Online marketing is just like real world marketing
July 31, 2010 by Ethan · Leave a Comment
Many years ago I used to do “real world” marketing. This was before the internet really took off. Before anyone heard of google or there were any internet marketing guru’s.
Many people try to make it like online marketing is so totally different than marketing is in the “real world.” Not true at all. Yes there is new technology, new terminology, but many of the basics remain the same.
Here is an example of a real world marketing campaign I worked on and then I equate each step to online marketing.
The Marketing Campaign:
Placing an advertisement for the Hotel Wolcott in NYC with the goal of getting more customers to stay there during a certain month.
There were 5 main steps
1) Choose the target market: people traveling to new york city that are looking for budget hotels.
online equivalent: There is nothing different here at all. You choose a target market online that you are going to focus your marketing campaign towards.
2) Find the market: It was decided to run an ad in Arthur Frommers Budget Travel magazine. This is a magazine with a very large audience that would have a readers that were perfetly in our target market.
online equivalent: Where does your target market hangout? A well known site you can buy an advertisement on? Or maybe a site that allows you to place google placement ads on that website? Or the ever popular…what searches are your target market typing into search engines.
3) Budget the ad: I forgot exactly how much we were allowed to spend on the ad, but with the figure we were given we could choose the size of the ad we could run. Bigger sizes cost more, color ads cost more, etc.
online equivalent: Just like different ads cost different prices in the real world, the same goes for the online world. Different websites will charge varying amounts according to the traffic they get as well as where the ad is on a page (higher up usually costs more). If you are going to run a ppc ad, perhaps you don’t have enough of a budget to target all the keywords you want. You must choose the ones you think will be the most profitable
3) Create the ad/offer: This would deal with the graphic design and copywriting of the ad itself. Of course the ad followed the rules of good copywriting – Grab their attention, tell them the benefits of staying at the wolcott , etc. As for the layout of the ad – it was created to be easy to spot, read and understand. This is not always the case with many advertisements.
online equivalent: there is a ton of material devoted to writing advertisements that convert including headlines, ads, classified ads and even banner ads.
4) Track the results – a “service code” is inserted into the ad, near the telephone number so when people call to book a room, they give the “service code”. This is a tracking device and let’s us know they are booking the room because of the ad we ran. It gives a fairly accurate count of how profitable the ad was. If was profitable we know it can be ran again to earn more profits. If it does not make a profit, we know to either change the ad, run it somewhere else, or scrap it altogether.
online equivalent: This is a step that many people don’t take as seriously as they should. In online marketing, actually in direct response marketing of any type, you must track your ads. That’s what direct response marketing means. You can track directly if the ad made a profit. If you do not track you are just playing a guessing game and are doomed to throw money away.
Internet marketing is not hard. Much of it is simply a numbers game.
Regards,
Ethan Semmel
What free content to give away?
July 31, 2010 by Ethan · Leave a Comment
In internet marketing circles, you probably read a lot about the importance of giving away free stuff. As much as I am a fan of making everything as simple as possible there is more to it than just “give away a bunch of free stuff” and people will then like you and buy from you.
Your free stuff should always have a goal. Such as to support the selling of your products, otherwise you are just running a hobby or even a charity. Plain and simple. Many well known marketers who advocate the giving away of free stuff, seem to leave out that important part.
If you go to some well known marketers blogs, you may see some great free content, however almost all of it is made with a goal in mind.
The Biggest Mistake
If you have a product to sell, Do not just put up a bunch of free tips every day of some cool things you know and hope people will eventually buy from you. In my experience of 10 years of running internet businesses, I can tell you, it will not happen.
Therefore, there needs to be a reason you are giving away free stuff.
Here are some example of a reason for giving away free content. The Goal is listed under each reason.
1) To support the sale of your product
Some examples of this type of free content are when people give out a sample or demo of what they are selling. Such as the first chapter or introduction of an e-book.
Another example if when people create a blog post about something like “10 most asked questions about…”. If you have a blog and and have a product for sale, or are going to launch one soon, you can use the commenting feature of blogs to see the questions and concerns people have about the product. Compile your answers into a blog post and upload it to your blog. Instatnt content that supports the sale of your product.
How about those case studies you see so often. Those are fun to watch for many people. Actually, sometimes they bore me, but they are purely to support the sale of a product.
2) For Link Bait
There are 2 general type of visitors that can come to one of your websites. People who don’t know you and people who do know you. Link bait is for people who don’t know you. Sometimes referred to as cold traffic.
The point of this free content is to target certain searches that people are entering into search engines. These “cold traffic” people will come to your site to read your free information. However you should still use “directing” and give them a good piece of content and then direct them to an action you want them to take.
Again, the biggest mistake is just giving out a cool free something and hope people will then take the action you want them to.
3) To drive people to an affiliate product
Someone is selling a course about email marketing. You can make your own content that complements what that person is selling or give out something about email marketing that you know. At the end of your content you direct the visitor to your affiliate link. The goal, of course, is to get sale commissions on that affiliate product.
A very common piece of free content that has the affiliate commission goal is the product review.
Yes, even this piece of content has a goal to it. Believe it or not, this is not posted just because I am a nice guy writing an article to help you. I won’t tell you what the goal is right now, maybe in another post sometime.
Regards,
Ethan Semmel
Templating increases revenue
May 10, 2010 by Ethan · Leave a Comment
I used to be under the impression that templates were what amateurs used while the real professional, the expert, created everything from scratch.
That was totally wrong. Everything is templated. And if you want to succeed you need to template as many things as you can.
Here are some examples people may not think of that are templates…
New Houses – When a community if built, from a housing developer, many times there are a handful of different designs to choose from, some more expensive than others depending on the size. All the houses in the new development are built following the template and you can customize the template you pick with certain add-ons or upgrades. You can come in to a new development with your own house design and ask them to built it for you.
Cars – When Honda comes out with their new model, everyone buys the same model (template) and customizes it
Restaurant Menu’s – When people go out to eat you get a choice of food you can eat in a restaurant, and everyone picks from the same menu (templates)
You should templatize as much of your business as you can because it increases productivity.
The only thing that you can never increase is time. Everyone always only has 24 hours in a day. That is set in stone. But if you can increase the work you can do in those 24 hours your will increase your revenue.
Templatizing reduces the time needed to complete tasks.
If you want to make 5 websites about different topics but that will earn revenue the same way – use 1 template to create all 5. The time saved will be huge.
Many people worry that their website will look like everyone elses. First off, that’s not true, but you must remember, most people spend their time on other websites, not yours.
Therefore they get used to certain conventions online. If you want to spend your resources re-inventing the wheel and creating everything from scratch so you can be different thinking this will increase revenue, you are wasting your resources.
There are plenty of good templates out there for most things including website designs.
Use em.
