Demystifying Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Demystifying Internet Marketing

Whether your business is a solo operation providing a simple service or a retail organization selling hundreds of products, it's important to have an internet marketing strategy in place.

With over 600 million people now using the web regularly internet marketing allows you to reach the growing number of people who spend time online. It also gives you more bang for the buck than traditional shotgun-style advertising and public relations because it enables you to better target prospective customers.

As well, internet marketing allows you to improve your reach within a narrow base of customers with specific needs or interests who are spread out over a large geographic area. Best of all, internet marketing is often less expensive than traditional marketing methods.

Among the most common internet marketing tools:

E-mail: the electronic version of direct marketing is a popular way to deliver messages to prospective customers.

Webinars or seminars delivered online: can be an effective way of demonstrating a product or explaining your service or merchandise.

Video: posted on your website can be a good way for manufacturers and service providers to increase sales by showing prospects the features of your product.

E-newsletters: delivered via email or on websites, can help you create communities of customers and attract prospects.

Blogs or online journals: are becoming an increasingly popular form of internet marketing. They allow users to comment and provide insight, and can create an instant buzz about your product. They need to be kept updated with useful information.

Expertise documents: such as white papers and case studies are growing in popularity as a marketing method, since they elicit greater trust among web users than do blatant sales messages.

Well-designed websites: whether focused on information or sales, can help you win business.

Search engine optimization: involves tweaking the design and content of websites to maximize the odds they will show up in online searches. Since about 80% of e-commerce is generated through search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN , it's critical for users to be able to find your site easily.

Pay-per-click advertising: involves paying for ads that appear when certain keywords are typed into search engines. This can be prohibitively expensive unless you choose keywords that are meaningful to users.

Online information distribution: is delivered by websites to customers who submit profiles of their needs and subjects of interest. E-marketers can use these sites to deliver targeted messages.

Whatever form of internet marketing you choose, keep the following pointers in mind:

Understand your customers. Service businesses will use different marketing techniques from product-based businesses because their customers' buying behaviour is different. Likewise, if your product is consumed by a narrow market, the marketing message you choose should be customized to suit that market.

Make choices. Internet marketing means ignoring some prospective customers; it's the opposite of the old mass-marketing system that emphasized sending sales messages to as many people as possible. The good news is that targeted customers have a higher likelihood of buying.

Work with fewer customers. Internet marketing often targets small market niches. This means messages are sent to fewer people than would be the case in conventional advertising. But the people who receive the message are more likely to buy. It's crucial, then, to know your targeted audience intimately.

Measure and analyse how well your tools are working. Readily available software packages can help you test techniques, gather information on buyer preferences and refine offers so as to appeal more effectively to those preferences.

Be innovative and flexible. Try new techniques, measure performance and then adjust your website and marketing tools to better reflect results.

Be entertaining. Web users usually prefer information presented in an entertaining or novel way. So you could use humour, satire or visuals to gain attention.

B2B Internet marketing 

While much attention is focused on sales of consumer products on the web, the reality is that only about 25% of online commerce involves sales of products to consumers. Most online commerce involves e-business or business-to-business (B2B) transactions.

The web has become the information library of choice for business customers who are scanning the market for potential goods or services. As a result, a sophisticated methodology has evolved for online marketing to businesses.

There are a number of differences between business buyers and consumer buyers that you should keep in mind.

Businesses often use the web to conduct research, while consumers tend to look for specific products. Marketers reinforce this behaviour by providing useful and educational material to businesses via the web.
When marketing to businesses, generating sales leads is more important than conducting transactions. With consumers, the opposite is usually true.

Business customers are usually beginning their shopping experience when they go online and are in the process of gathering general information. On the other hand, consumers are often near the end of that experience and are narrowing down their options or comparing choices.

Most businesses use the Google search engine to conduct research, while consumers are more likely to use other engines like Yahoo and Bing.

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Seven Tips to Improve Website Search Rankings

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Seven Tips to Improve Website Search Rankings

With more than 644 million estimated active websites on the internet today and growing, businesses need to work harder to get noticed online. For small businesses that don’t already have an established market presence this means finding ways to do more with less – and that’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play.
SEO is about making a company’s website as visible as possible when related information is requested through different search methods such as engines like Google or Bing. Most large, well-established and tech savvy companies have the advantage of prominence and often more budget to put into creating brand recognition.
If smaller businesses are looking for budget-friendly ways to maximize their chances of being found through search and attracting more traffic to their website, there are a few SEO-related tactics they can employ themselves with their website to help with that.
Whether a business is in the process of building a website in-house or working with an external developer and wanting to understand or speak their language here are seven tips for businesses to improve their site’s search rankings:

1. Secure Links – For SEO this means reaching out to industry associations, loyal clients and other complimentary businesses to encourage them to link to your site from areas like their blogs and resource pages. This is a signal that search engines, such as Google use in their rankings algorithms and will help to improve a website’s rankings.
2. Update content regularly – Ensuring content is unique, compelling and fresh is key to keeping the attention of website visitors. Consider blog posts, videos, images, webinars, eBooks, widgets, infographics, and primary research as ways to renew content on a regular basis.
3. Variety in content  – A Forrester study found that pages containing a mixture of text and video are 50 times more likely to rank higher in search results. Make sure to include more than one type of content sharing per web page.
4. Ensure the site is “social media optimized” – With the growing influence that social media has on a company’s relationship with potential and existing customers, it’s vital to ensure all website pages have the company’s social profile icons (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest). These icons encourage and make it easy to share the information and increase the chance of it being found in a search.
5. Use keywords in page titles - Ensure each website page has a title that is relevant and unique. The title should contain keywords that are related to how the company wants its website – or that page – to be found through search. (eg: the title “Dentist Toronto” would help a site rank for the term ‘dentist Toronto.'
   
6. Ensure main navigation links contain keywords - Again, focusing on keywords, it is important to include text links containing relevant keywords that reflect the way a business would want its primary pages to be found. (eg: if you’re a dentist and want to rank for  ‘Teeth Whitening’, links to the teeth whitening page should say ‘teeth whitening’.)
7. Offer unique and valuable content – Content that is unique, user-friendly and valuable encourages sharing and gives Google the social signals needed to believe that the page does in fact deserve to rank in their search results. In future, search engines will put much more trust in such social signals and those producing great content will be the net beneficiaries.

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

5 Internet Marketing Strategies That Don’t Work

1. Image Search –> Anything that produces income. This strategy works great if you want to boost your ego, because it can be extremely effective for getting traffic. However, if you care about internet marketing or making money, image-search does almost nothing for you. I challenge anyone to take a stream of image searchers and to try to get them to act. Getting them to click ads is extremely difficult and getting them to make a purchase is even more difficult.

2. Personal Blogging –> Adsense. The bottom line is that people don’t really care about us. They are self interested. If you are trying to establish a blog while hoping that people are getting interested in YOU, you have a long road ahead of you. People care about what you can provide to them – they care about how you can solve their problems.

3. Social traffic –> Adsense. It doesn’t take degree from MIT to figure this one out. Social traffic rarely clicks ads of any kind. This happens because more often than not, these individuals are looking for entertainment. They also have a solid understanding of what ads are, and what they can expect to see if they click one. You can expect social traffic to click on an ad less than 0.25% of the time they hit one of your pages. That means you’ll need 400 social visitors to produce one click IF you’re lucky.

4. Social traffic –> Sales. Social traffic is also extremely difficult to sell to. Again, these people are looking for entertainment and honestly, are often information addicts. However, it is often possible to get them to subscribe to a feed and then convince them to make a purchase later.

5. PPC –> Adsense. People were making a killing with ‘Adsense Artbitrage’ a few short years ago. However, this is almost impossible to do in today’s climate. Google’s smart-pricing made this a LOT harder. There are still people claiming that it can be done, but as you might guess, these people are almost always trying to sell you a product that tells you how to do it.

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Internet Marketing: 5 Ways to Spot an Internet Charlatan

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online 

Internet Marketing: 5 Ways to Spot an Internet Charlatan

As Web and internet marketing become hotter and hotter, more and more of our field will experience an influx of people who will claim to be “experts.” Here’s a list of how to spot an Internet charlatan — someone you should avoid, whether they are in a sales or creative position — if they say any of the following:

1. “THIS” Works

I begin with the bête noir of our lofty field — the idea that there is a magic bullet. There is no digital magic bullet, and there is no holder of a digital magic gun. Creating content that converts users to customers, tagging pages so they show up high in search results, developing code that loads quickly and designing user-friendly and graphically pleasing interfaces requires hard work, the combination and talent of many and an iterative approach.

If someone tells you that one service they sell will solve all your digital marketing challenges, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

2. Links are the Only Things That Matter

This is my personal favorite and it drives me crazy, because it is partially true. Links are not the only aspect of your internet marketing that matter, but they are critically important to your search results, rankings and perceived quality of your content. However, we all know from Google Penguin and Panda updates that shoddy links are not going to get you anywhere fast.

Building an online reputation comes from building relationships. Links to and from other people’s blogs, social media, articles and comments are critical. Quality links arise from people who want to build relationships because of the quality and value of your content.

If someone tells you that links are the only things that matter, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

3. We’ll Get You on the First Page of Google

It is sad that we still need to cover this, but as more people take an interest in spending money on internet marketing, more people will be fooled by this lie. The Internet is so competitive now (trust me — you think your customized baby straws are the only ones out there? Someone else in Texas (and China) is already making them.)

Being on the first page of Google is very important, as studies show that most people will click on one of those links. That should absolutely be your goal for the keywords that drive qualified leads to your website.

However, you should not believe anyone who tells you they can guarantee your results on the first page of Google. They cannot guarantee it, or they’re doing something illegal and trust me, Google will unleash some code with a name of a black and white animal whose name begins with a P and all your money, and potentially your hard work will roll right down the proverbial drain. Plus, Google may ban you, and then at that point, why are we still even having this conversation?

If someone tells you that they can get you on the first page of Google, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

4. We can Definitely do That

Just today, with two different clients, I had conversations that appalled me. During one, a client informed me that a big consulting group told them they could implement a taxonomy during the contract negotiation phase and now, during the implementation phase they admit “they’ve never done one before.” Another client picked a designer who submitted a design that looks almost identical to their competitor’s website. (These are the days I hate consultants.)

When a company, or a consultant, or a design shop, or anyone, really, tells you they can do “that,” ask them for examples, samples and results.

If someone tells you they can do that, without proof of having done it before, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

5. We Have a Secret Sauce for That

You know who gets to say “We have a secret sauce for that?” Google. Coca-Cola. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yep … that’s about it.

If a consultant or company tells you they have a secret way of researching keywords, or a secret way of prototyping, or a secret way of knowing what your target audience wants, then they are either wizards from Hogwarts or liars. I am not talking about software that helps you write SEO code on the backend or a product like that. I’m talking about people who try to sell you on a proprietary way of doing something that doesn’t have some transparency.

For example, when my clients ask me how I do my SEO research, I tell them. I even hand them spreadsheets. What I do isn’t rocket science or neurosurgery, and even if it was, I think you have to be transparent about those things, too. “Hi Doctor, how do you plan on accessing my brain to take out my tumor?” “It’s a secret, Madam. How dare you even ask me?” Uh huh.

If someone tells you they have a secret sauce they won’t share, they are (Drumroll!!! Lightning!!! Thunder!!!) an Internet Charlatan.

So — in your opinion — how has an Internet Charlatan bamboozled you?

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online 

Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online 

Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web

The numbers this fall aren't good.

After a high above 14,000 last year, the Dow is now thrashing around well below 9,000. The U.S. government is spending over $700 billion to buy unprecedented stakes in the nation's largest banks. Many industries, including technology, are hemorrhaging jobs.

This post isn't about all that. It's about the silver lining -- the fact that, just as we saw eight years ago when the first Internet bubble burst, financial pressure is now forcing companies to make changes. And just like last time, these changes are laying the foundation for a new, more efficient period of Internet growth.

In 2001, when the last downturn began, businesses began shifting some of their marketing dollars to search engine advertising. It was more measurable and targeted than display advertising, so it was appealing to marketers with tight budgets.

As we enter a second Internet downturn, businesses are again seeking efficiency. They're shifting money out of paid search advertising, and into optimization, content, and social media that help them get found in organic search results.

These changes are laying the foundation for a new era of marketing on the web - the Inbound Marketing era.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.

In traditional marketing (outbound marketing), companies focus on finding customers. They use techniques that are poorly targeted and that interrupt people. They use cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, spam, and trade shows.

Technology is making these techniques less effective and more expensive. Caller ID blocks cold calls, TiVo makes T.V. advertising less effective, spam filters block mass emails, and tools like RSS are making print and display advertising less effective. It's still possible to get a message out via these channels, but it costs more.

Inbound Marketers flip outbound marketing on its head.

Instead of interrupting people with television ads, they create videos that potential customers want to see. Instead of buying display ads in print publications, they create their own business blog that people subscribe to and look forward to reading. Instead of cold calling, they create useful content and tools so that prospects contact them looking for more information.

Instead of driving their message into a crowd over and over again like a sledgehammer, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like a magnet.

The most successful Inbound Marketing campaigns have three key components:

(1) Content - Content creation is the core of any Inbound Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business.

(2) Search Engine Optimization - Search engine optimization makes it easier for potential customers to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your customers begin their buying process.

(3) Social Media - Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

Why Inbound Marketing Makes Sense in a Recession

As the economy slows down, companies are turning to Inbound Marketing because it is a more efficient way of allocating marketing resources than traditional, outbound marketing. As our CEO, Brian Halligan, puts it, when you're inbound marketing, the thickness of your brain matters a lot more than the thickness of your wallet.

There are three specific ways Inbound Marketing improves on the efficiency of traditional marketing:

(1) It Costs Less - Outbound marketing means spending money - either by buying ads, buying email lists or renting huge booths at trade shows. Inbound Marketing means creating content and talking about it. A blog costs nothing to start. A Twitter account is free, too. Both can draw thousands of customers to your site.  The marketing ROI from inbound campaigns is higher.

(2) Better Targeting - Techniques like cold-calling, mass mail, and email campaigns are notoriously poorly targeted. You're reaching out to individuals because of one or two attributes in a database. When you do Inbound Marketing, you only approach people who self-qualify themselves. They demonstrate an interest in your content, so they are likely to be interested in your product.

(3) It's an Investment, Not an Ongoing Expense - When you buy pay-per-click advertising on search engines, its value is gone as soon as you pay for it. In order to maintain a position at the top of Google's paid results, you have to keep paying. However, if you invest your resources in creating quality content that ranks in Google's organic results, you'll be there until somebody displaces you.

The Roots of the Inbound Web

Only in the past year and a half have the technology, the tools and the public's use of both evolved to the point where Inbound Marketing is practical.

In the early days of the Internet, there was no mainstream marketing. There were lots of experiments but few business buyers and consumers.

In the mid-1990s, as the first Internet bubble grew, companies began to follow their customers online. Tools for independent publishing were weak, so companies' online presence mirrored their offline presence. They sprayed advertising across mass media sites and prayed a few potential customers would see it.

When the dot-com bubble popped in 2001, marketers began to reassess the effectiveness of the spray-and-pray approach. They saw that consumers and business buyers were starting their purchase process less on mass media sites, and more on search engines. They discovered that in many cases targeted search engine advertising was far more effective than display advertising on large media sites.

As spending poured into search marketing, a new era of Internet growth began. In addition to changes in Internet marketing, this phase of growth -- Web 2.0 -- produced significant changes in the way we use the web. It shifted from a read-only platform to one where anybody could publish, connect with friends, and share content.

Now, as we enter a new economic downturn, online marketers are using the tools of this new read-write web to become more efficient. They're using social media, they're publishing content, and they're optimizing it. They're becoming Inbound Marketers.

For an eye-popping overview of the dramatic changes search engines, social media, and mobile technology have had on consumer behavior—and why it's time to transform your marketing now—check out this awesome, stat-filled report:

The Inbound-Marketing Secret? Empowerment!

Eight years ago, when the dot-com bubble collapsed, the idea of a single man using great content, social media, and search engine optimization to build a New Jersey liquor store into a $50-million-a-year business in the course of two years would have been absurd.
Yet that's exactly what Gary Vaynerchuk has done since he launched Wine Library TV in 2006.

This is the power of Inbound Marketing.

With the tools that have become mainstream over the last two to three years, the scale of any business can be unlimited. If you have a great product and the skills to communicate with your customers, you can compete with the biggest advertising budgets.
That is exciting, and for small businesses, it's empowering.

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online 

Inbound Marketing overtakes Outbound Marketing

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online 

Inbound Marketing overtakes Outbound Marketing

When I talk with most marketers today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising.  I call these methods "outbound marketing" where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack. 


I think outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time for two reasons.  First, your average human today is inundated with over 2000 outbound marketing interruptions per day and is figuring out more and more creative ways to block them out, including caller ID, spam filtering, Tivo, and Sirius satellite radio.  Second, the cost of coordination around learning about something new or shopping for something new using the internet (search engines, blogs, and social media) is now much lower than going to a seminar at the Marriott or flying to a trade show in Las Vegas. 

Rather than doing outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing "inbound marketing" where you help yourself "get found" by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.  In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a "hub" for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through search engines, the blogosphere, and social media.  I believe most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing, and I advocate that those ratios flip.

The best analogy I can come up with is that traditional marketers looking to garner interest from new potential customers are like lions hunting in the jungle for elephants.  The elephants used to be in the jungle in the '80s and '90s when they learned their trade, but they don't seem to be there anymore.  They have all migrated to the watering holes on the savannah (the internet).  So, rather than continuing to hunt in the jungle, I recommend setting up shop at the watering hole or turning your website into its own watering hole.

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online 

Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Internet marketing, also known as web marketing, online marketing, webvertising, or e-marketing, is referred to as the marketing (generally promotion) of products or services over the Internet. Internet marketing is considered to be broad in scope because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media. Digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems are also often grouped together under internet marketing.

Internet marketing ties together the creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including design, development, advertising and sales. Internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along many different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, email marketing, mobile advertising, and Web 2.0strategies.

In 2008, The New York Times, working with comScore, published an initial estimate to quantify the user data collected by large Internet-based companies. Counting four types of interactions with company websites in addition to the hits from advertisements served from advertising networks, the authors found that the potential for collecting data was up to 2,500 times per user per month.

Types of Internet marketing

Internet marketing is broadly divided in to the following types:

• Display advertising: the use of web banners or banner ads placed on a third-party website or blog to drive traffic to a company's own website and increase product awareness.
• Search engine marketing (SEM): a form of marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of either paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion, or through the use of free search engine optimization techniques.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.
• Social media marketing: the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Email marketing: involves directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail.
• Referral marketing: a method of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually word of mouth.
• Affiliate marketing: a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.
• Inbound marketing: involves creating and freely sharing informative content as a means of converting prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers.
• Video marketing: This type of marketing specializes in creating videos that engage the viewer into a buying state by presenting information in video form and guiding them to a product or service. Online video is increasingly becoming more popular among internet users and companies are seeing it as a viable method of attracting customers.

Advantages and LImitations of Internet Marketing

Advantages

Internet marketing is inexpensive when examining the ratio of cost to the reach of the target audience. Companies can reach a wide audience for a small fraction of traditional advertising budgets.The nature of the medium allows consumers to research and to purchase products and services conveniently.Therefore, businesses have the advantage of appealing to consumers in a medium that can bring results quickly. The strategy and overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns depend on business goals and cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis.

Internet marketers also have the advantage of measuring statistics easily and inexpensively; almost all aspects of an Internet marketing campaign can be traced, measured, and tested, in many cases through the use of an ad server. The advertisers can use a variety of methods, such as pay per impression, pay per click, pay per play, and pay per action. Therefore, marketers can determine which messages or offerings are more appealing to the audience. The results of campaigns can be measured and tracked immediately because online marketing initiatives usually require users to click on an advertisement, to visit a website, and to perform a targeted action.

[edit]Limitations

• One of the challenges that internet markets face (as does the general public) is that many internet products are outright scams or promoted with deception making it difficult to know what one is buying. This is especially the case with products that are supposed to train or aid internet marketers in making money. While the quality of products has improved in the past few years, ethics is still often missing in internet marketing. Many so-called money making products are "empty boxes" in which there is essentially nothing there yet a buyer is to make money by reselling this empty box to others. Pyramid schemes are also still prevalent.
• The consumer is unable to physically feel or try on the product which can be a limitation for certain goods. However a survey of consumers of cosmetics products shows that email marketing can be used to interest a consumer to visit a store to try a product or to speak with sales representatives. 

• Marketer will not be able to use the x-factor/personal touch factor/human touch factor to influence the audience as the marketing is completely based on the advertisement and the information that the advertisement might lead to [websites, blogs and other channels].

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Internet Marketing Seminar of Prof. Erwin Globio

erwinglobio.sulit.com.ph - Saturday, September 24, 2011

2011 © Sulit.com.ph

Internet Marketing Seminar and Training of Prof. Erwin M. Globio, kindly click here to avail of the FREE Internet Marketing Seminar and Training Online

Understanding Affiliate Marketing

The world of affiliation is growing by the day.

Unless you already have a true understanding of Affiliate Marketing, it is probably an underused, grey area in your Internet marketing strategy. However, the world of affiliation is growing by the day – to the point where it is impossible to ignore and is rapidly becoming extremely powerful.

Many people may not even realise they are already coming into contact with some form of Affiliate Marketing on a daily basis, which means that for Internet marketers, it opens up a huge area of opportunity.

Here is an example of how one specific scheme works, and how it can be used to a commercial advantage.

Group Buying Sites

Consumers absolutely love these sites, simply because everyone loves a bargain. They represent a win-win
situation for both the consumer and business, if used appropriately.

The popular sites in this sector have an absolutely huge database of clients, and a far-reaching audience.
The way they tend to work is to offer a variety of deals from businesses on either a local, daily or worldwide
scale via e-mail, all of which have two forms of call to action: their availability is limited either by time or number.

All users of group buying websites are required to become members, which usually costs nothing. As members
they are actively encouraged by the site to recruit additional members and to ‘Share’, ‘Like’ or ‘Tweet’ their good
fortune via a variety of popular social networking sites.

From the business side of things, using these sites for marketing will almost always result in sales. However,
businesses are usually required to discount their products or services by at least 50% on the voucher site and
then the value of all sales made has to be shared 50/50 with the voucher site.

This may be a difficult tactic to understand, selling something for only 25% of its value, but in reality it has a
twofold benefit.

The consumers who feel they have purchased a bargain will tell everyone they know, because when any of their recommendations also make a purchase, they additionally receive a cash incentive, and simply because it
represents a bit of ‘good’ news in their lives.

For the business providing the offer, assuming they deal fairly with purchasers, the exposure for their brand
can be massive. They may feel that they have massively undersold, but they should always remember that
this is a marketing exercise and any ‘losses’ could be accounted for within their marketing budget.

Most businesses have to sustain a loss at some point to generate future profits.

Summary

Businesses should always look at the big picture. Maximum exposure for minimum cost can be achieved by
using group buying sites, and the overall loss on actual sales can easily be outweighed by the exposure.
By using the most reputable voucher sites, and dealing as fairly as possible with consumers who make
purchases, everyone can be a winner.

This is only one specific form of Affiliate Marketing, but it is the one that is currently showing the largest growth,
and is one that is certainly worth exploring.

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