What is internet marketing

1. What is Internet Marketing?

Internet Marketing in its simplest terms refers to the marketing and selling of goods and services using the Internet as the sales and distribution medium. What started as a cottage industry in the early nineties has mushroomed into a global multibillion-dollar industry that has been embraced by industrial giants such as Microsoft and General Electric.

The Internet has reduced the world into a global village, has made distance irrelevant and time zones little more than an inconvenience. Businesses in the remote parts of India can easily service clients in the bright cities of America, while goods produced in China are sold to consumers in all parts of the world.

The Internet has made all this possible and made Internet Marketing a reality.

Internet Marketing offers anybody over a certain age with access to a computer and access to an Internet connection, the opportunity to go into business for themselves with little or no start-up costs.
There are two main ways to conduct business over the Internet.

You could either sell your own products and services, in which case you will be doing business as a merchant. Many people though, have neither the time nor resources to create and offer their own products or services. Fortunately for this large group of people they can still earn significant sums of money as affiliates.

Affiliates are Internet Marketers who are actually middlemen or women. They will typically have a website of their own, and on this website they will promote or review a product or service that is provided by a third party (the merchant). Affiliates earn money by joining the affiliate programs of merchants, and earn commissions when visitors to their websites go to the merchant’s website by clicking on either a textual or graphical link strategically placed on the affiliate’s website.

In the brick and mortar world, businesses only make profits when they make sales… they only make sales when they have customers and clients… which they only get when they have prospects. Do you see the trend?

It all starts with prospects.

It is the same with Internet Marketing. You could have the biggest, baddest and even best website in the world, but without prospects, your website is dead on arrival.

So the million-dollar question is ‘how do you bring prospects to your website?’

Brilliant question… I thought you’d never ask.

Let’s go back to our brick and mortar business… how does it get prospects? I can think of a few ways.

1.Advertising
2.Word of mouth referrals
3.Passing Traffic

As you might have guessed, it is no different with Internet Marketing.

For advertising, Internet Marketers advertise on third party websites using banner adverts or plain text links. They can also use Pay-per-click campaigns, of which Google Adwords is probably the most popular. We will talk about this in more detail later.

Word of mouth referrals can happen in two ways. Firstly, someone could verbally give you the address of a website, which you then proceed to type into your browser. An example would be www.microsoft.com. The other way word of mouth referrals happen is when people write about a website on their own website and then include a link to the other website. Visitors can then click on the link and go directly to the other website.

Finally, you have passing traffic. For most Internet Marketers this is usually the cheapest and largest source of prospects. It usually involves Search Engine Marketing – where marketers try to get traffic by ranking high in the search engines. The technical name for this effort to rank high is ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO). As you well know, Google is by far the largest search engine, so you can’t talk about SEO without mentioning Google’s role in Internet Marketing. We will visit this in more depth later.

2. Benefits Of Online Business

Many people, I imagine, dream of one day owning their own business. It is a sad fact of life that the vast majority of people never venture to do so. Perhaps it is even sadder, that even those that are bold and brave enough to become their own boss often return, with their tails tucked firmly between their legs, to regular paid employment.

Why? What is the problem?

Isn’t the answer obvious?

Think about costs… accommodation, suppliers, marketing and all the rest.

Between you and me, I think it takes a very brave man or lady to take on all these hurdles. The beauty of Internet Marketing is that it is all so different. Here are a few of the factors that make Internet Marketing such an attractive proposition.

Low Risk
You could try before you buy. Many successful Internet Marketers did not quit the safety of their jobs to become full time Internet Marketers. What they did was establish and run their Internet Marketing (IM) business in their spare time. When it took off and started to earn them a very decent income, they were then able to quit their jobs.

On the other hand, those that were not successful still had the safety of their jobs to fall back on.

The thing that makes IM such a low risk enterprise, apart from the low start up costs that we’ll discuss next, is the fact that you don’t have to be physically present to run the business. It can and should run on auto-pilot 24 hours a day.

Low Cost
To start up a brick and mortar business, you literally need tens of thousands of dollars. You need to rent or buy accommodation, then pay for inventory, staff, insurance etc. With Internet Marketing, all you really need is a well optimised website, and that will only set you back a few hundred dollars, and you are ready for business.

Yes, it is that easy and cheap, as you will soon begin to realise.

Exposure
When you have a traditional business, you are limited to a very large degree by your location. It is almost unheard of to have a small widget factory in Brazil supplying widgets to a large manufacturer in Germany. This, however, happens to be the norm with Internet Marketing.

You could be located in the middle of Surrey in England, but have most of your clients come from Australia and the US. Like I said earlier, the Internet has reduced the world to a global village.

Your next customer is only a click away, not thousands of miles away.

It is worth mentioning that the Internet has made it much easier for traditional businesses to extend the reach of their market. However many of the businesses still use traditional marketing practices, which quite frankly don’t work very well on the Internet.

Testing and Tracking
Advertising in the offline world is notorious for being hit and miss. As the joke goes, “half of every advertising budget is wasted, but nobody knows which half”. On a more serious note, this means that businesses spend twice as much as they really need to on advertising, and in return get a return on investment (ROI) that is 50% lower that it should be.

This is not the case with Internet Marketing. When properly done, the results from IM efforts can be tracked in real time, which means that testing becomes a very realistic and affordable proposition. With IM you can identify what works and discard what doesn’t.

Leveraging Time
Earlier on, I mentioned that you don’t need a physical presence to run an online business, because the business should be able to run on its own with little or no human intervention.

This means that you can use the time that you would otherwise have spent running the business, to set up yet another website. What I am getting at here is that a true Internet Marketer will usually have multiple websites running at the same time, each one contributing a profitable income stream to the bottom line of the online business.

This is Internet Marketing at its best.