Discovering Internet Marketing - A Beginners Tale

Spend just a little time finding out about Internet Marketing and you’ll probably get very confused. It’s clear to most people now - Internet Marketing is the way of the future.

We’ve spent the last year finding out if this promise is real, or whether it’s more snake oil.

We’ve been lucky enough to come across some real thought leaders everybody should follow - see below.

In this paper we’ll describe our journey of discovery and explain what we found along the way.

Our objective is helping you short cut the process, getting to the real Internet Marketing fast, and for free.

Outbound versus Inbound Marketing

For sure the marketing experts of previous times will have had their own definitions for Outbound and Inbound, but our purpose here is explaining Internet Marketing so we can limit ours to Internet techniques:

Outbound - using the Internet to deliver messages to potential customers. Techniques include email marketing, banner advertising, affiliate promotion and Pay Per Click advertising. The target audience is thought to be interested because:

1. It’s been selected for targeted email.
2. It’s visited special interest sites
3. It’s searched on Keywords

Inbound - joining in conversations and contributing ideas in blogs, to forums and networking sites. The theory here is marketers attract interested parties to their own sites where they have the visitors permission to deliver marketing messages.

Both Outbound and Inbound are well proven strategies for Internet Marketing. The main difference being Outbound can be expensive, whereas Inbound can be free. Outbound needs little time or effort, whereas Inbound requires a great deal of both.

Keywords and Search Engine Optimization

Keywords are the currency of internet search, and therefore internet marketing.

Search Engine Optimization ensures those Keywords are placed in “on site” web pages so search engines understand the content.

Increasingly SEO is also extended to other blogs pages, where “links back” add authority. Google attributes quality to content referred to elsewhere - the more “links” the higher the quality and higher the relative page ranking.

Pay Per Click advertising is also based on Keywords. Pay Google enough money and you can have your advert displayed to anybody “searching” on that term, looking at a content page displaying that term, and even reading an email containing that term (for Gmail users).

With PPC Google ranks the advert based on how much it’s paid for showing it. Advertisers get to “bid” for position - 1 to n. Naturally the advertiser with the deepest pockets gets primary position, regardless of quality.

With PPC Google only gets paid when somebody “clicks” on the advert, so you can be sure you’ll get the clicks you buy. Whether you’ll make any money is an entirely different question.

And to make the whole PPC model super easy to spend money on, Google Adwords helps you plan and manage campaigns.

So for both Outbound and Inbound, Keywords are the link between who’s looking for information and those wanting to provide it.

Marketing Sites versus Blogs

In the early days Internet Marketing was limited to marketing sites. Vendors would put up a few pages, much as on-line brochure, and use keywords in titles and texts to tell Google what the pages were about. The more keywords crammed in, the more highly Google would rank the site. A Google search would provide a list of those sites containing the relevant keywords.

The emergence of blogs complicated the picture. These new sites offered to feed the Google machine with more, and more relevant, content. New postings kept that content “fresh” - there were more pages to search, and they covered wider topics, so Google searches added more value to users.

Google started to value blog posts more highly than marketing pages and paid bloggers for hosting Google adverts through Adsense.

Its preferred methods for delivering messages to a targeted audience became A) PPC adverts for marketing sites and B) keyword rich content in blog posts.

Internet marketing experts emerged, in different guises - a)specialist agencies with skills in PPC and SEO who helped marketers make the most of their sites and b) bloggers who used their own sites to build audiences, affiliate for marketers, and feed the Google machine.

Enter the Internet Marketing expert and 16 year olds said to be making $1 million/year with a few hours a week work.

Social Media

As if this picture wasn’t complicated enough :-( we then saw the social media sites start to emerge. The orginal intent of sites like Friends Re-united, My Space, You Tube etc. wasn’t extending the advertising platform. It was offering users ways to share their own content.
It was offering venues where people with common interests could meet each other, network, share, collaborate, and have some fun.

But the opportunities for advertising were too attractive to be ignored for long. Most social media now has an advertising dimension, and users are offered more opportunity to contribute content to the Google machine.

The Ugly side of social media became the Internet Marketers.

All of a sudden the social media world became full of Internet Marketing experts selling their skills, expertise and secrets.

Now just about every site or service, and particularly the most popular ones, are flooded with self proclaimed experts and their expensive secrets.

Social Media Marketing has emerged as the new Internet Marketing, and provided people follow the social media rules, it works pretty well.

Meeting people through social media is no different to off-line marketing - at cocktail parties or sports clubs. This is Inbound Marketing. “I’m a nice guy, why not take a look at my blog?”

(Get a detailed introduction to Social Media Marketing from our white paper.)

The Witchdoctors

There’s a small number of genuine thought leaders - both brilliant and generous - in the world of Internet Marketing.

There’s a very large number of pretend experts, with minimal skills and experience,whose only interest is separating punters from their money.

A few minutes spent reading this paper will equip the Internet novice with enough information to frighten off the Witchdoctors.

A good way to spot them is their bio - anybody who claims to be an expert is a witchdoctor. The genuine experts are happy to let us make our own minds up about their capabilities.

Our Real Life Experience

There aren’t too many “real life” case studies of Internet Marketing, probably because there aren’t that many relative successes. There are plenty of horror stories about new businesses being taken to the cleaners by PPC. We could have been one of them.

For the record we don’t believe the underlying reason is failure of the strategy, just that it’s so new. It’s the Witchdoctors “who get the pleasure” and the marketers “who get the pain”.

The only way to make any sense of the opportunities in Internet Marketing is to know more about it than the guy selling the services. (This is a direct quote from a real guru - unfortunately I’ve forgotten his name - sorry whoever you are.)

So, here we’ll offer an overview of our experience - not a lot of detail. Perhaps we’ll do that later.

Email

Our first efforts in promoting our service were email campaigns. We compiled our own lists, and used our own software.

Response rates were horrible - worse than those traditionally expected from direct mail.

The upside was this experience helped us estimate any returns we’d get from a full scale campaign run by an agency. It just didn’t add up. Buying lists and paying somebody to do the mailing would be frighteningly expensive and produce virtually no benefit.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who regularly receives promotions via email - we just put them in the junk folder, don’t we.

Banner Ads and Affiliate Marketing

We haven’t tried these yet, mostly because there are questions about how they fit our business model. We plan to try them at some point, and will update this paper when we’ve some real experience.

Marketing Site and SEOThe first marketing site was a simple affair, with a nice design but no SEO, no attention to Keywords. Not surprisingly, it brought us very little traffic.

Our new site is much more impressive, combining marketing pages and our blog - all fully SEO’d as well. It does a pretty good job of explaining what we do, and how, but the number of visitors it attracts in it’s own right isn’t worth talking about - maybe 5%- 10% of total traffic.

We’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way and incorporated these into the site ourselves. Bottom line is if we’d paid somebody $1,000s to do the SEO we’d be very unhappy with the performance.

Blog and SEO

Our blog is full of high quality content focused on topics our intended audience is looking for. All the pages have titles and summaries with appropriate keywords. The site is regularly indexed by Google.

Performance is encouraging. We get visitors from all over the world (amounting to 30% of our traffic) and specifically looking for our type of content.

But here’s the interesting point. They don’t come to us because of searches for Keywords. Their searches are genuine queries such as “what is a conditional close?” and “how to qualify a sale?”

Google pays us the compliment of sending visitors looking for our quality content. Visitors looking for category keywords get sent to others with much deeper pockets, and PPC budgets.

PPC

Our pilot PPC campaign cost us more money than we could afford, delivered a lot less value than we expected, and caused an irrecoverable rift between us and our chosen partner for marketing.

I’m sure PPC works well for some people, especially where dominating traffic is part of their strategy. Where a direct sale can be made on the site the theories of PPC can indicate a simple business case. If the margin from sales covers the cost of the Ads then it can be a great way to grow a business.

But, where the competition has deep pockets and is more interested in exposure than return on investment, PPC is just a great way of transferring your money to Google.

Social Media

Something like 40% of our traffic, and a much higher percentage of our registrations comes from our engagement in social media.

Some social sites/services are more productive than others but in general the opportunity to engage with others in a social environment gives us a chance to let our true value show through.

There are a lot of witchdoctors cruising social sites, simply to attract traffic to their own. This can make any engagement on these sites a frustrating experience. But that doesn’t detract from the value of time spent there.

Conclusions
The bottom line of our experience is Internet Marketing works, provided marketers take the trouble to understand how to make it work for them.

Real, generous, guidance on how to figure this all out is provided free of charge by our selected experts.

Our experience ratifies everything they say.

Our Selected ExpertsThere are links to their sites below, where you can learn most everything there is to know, but here’s a selection of their contributions:

Seth Godin - How to make money at SEO

Chris Brogan - Fish Where The Fish Are

Gary Vaynerchuck