Internet (a.k.a web) marketing IS simple. After all, when you break it down, there are only four or five steps. So why is it that only a few people ever seem to make money at it? To get a clearer idea, let’s take a closer look at those steps and what they entail.
Simple Internet Marketing Process
Conduct Research
The first part is all about gathering the information that will help you to perform the following step. Most internet marketers will use keyword research tools (free or paid services) such as Google’s AdWords keyword tool to find out what people are searching for and how many websites are currently listed by the search engines.
Identify a Hungry Market
Once you’ve got your list of keywords along with search and site volumes, the next step is to decide where there are enough people looking for the keyword combinations to make up a sufficiently hungry market.
Source Product Or Service
Next, you’ll need to identify a product or service that the market might be willing to buy. Whether you create it yourself, outsource its creation or purchase something ready made with resale rights is something that you’ll need to decide upon yourself. This will depend on your own technical or writing skills, your financial resources and the time it’s likely to take to get ready for market.
Tell The Market
You might have an absolutely brilliant product, that will have eager buyers beating down your door – if only they knew about it. So before they can start buying, you need to get the message out. There are a number of ways you can do this – again, some are free and some will cost.
Rake In The Money
And now that everyone who might be remotely interested in what you’re selling knows about it, you’re having to tell them to form an orderly queue while your many hired assistants take their money and hand over the goods. Alternatively, you just need to tell your internet service provider to give you extra bandwidth so that customers can download your electronic offerings while you sip something cool at your favourite holiday destination.
Rinse and Repeat
Finally, all you need to do is repeat the previous steps to set up more and more income streams that will keep your personal wealth and associated lifestyle on a continuous upward curve.
Simple, Right?
So there they are. Five simple steps. So why isn’t everybody who picks up a “how to make money” ebook, or signs up to a guru’s “get rich in your pyjamas” mentoring course selling lots of stuff and making lots of money?
Because, while it is simple, it certainly isn’t easy. There’s a whole lot more that needs to happen within each of the boxes in the above diagram. And each of those subprocesses needs to work with 100% effectiveness and many other questions need to be answered. For example:
- You might manage to gather a really great set of keywords - but are they being used by potential customers looking for something to buy? Or are they just doing some research?
- You’ve managed to source a really great product that people want - but are you competing with an army of other sellers?
- You’ve managed to compete successfully and managed to tell more people about your product than your competitors have – but has it cost you more in advertising than you’ve gained in sales?
- You’ve spent money on the “best thing since sliced bread” from a “guru” who claims he/she has made $millions from it, but you can’t seem to make a penny. Are you just not doing it right, or has the “guru” ripped you off?
I think that the answers are much more complex and wide-ranging than I’ve got time and space for in this post, but I’ll be using my old process moelling skills to see whether I can get some solid answers to these and other questions.
In the meantime, if there’s any other angle you’d like me to look at, then please leave a reply.