Balancing your internet marketing mix

To really understand internet marketing mix, we will first need to understand where the concept takes root from.

Marketing mix is a basic concept which is taught and used in marketing an offline business. The marketing mix at the most basic level is the different types of marketing activities a company does to get exposure to its target market. The intended results of course being to increase sales and revenue in most cases.

For an offline business, Internet Marketing can be ONE component of its marketing mix. Even though a company may treat it as such in the bigger picture, it certainly is not just one component. Unlike other marketing activities like TV ads, billboards and print, the internet is a vast space in itself and its rapidly growing. There endless marketing fronts on the internet. In fact I would say there are more marketing fronts online than offline. There fore whether you are a large corporation or a one man army entrepreneur, you will need to understand at least the most basic internet marketing mix in order to be successful online.

Internet Marketing Mix 101

Many successful offline marketers know the crucial importance of market research before entering a market and investing valuable time and resources on a project. Unfortunately, those same marketers who have a firm grasp of marketing forget that the very basic principals of marketing stay the same while doing business online. To be able to design a successful internet marketing mix, you need to know you market and you need to know how they behave online.

Niche Research

This is the first step to putting your internet marketing mix together. You need determine the area in which you will operate online. As with offline businesses, internet is filled with niches and opportunity waiting to be untapped. Two very good places to do that are clickbank and Amazon.

On Amazon, if you find that the top products in a particular niche have more than 20 reviews, that means that this product has sold thousands of units from Amazon alone. That’s a very good indication of very strong demand for that product online, and probably for that market as a whole too. If you see this trend repeated on multiple products in the same market, that means the market is big and profitable enough to enter and there are buyers in that market.

On Clickbank, you can look at a product gravity to get an idea of how “hot” the product is. Higher the gravity, the better.

If you are already in business offline and want to move that business online, then you will not need to find a niche for yourself because you already have one. Instead, you will need to verify that the industry/niche you are in, is big enough online and that there are buyers on the internet. Otherwise, no matter how good your internet marketing mix is, you will not see online success if there are no buyers looking for a product/service like yours on the internet.

Business Model Determination

This gets a little tricky after niche research. You see, not every niche is suitable for every business model. The business model determines your role (or your website’s role) in a customer’s buying cycle. There are many types of models online and each caters to a different audience, a different stage in a customer’s buying cycle.

-          Information sites

Information sites are aimed at people who are researching a certain topic online. The website is full of valuable content given away for free. They aim to get visitors to their sites and monetize them in some way. The most common monetization strategy for information sites is to show audience targeted ads to their visitors.

These ads may pay on a per click basis or a lump sum monthly fee.  Another method to do this is to add subscribers to your email list and expose them to offers via email. These will be discussed further in this article.

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-          Ecommerce Websites

An e-commerce website is simply an online store where people can visit and order from your store online through some kind of a payment method. This is one of the best methods to do business online but it is not for people who are just starting out. This model inherently comes with an offline requirement. If you are to sell products online, you will obviously need to have an offline supply chain to support your online store. However, there are also ways to get that done for you by third party suppliers, for a price of course.

-          Lead Generation Websites

This is also a very good way to make an online income with minimal risk on your part. There are TONS of offline businesses that could use more leads and sales. Internet is an amazing place to generate these leads and sell them to offline businesses. In fact, one of THE biggest niches online is lead generation for auto insurance and life insurance for the big insurance companies who buy these online leads, follow up with them and try to sell to them.

-          Affiliate Marketing

This method has gained tremendous popularity in the last 5 years or so. With affiliate marketing, you basically act as an independent sales agent to another seller. The seller could be an ecommerce store or an information product creator. You get commission for customers you refer to the seller. Unique cookie tracking is used to ensure that you get credit for sales that came through customers you sent. This is very attractive because the affiliate does not have to handle any back end costs, does not have to hold inventory, increase conversions. The only thing an affiliate needs to care about is getting a potential customer through to the seller. This may sound like a meagre task but affiliate marketing is a science in itself and has been about 10+ years in the making. This is also the model I use to make money online. This website itself is an example of an affiliate website.     

-          Information Product Creation

You may or may not realize but information is valuable. So valuable in fact that you could put a price tag on it and sell it online in the most bizarre niches you may never even think about. Billions of dollars (yes with a “B”) worth of information is sold on the internet every year on the internet in huge niches like internet marketing and weight loss to more bizarre niches like how to get rid of haemorrhoids.

Putting up the Websites

Once you have decided what your niche is going to be and what model its going to follow, you will then need to get your product in place. The nature of your product will obviously depend on what model you chose. Not all models are suitable for everyone. For example, in case you’re putting up an info site, you product is simply the articles you put up. You publish that content on your site and give free access to everyone. You try to attract visitors to your sites and hope to make money from the ads or affiliate offers you place their. In case you put up a ecommerce store, your products are going to be tangible, physical products that will need to be shipped, ect.

Getting Traffic

Out of the whole internet marketing mix, this is perhaps the point where most webmasters fail miserably… literally. They spend a ton of time and resources on building their sites and what not but can never get enough people to take up their offers. There are numerous ways to get traffic and its not at all possible to go into the details of each traffic method. I don’t even know all of them myself. However, in my future articles on this site I will be writing more in detail about the methods that I do know and have experience in (SEO for example)… For now though here is a list of the major methods out there and a little information about them to help you decide if you want to go for this traffic method or not.

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FREE TRAFFIC METHODS

• Search Engine Optimization – Go for it if you have at least 6-10 hours to give to you online business each week. Less will also work but results will take longer to come through. You also need to stay focused. SEO ain’t for you if you can’t keep your head in one place. Finally, patience is the mother of all virtues… this is one virtue, very HIGH in demand if you’re going near SEO I tell you. On the plus side, its easy, not complicated and no rocket science that an average person like you and I can’t understand. Oh and did I mention that the traffic you do get from it is the BEST kind of traffic you could get!

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• Article Marketing – If you’re a writer and you got no problem writing (or buying) a good amount of valuable content each day, then this is the thing for you. This method is especially very good for people who are experts at some particular topic and have a lot of useful advice to give to people about that topic. You need to be good at long tail keyword research for this method. You commit to writing 8-10 short (approx 400 words) articles every day and you can start making money with it TODAY…

• Video Marketing – great method to create an on going traffic stream. If you notice, most videos on youtube that have HUGE view counts are at least a year old. Unless you have a huge youtube following, in which case you can literally create traffic on demand.  Good videos on YouTube pick up steam with time. As more and more people find you videos, they share with others if they like it. After a while it becomes huge and if you’ve done your videos right, they will send a LOT of traffic your way.

• Social Media – You can do this if you have at least half an hour each day and interesting things to talk about on your topic. Relationship building skills will blow your results off the roof. This is not immediate though. It takes time to build upon and it takes time to create a following. Once done, its very powerful.

• Email Marketing – Many people will argue that this is the very best method to create traffic online. I say YES and NO. You see, you can’t really employ this until you have a list already and to have a list, you NEED to have already generated traffic from one of the other methods. List building does take time and the list needs to be fuelled using one of the other traffic methods. Once you have a responsive list, you can literally create traffic on DEMAND. Its just a matter of finding a good product to promote and sending an email to them with your affiliate link inside.

PAID TRAFFIC METHODS

• Pay Per Click – One of the fastest and effortless ways to create traffic! Not without its hazards though. Pay Per Click is an excellent way to get very targeted, high quality traffic but not everyone succeeds with it. You can afford to make mistakes with free traffic methods but every mistake costs money here. When you start, you will make mistakes and lose money… that’s my 100% guarantee! However, that should not stop you because this loss can be minimized if you do your research right and learn the basics before getting into it full throttle. This method is for you if you have some extra money that you can afford to lose in case things go wrong. Analytics skills help big time!

• Media Buying – not as expensive as pay per click but still not something you should go for if you don’t have some extra money that you can afford to lose. The traffic isn’t as expensive as PPC but its not as good quality either. However, there is a lot more traffic to be had with this method. As with any method, you can kill it if you do it right.

• Pay Per View – this one is a relatively inexpensive method and you can get started with even something as low as $25 on some networks. The quality of traffic however is lower again and you will need to have more of this traffic to get desired results. Use it if you have a small budget and are good at analysing numbers and tweaking for optimum results.

All traffic methods have their goods and bads. If you can master even one of these methods, you will never have to worry about finances ever again. You can kill it with any single one of these but it is always good to not have all your eggs in one basket. Therefore my advise will be to incorporate multiple traffic streams in your internet marketing mix so that if one goes down for some reason, your entire online business doesn’t go down.

These are all the major puzzles you need to put in place for your internet marketing mix. There could be a thousand other things in between but these are the basics and everything else revolves around these same components.

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