What are two things you need to remember about online marketing?

As you surf around the net what do you see? At one end of the scale are passive sites that just sit there and display their owners wares. You wonder “how are ever going to get people through the ‘door’”?

At the other end there are sites that are multicoloured, move around and fairly shout and yell at you. Well I just click away, and am left wondering “who on earth goes ‘in’ there”?

What works?

Many who venture online forget (or perhaps have never known) the two fundamentals:

1. online marketing is a business,

2. it is a business that has its own way of doing things.

The purpose of online marketing is simply to use the Internet to find either customers or products and even to find both.  Commerce has been that way for all of history,
it is just that we now have a new set of tools to do it by. The old way of doing things does not translate easily to the new way. There are new skills to learn, a new language and a totally new business model.

Just because your business model works offline there is no guarantee that it will fly online. In fact it probably won’t unless you understand the inner workings of the model. The basics are simple you think? You have something to sell and you just have to find the buyers.

For most online marketers the opposite is true. Find out where the buyers are and go sell them something.

The transaction part is taken care of for you online already but bringing together the buyers and the sellers is a totally different story.

Customers online are used to receiving extremely high value. This makes it very tough for information sellers running an online marketing business as users of the net have become pretty used to  getting everything for nothing for a long time.

So you have to be really clear about your value proposition and offer extremely high value before the prospective customer will give you anything. Even their email address.

Online marketing – the new way of doing things.

And as for online marketing having its own way of doing things; well who ever heard of advertising channels like Twitter, Facebook and opt-in lists and relationship management in the old world of business. Social media is the buzz but how do you use it? Anyone with a Twitter account will have seen hundreds of people who
just don’t have a clue.

This site is about explaining the business model that lies underneath the new way of doing business. The fundamentals are the same; someone wants to buy something, someone wants to sell but how the two come together is very different. You wont
find the total model in any one place but parts of it will be explained on different parts of the site.

The model will probably never be finished as “the new way of doing things” is growing and evolving every day. It is expected that online business will exceed more than a
trillion dollars per year very shortly, if it hasn’t done so already. If you structure your online marketing business correctly you could share in a large part of that market.

Some online marketing blog posts