Getting the Internet Marketing shopping list filled out – completely…
Another rainy day on the farm – perfect for sorting through all sorts of things. For me, it’s getting back to all this stuff I’ve accumulated on Internet Marketing.
I’m just now getting through Charles Heflin’s SEO2020.com, where he has a great deal of courses in all shapes and conditions. But they mostly follow what he has been uncovering for years. Some changes you can tell. And other stuff he’s not gotten around to yet – if ever. But the basics are there.
Internet Marketing Pyramid
Now, there is a bit of a pyramid to all this SEO stuff. And I’m sure this is controversial, but I’m looking at it from the broad view. This is looking backwards to see where I’ve gotten the data that works and who came up with that stuff first.
Top tier is Charles’ Heflin and his ThemeZoom buddies. Follow him, get a Google Alert going on him – this way you can keep up with stuff.
Somewhere between top and second tier is the 30 Day Challenge guys. When you hold a webinar series and 50,000 people attend, you have to be doing something right. If you did 30DC and then studied Heflin’s stuff – this would be a simple approach which would really set you up to succeed. Ed Dale doesn’t particularly cover Heflin’s stuff, but he gets you set up very well on using the Internet and making money doing it. Another subscription you should sign up for (it’s free.)
2nd tier is Michael Campbell and his buddy Dr. Andy Williams. Both of these guys have been around as long and deal with making income from Affiliate sales, much as Heflin does. But while some of their stuff is original early on, and that they have their own tangential approach to things, they have a sizable Heflin/ThemeZoom influence. And I follow Campbell and Williams through their email newsletters – though I’d probably be better off with RSS feeds.
3rd tier is Jack Humphrey’s and his associates. I don’t really like anything that is ego-based. When someone says it’s “based on so-and-so’s success”, I tend to be skeptical. And Humphrey’s stuff is that way. It’s all about Jack. The other point is that while I’ve done his 16-step program with Sam Clark (twice), I found it haphazardly organized and presented. After that 16-day program, you are supposed to sign up for his (formerly known as) Authority Site Center and do his 60-day program. But you can find that pdf file online in various places – and it’s no better organized. It’s really a blind shopping list of things to do, not “here’s what to do and why it’s in this sequence and how come”.
After all, I’m a farmer, engineer, and philosopher – so things that work are appreciated and when you study them to find out why they work, you appreciate them even more. When someone obfuscates (hides) the reasons things work (or don’t really know) then you suspect either 1) they got their secrets from someone else, or 2) their “secret stuff” doesn’t work or is a gimmick.
Jack also has the scene of reinventing himself every few years. First it was ContentDesk (the idea that Content is King, which is still true) and this was in the heady days of Article Marketing. Then it was Authority Site Center, based on the idea that authority sites get better search engine positions and so more traffic (also true). Now it’s BlogCentral or something – all based on local search (the current rising star). So I’ve reluctantly started following him, as he keeps coming across my trail with data I’m trying to find. He’s just changing too much for me – seems inconsistent. Nice guy, though. I’m just not into personality cults for my data. So you don’t see any link to him or his cronies.
4th tier and below – all these knuckle heads with their semi-rabid followers who buy up everything they put out. My clue to these guys was in a survey Sam Clark did at the beginning of his 16-step program – where 80% of those who had signed up had bought some major services or packages about Internet Marketing in the last year, and were intending to buy more. The worst scenes I’ve ever had to deal with were Internet Marketers marketing Internet Marketing to Internet Marketers. Like the settlers circling their own wagons endlessly with no Indians even attacking. (Are we there, yet?)
What you really need to know
Hopefully, I’ll be able to tell you this by the end of these studies. I got into studying marketing after I wrote a bunch of books which just sat there. Now I had already been trained as a graphic artist, so had a thorough grounding in what that corporation thought was marketing. Of course, they had built this up with their own clientele and through the days before and after desktop publishing appeared. And mixed in with this was their own way to build a sales silo to extract maximal income from clients they had lured there. All top-down and inbred.
Getting out onto the Internet was a relief, but was a bit like Tom Hank’s castaway character – lots of ocean all around after you get off that island. And the “experts” out there are really little more than sharks most of the time. Essentially, they all want you to buy into their plan somehow, someway. They all want a piece of you. And they’ll keep circling until they get it…
The funny thing is that when you try to use most of their methods, the vast bulk of the fish just swim right away from your hook. So you have to learn how to fish completely different than what you are being told or shown. Most all of the data which is and has been being used is dated by the time you get around to using it.
My approach is to then find the underlying explanations for those method which will consistently work. Marketing is based on the principles of finding or creating a market for goods or services you can provide – to clients/customers/consumers who really need that set of goods or services and are willing to exchange something with you in order to acquire (or use for a limited time) those goods or services. That also includes giving advice to people on how to use or acquire your own goods or services.
The bottom of the shopping cart
This is what you need to get first – how the whole system works – the basics. This is the durable goods which will stand up and hold their shape no matter what you put on top.
At this layer, you are getting in your basics of
- what your passion is,
- what your business model consists of,
- what niche fits those two,
- market research for that niche,
- getting a product that niche wants,
- setting up a way to sell and deliver the product(s) those niche clients want.
It’s really that simple. But you can see there are a lot of steps to it.
Shopping cart Fluff filler and the top items
You then, and only then, can start your promotion. You’re still marketing, but now you know who you are trying to reach and how, with what – and for how much.
What you next need is to let people know you exist and why they really need that better mouse trap. Mouse traps need to be promoted, or the world can never find a beaten path to get to your door.
And here is where social media comes in, as well as conventional marketing. PPC is another leg to this stool. And to begin with, you’ll need to rank on search engines – but we’ll need to do some SEO at the outset in order to build a site they can come to and buy from. And search engines are the be-all and end-all. They are just another stepping stone (albeit a big one.)
Series shopping beyond dropping
Update: This data is now available a book – Online Sunshine Plan.
And all this is simply an explanation of what I’ve found that others use – a review of sorts – plus all sorts of little knick-knacks and PLR sets so you can get inspired and start cranking out your own site.
The idea of this is to create a basic site and then set up ways various niches can find and use this stuff for themselves. Internet Marketing for Farmers, Internet Marketing for Boomers, Internet Marketing for Newbies. Lots of versions of this with the same idea – helping people who don’t have a clue how to get set up and operating in no time at all (or it should seem like that.)
It’s not a course in “how to make money online” or “get rich through online marketing” – it’s a course in how to figure everything out for yourself so you can get on with your life and what you really want to do.
That’s one of the hard lessons I had to learn over the last year – if you are only trying to learn how to “make money”, you’ll surround yourself with people who want to “make money” off of your hard work. You really want to help people improve their lives. And that is why you have to put a price on stuff so they can buy it – because they wouldn’t think it was valuable enough to put to use in their lives otherwise.
-o0o-
OK – list complete (at least the broad strokes – I’m sure I’ll find something on the dessert aisle…)
