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Online Marketing: What’s the Point?

Some small business owners don’t bother with online marketing. Maybe they provide a neighborhood service, like running a home-based daycare center or the corner coffee shop, so they think their customers are only those people in their immediate vicinity. It wouldn’t appear necessary for them to do any online marketing — using a business website to advertise to a global market? What would be the point?

One major advantage of having a business website is the increased visibility; it puts your business on the map, or more precisely, the Web.

For example, what if someone from out of town wanted to check out the daycares or restaurants in your area? Or find out more about your business after hours, when all they’d get if they telephoned was voice mail or an answering machine? Or worse, what if your competitors were listed in the local Internet directories and you weren’t — who do you think would get the Web surfer’s business?

More and more people are relying on the Internet to obtain information these days, and if your business doesn’t participate in some form of online marketing, you’re limiting your potential customer base.

Benefits of Online Marketing

Marketing your business online with a website is beneficial in a number of ways. You can:

Advertise your business for a lot less money than a print ad or TV or radio commerical.

Build credibility because nowadays people expect to be able to find your business on the Web. It’s fast becoming “standard operating procedure,” like having your phone number listed in the phone book. In the public’s eyes, a website proves you’re a “real” business (though you and I both know that’s not true of all cyberspace businesses, it’s the public perception that counts).

Generate additional income through affiliate marketing, direct referrals, and infomarketing. Learn how you can benefit from infopreneuring in our free 4-day e-Course, Infopreneuring 101 (see the end of the Become An Infopreneur section below for details).

Make More Money With Online Marketing

The first two benefits listed above are self-explanatory. It’s the third one that really emphasizes the importance of online marketing and having a Web presence. It’s about making more money.

For entrepreneurs who don’t have a pension plan or retirement fund, it’s especially important to have a financial mechanism in place to provide you with income for retirement, or in the event you can no longer work. Passive revenue streams are that financial mechanism.

Let’s take a closer look at the individual revenue-generating strategies listed in the third bullet above. Each one on its own can provide some extra money every month — the amount depends on the effort you put into driving traffic to your site or someone else’s. When you combine all three online marketing strategies, however, as many Web-based entrepreneurs do, you can conceivably make your entire living from the Web.

I. AFFILIATE MARKETING

This first strategy is just a fancy way of saying you’re selling someone else’s product on the Internet. You don’t have to have your own Web site, nor stock inventory, nor collect payment. Out of the three strategies we’ll discuss, it is probably the easiest one for you to do. You see, many companies, BIG companies, like Old Navy, and Sony, and Verizon Wireless, offer affiliate programs in which you drive traffic to their merchant site and if the person you send their way buys their product, the merchant pays you a commission.

Of course this is an oversimplification of how the system works but it does work. And it can be quite lucrative, if you’re dedicated to following the merchant’s guidelines, and you educate yourself about how to effectively drive traffic to their site. You can learn more about this online marketing strategy from affiliate marketing experts such as Rosalind Gardner, whose Super Affiliate Handbook is one of the best resources on the Web.

II. DIRECT REFERRALS/FINDERS FEES

In this type of arrangement, you’re acting as a broker between website visitors looking for a particular type of service or product (vacationers looking for condo rentals or hotels, for instance) and local businesses providing the service to whom you’ll send the website visitors. In other words, you recommend businesses on your website and when visitors buy from the business you recommend, that business pays you a “finder’s fee” or a “referral fee.” Arrangements like these can be lucrative if, for instance, you live in a vacation destination and know business owners who’d appreciate your referrals enough to pay you for them, or if you know a real estate agent who would be willing to pay you a percentage of their commission for homes sold to buyers you’ve referred.

This particular strategy is more labor intensive than an affiliate program because:

1. You need to research reputable businesses that you can trust and would be comfortable referring people to (your credibility is at stake here);

2. You need to make human contact with the local businesses to whom you’ll refer your website visitors and agree upon a per-lead versus per-sale payment system;

3. You need to implement and monitor a tracking/reporting system (usually a monthly report) to ensure that you receive payment for referrals;

4. You’ll occasionally need to follow up with the people you’ve referred to make sure the business is accurately reporting referrals.

While this may seem like a lot of legwork initially (it is!), you’re not only setting up a potentially lucrative income stream, you’re also building business-to-business relationships, which can pay off in other ways as well. You can learn more about this from our Networking article.

III. BECOME AN INFOPRENEUR

Also known as “infomarketing” or “education-based marketing,” this online marketing strategy positions you as an expert in your field, which can build credibility, generate revenue, and create a global community of customers that you can market to repeatedly.

Even if you don’t think of yourself as an expert, you’ve undoubtedly gained some specific knowledge or proficiency during your life that others would like to learn. The single mom who whips up nutritious and delicious meals in 20 minutes is an expert at “fast and easy meal preparation.” If you provide care for your aging parents or a special needs child, you’ve probably become an expert at providing such care and have wisdom to share that others would find valuable.

You can’t assume that other people automatically know everything you do. They don’t. Everyone’s life is different. We all acquire expertise in areas that reflect our own experiences, and it’s that expertise that others are looking for.

If you’re still worried about calling yourself an expert, I recommend reading Jennifer Tribe’s article, Are You An Expert At What You Do? It really puts the “expert” concept into perspective.

The bottom line is: People crave information — that’s one of the main reasons they surf the Net. And you’ve got valuable knowledge that people are looking for.

Sharing that knowledge is what Infomarketing is all about. Check out some of the ways you can do this:

Ezines: Create a free weekly, biweekly, or monthly electronic newsletter (ezine) with tips and strategies, recommendations, product reviews — you choose the format. Provide useful information your subscribers will value, and in each issue, promote your products or services. Your subscribers already know you and are willing to buy from you because they trust the information you deliver. It’s a highly effective online marketing tool that works wonders to build your business.

Find out more about the benefits of publishing your own ezine in our FAQs About Ezines section.

E-courses: Offer a 5-week or 7-week online course. Every week you send a lesson about how to solve the problem your subscribers have. If your expertise is gardening, for example, each lesson can address a specific topic: how to get rid of aphids, the best weed-killing product, organic gardening, hydroponics. Use your imagination to create a curriculum that’s easy to follow, provides useful information, and overdelivers value to your students.

Teleseminars, audioseminars, CDs: Offer intensive seminars that people can participate in from the comfort of their own home. Schedule teleseminars with experts in your field who provide listeners with in-depth, highly targeted information about a specific area of concern to them. Tape the session and offer it as an audio seminar that people can download from the Internet and listen to when it’s convenient for them. Sell CDs so people can listen to the seminar while they’re driving or exercising or doing dishes. It’s relatively inexpensive to produce these types of infoproducts, and once you’ve created them, they’ll continue generating revenue without your continued participation (except maybe mailing out CDs).

Online marketing with an education-based infomarketing strategy is easy to do, fairly inexpensive, and can generate a highly profitable income stream. Learn more from experts such as Sheri’ McConnell of the Association of Web Entrepreneurs (AWE). Her program really over delivers. My own membership has paid for itself many times over and I’d gladly pay more for the knowledge I’ve gained (but please don’t tell Sheri’ that!).

As you can see, online marketing is the wave of the future. If you’d like to learn more about infomarketing, check out our Infopreneuring article or register for our free 4-day e-Course: Infopreneuring 101.