Preliminary Course

Online Marketing

In this article I will explain both the principles of making profit with the online marketing business and how these principles can be applied in a general sense.

My purpose this time is not to show, how to use recommended services or how you can get computer skills to achieve results fast. I will only present the principles here. Later I will add more resources for teaching necessary computer skills and going through necessary steps for using recommended services. This article is not about making money with casinos, or being paid with filling surveys and such. I am keeping my focus on marketing oriented home business model. Business principles and definitions

You need to have something to give for people, was it a single product, multiple products, single service or multiple services. To make sentences simpler, I will call this later with a single word: the PRODUCT. The PRODUCT is the start and the corner stone of the business. At least you need to have an imaginary the PRODUCT, that you are going to make available to other people. I use word the PRODUCT here in a wider sense, it includes blogs and lenses, that are tried to make visible, available and reachable for people for various reasons.

1. First you need the PRODUCT. You might not need any inventory for it. You can sell digital as well as material the PRODUCT and you can be an affiliate marketer, who just promotes the PRODUCT. A good the PRODUCT comes with a good STORY. Again, there can be multiple stories from different perspectives, but later i will call it simple STORY. Every good STORY has a title, golden thought, where the nucleus of the STORY is stored.

2. Second you need a center or central places where to sell or offer the PRODUCT. Here i will make simplified definitions for the CENTRE and SELL words. The CENTRE can be a physical or virtual store or stock, and there can be many of them. It can be a physical stock or website, or you can mix them, as it is usual. But it doesn't need to be any static place, you can carry the CENTRE with you.

SELL means selling in a sense of exchanging real money or goods between sellers, resellers, advertisers, transporters and owners. SELL also holds a meaning of offering the PRODUCT as well. Sometimes SELL can be a free give away. It is a sell because often it has a motivation of giving buyer a reason to buy more or other PRODUCT.

CENTRE does not need to be your own. You can SELL other's the PRODUCT on other's CENTRE. I'll explain this later.

3. Third you need channel(s) where to promote the PRODUCT. This is called advertising and marketing. CHANNEL is either online or offline. Online CHANNEL includes website, search engine, net application (messengers and other stand-alone applications, which are connected to internet and has advertising slots) and email marketing. Offline CHANNEL is a traditional media marketing including newspapers, magazines, street, tv, radio, telephone, store, friends, landscape or any other creative method. You can even rent skin of bold people head to place an advertisement on there.

So we have the PRODUCT with good STORY, CENTRE and CHANNEL, which are used to SELL the PRODUCT.

How to have the PRODUCT?

See, I don't want to teach, how to invent or create a product, because basically, in a sense of business, it is all about getting and having a profitable the PRODUCT. If you have your own the PRODUCT or resell rights of other's the PRODUCT, it is all the same.

It is quite easy to create own products, if we talk about digital goodies and you are creative. Creating a picture gallery, ebook, music, other arts and selling them is too big subject to handle here. All I can say, that if you are keen of creative product making, just learn how to use Apple iLife applications and you'll be quite near to professional quality of any goods, that are related to pictures, music and video.

You can get the PRODUCT to sell from various places. There are a lot of merchant and market places on internet, where you can apply and get the products with resell rights. ShareASale, ClickBank, Amazon Associate Store, eBay Affiliate Store, PopShop to be mentioned at first hand. They are all free to join.

Next thing you need is enough knowledge of the PRODUCT, that you can describe it with interesting titles and short descriptions. It requires also knowledge of customers, their habits, behaviour and influences, that are using the PRODUCT. I recommend creating a lot of titles for the PRODUCT and as many short and long descriptions of the PRODUCT. With this creation process, you can use internet tools to examine competitors methods and titles, how they have described their PRODUCT. This is your first step to the keyword oriented work, that is very fundamental of the whole system. You can also use additional tools for creating the STORY, if you want.

I'd prefer choosing the PRODUCT, that is near to your own interests, at least not against your own interests! Depending on marketing plan, you are probably going to use a lot of time with the PRODUCT, so motivation is important. If customers can see your profession and interest with the product, you have better changes to success with it.

After saying that, you can choose the PRODUCT with neutral attitude also, if everything you want is to profit or learn marketing. Most fundamental part of this process is to find a product, that has best combination of minimal risks, lowest competition and highest commissions. There are a lot of tools, that are used to search such products, if you are up to affiliate marketing. These tools are briefly discussed on earlier blog posts and will be discussed more detailed later. How to have the CENTRE?

We already touched the subject when told about market places, that there are available. This part of the business contains either creating your own websites for showing the PRODUCT or using others websites to show the PRODUCT. CENTRE is the place, where you put all the necessary information about the PRODUCT. Information can be textual, hypermedia or anything, that provokes customer to invest to your PRODUCT.

There are various ways to get a place, where to put the PRODUCT information, from free single webpages to the dedicated and virtual servers. You can put CENTRE to the famous and much used services like social websites and get a space for selling and advertising free. Or you can buy cheap web hosting and own domain name, that makes couple of tens of dollars a year at minimum. And finally, if you have resources, you go further and get more flexibility by choosing dedicated hosting. That is for advanced users and for being successful with marketing does not necessary need this option.

It is also a good idea to create landing pages and various ways to get people attention and leaving their contact information for further details.

Finally you can choose your strategy to make your CENTRE slowly reachable or fast reachable. That takes us to the next topic, the CHANNEL.

How to have the CHANNEL?

I'd like to say, that this is the most important part of the business. Without proper CHANNEL people would never know, that you have the PRODUCT. This can sound rude, but even if you have a bad PRODUCT, you can makes sales with it, if you have a good STORY and CHANNEL, that directs tens of thousands of people to your CENTRE. There will always be some people among them, that are interested and will buy the PRODUCT. If not because they are really interested, but sometimes, just because they want to spend money. It is stories and flow of customers, that makes profit.

Actually there is endless amount of the CHANNEL, that can be used to direct traffic to your CENTRE. I will list here some of the free or low budget choices: Traffic Exchanges, Traffic Redirects, Safe Lists, Search Engines, Directories (blog, article, subject), Forums, Adwords and its alternatives. Some of the channels makes it possible, that targeted people find your CENTRE very fast, actually immediately. Often they cost something, not much by default, but something.

So you need to decide your strategy here, to use PPC or SEO or mix them someway. Also if you have not involved with team work on earlier steps, this is a good place to think about it. Making this all by yourself can be a tremendous work to be done. Summa Summarum

These are the basics of online marketing business.