspects of marketing is a no-cost way of getting better marketing.

Other no cost ways of marketing are to use the power of the PR, run a company blog, write customer emails, write a book or series of articles or phone customers to deepen rapport with them.

However, this new stats tool is simply great.

Using it you can find out exactly how your traffic is growing, or shrinking.

I used it on my Manchester Blog and got the following results: Manchester Blog Stats I’ve already Dugg this tool and I’ll Stumble it too. If you’ve an RSS feed you need to use it because you’ll see the traffic spikes for posts people like. That means you can analyse the post and see whether you can do more of the same or similar to get more traffic.

Go get it, say I sent you!

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