TUTORIAL
YOU DON'T HAVE TO BRING A LOT OF MONEY TO INTERNET MARKETING! For the average business, the Internet presents an inexpensive form of marketing, advertising and sales. If you don't bring advertising money, you will need to netlink to reach your customers. You won't have to bring your celebrity, or a hook to the party either. Content will get the job done! The marketers who are out to build the biggest or prettiest sites on the Web are generally the ones who have a good chance of falling flat when it comes to visitor count. It has nothing to do with their efforts to design, but their lack of effort to market correctly. They generally rely on the visual effect of the website rather than content to do the sales job. Unlike most forms of ad media, the Internet is not a matter of sight or sound competition; it is a matter of recommendation. We don't send our friends and associates to a site and say "see the pretty picture". Instead, we would recommend a site and say "thought you could use this information". Survival and success depend on netlinking and the content of a site is paramount. Netlinking is the Internet term for networking. If you spend your money Netlinking you can expect long term results. 50% of all new business is profit less the cost of advertising! Many business people may find this hard to believe until they examine the facts. The keyword is NEW business. That is business that comes to you after both your labor and overhead is paid by your current business. This now means that you can spend a lot more on new advertising in order to generate new business than you spend generating old business - assuming you have the money to spend on new advertising, of course. For instance, if you are in a service business, for every extra $10,000 worth of NEW business you generate at a 50% profit, you would realize a return of $5,000. Even if you spent $2,500 in new advertising to acquire the new business, you would achieve a 100% return on your new advertising investment - or $2,500. If you sell a product, you may have to do something like $15,000 in new business in order to pay for the product, but you will still get a 100% return on your advertising dollar. YOU DON'T HAVE TO BRING A LOT OF MONEY TO INTERNET MARKETING! It is interesting that most of the big glamour sites are having a difficult time getting a decent return on their advertising investment. Ad agencies spend a lot of money and call it "branding". However, these sites are also spending a fortune on offline advertising trying to attract online usage. We look at it this way... Some people are already making money. A book by Jaclyn Easton confirms this and can be viewed at - http://Striking It Rich.com There are many more success stories surfacing daily. If you would like another opinion look at this survey: http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/technology/d923325902.brc
The glamour sites think that they will gain a large portion of the market share by advertising and since they can afford to spend millions of dollars in the process, everything will be OK! However, it is entirely possible that they will not win financially because they are not netlinking! They are merely throwing advertising money and personnel at a new project without regard to profit. We wrote and published this article in 1996; Internet For The Rest Of Us. Since then nothing has changed our opinion. http://virtuallyfree.com/Restofus.htm In 1996 we also posted this article on the Internet. http://virtuallyfree.com/Died1997.htm YOU DON'T HAVE TO BRING A LOT OF MONEY TO INTERNET MARKETING! It really doesn't matter whether you have a product, a service, or that you are a professional; you rely heavily on "word of mouth" recommendations or netlinking! We decided to follow the "KISS" rule and treat our website http://virtuallyfree.com/ and marketing just as a good sales person would -- one BILLBOARD and one person at a time -- netlinking. And allowing the "word of mouth" principle time to work its magic with referrals. What if you don't know everything about Internet marketing or the latest technology? With over 500 million people online, the Internet itself presents the largest single market on the planet. It is predicted, by some, that as much as 90% of the population of the United States, and 5% of the world will be online in the next five years. Because of the word-of-mouth nature of the Web, the sooner you are on someone's referral list (bookmarks) the sooner you will be referred to their friends and associates. Don't forget, more than 80% of the Internet's business potential is still ahead of us! We recommend the following for a successful online business: 1. Bring your own business. Think of your Internet project as a branch office. Use it to communicate in-depth information about your products and service. Don't think that you will copy someone else's business and succeed with it. It's not about competition; it's about competance. It's about creative marketing! It is imperative that you build trust with your potential customers. Will you write orders? Perhaps, but more importantly, you will present yourself in a way that previously has been impossible. Browsers will take time to read what you have to say and they will respond. 2. Self-praise is no recommendation, but you can offer your expertise to the online community even if you currently sell it to make a living. You don't have to tell your secret formula if you don't want to -- only the result. "Sell the sizzle and not the steak" was never more true than on the Internet. 3. Observe and learn from your online competition, but don't concern yourself about them. With over one billion pages online, it's not likely that you are going to run into them often. However, you will compete in Search Engines and Directories. Some serious surveys have said that on the average, websites receive only 15% of their visitors from search engines (including directories); 85% by referral. Note the following article published by Ziff Davis: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2432.html. It is impossible to provide you with all of our marketing opinions here. However, we would be pleased to continue this as a two-way dialogue. Just send us your name, telephone number and the best time to contact you and we will respond promptly. For instance if you have a product or line to retail and you don't want to take on the full responsibility of a Shopping Cart and Charge Card system at first, we can recommend a company that offers both at only 9% of gross sales. Put this together with an inexpensive check guarantee system and you could get down to a 5-6% cost of money processing. YOU DON'T HAVE TO BRING A LOT OF MONEY TO INTERNET MARKETING! Our office hours are 8AM to 4PM PST M-F - 800.330/7501 History, although sometimes made up of the few acts of the great, is more often shaped by the many acts of the small. Mark Twain Man did not weave the web of life - he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself. Chief Seattle Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road. Unknown In the internet age there's no greater risk than being left behind. Newsweek
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