The reason for the growth of Internet marketing

Does anyone truthfully know the reason for the growth of Internet marketing?

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.