How to grow your internet business without doing it all yourself

How to grow your internet business without doing it all yourself by Paul Isaac About the author Paul Isaac is the founder of two digital marketing agencies and has marketed global brands the world over When yesterday’s digital marketing techniques stopped working, he and his company spent four years pioneering new ones which did Born in the UK, he currently lives in the Netherlands and is still a frequent visitor to the UK, as well as the USA and Sweden where he has family He spends his days getting hands-on with marketing for his global clients and cycling enthusiastically across the flat Dutch countryside You can reach him at info@click-click-go.com The easy way to read this book You’re a busy person Ever since all our labour saving devices like computers and mobile phones were invented, we somehow have a lot more work I’d love to think you’re going to read every last word of this book - I nearly broke into a sweat writing some of it - but if you want to get up and running as fast as possible then, especially for you, I’ve including a Wrap Up section at the end of each chapter to give you the key points from that chapter You could read all of these Wrap Ups first, then go to the last chapter which is a quick How-To-Get-Started guide Then you’ll be off and running, making so much money you can afford the time to come back and read the rest of it The internet and an ancient Chinese general Before the internet bubble burst in 2001 there was a lot of talk about how traditional businesses didn’t “get” the internet We don’t hear so much from those people any more The bubble burst, they were proved wrong The reason they were wrong was that they thought the new technology made the old basics obsolete We’re going to be discussing a lot of very modern ways to do marketing in this book, but let’s not get lost People are still people and selling is still selling In the end, the internet is just a channel, a new way for us to communicate with each other It may be a major channel which has disrupted commerce in a way not seen before in our lifetimes, but it’s still a channel And perspective matters To keep that perspective, I’m going to be diving back into a work which was written in the fifth century B.C : The Art of War by the Chinese general Sun Tzū I chose this book because it’s out of copyright so I won’t have to pay royalties if I quote it Ha, ha No, not really I chose it because its principles of strategy apply equally well to business as to war These are the basics Marketing ideas come and go, gee, if I only had a dollar for every new book on the subject that comes out But the basic principles endure The Art of War was written from a military perspective, but it’s about strategy and those strategic principles apply to marketing in a big way Here’s one of my favourite quotes from it to get you thinking: “Hence in the wise leader’s plans, considerations of advantage and disadvantage will be blended together.” I’ve seen an awful lot of companies violate this For example, they make a sales budget based on new business they will gain However, they never allowed that the competition would probably come in and take some of their existing business from somewhere, in other words, they did not allow for disadvantages If they had, they would have realised that they needed to target a lot more new business to meet their sales goals Or, to give you another example, I’ve seen companies go after new business by competing on price, and then be surprised when the competition lowered theirs in response This all sounds like common sense, but it gets ignored more often than you’d imagine —————————————— Alright, that’s all the warming up you’re going to get If you’re ready for some controversial views, some strange humour and (hopefully) some genuine insights into doing business on the internets, let’s get started Appendix 1 Some random advertising ideas to try Next time you find yourself racking your brains about how to get new business, come and look at this appendix again There are no end of ways to advertise or promote online, with new things coming along all the time These are a few ideas, in no particular order, just to get you thinking It’s is absolutely not meant to be a complete list of all the ways to advertise, just a place to start imagining the possibilities which are open to you ✴ Put a high profit product on a Daily Deals site (sites like Groupon) to get a one-off blast of visitors and new customers ✴ Put your products on Amazon and eBay to broaden your distribution ✴ Start a blog about your product ✴ Run some display ads on desktops and tablets ✴ Run display ads on mobile ✴ Write a guest blog on an non-commercial website that covers your industry ✴ Run video ads on YouTube ✴ Place display ads on YouTube videos (these are the small banners that appear at the bottom) ✴ Put your new product idea on Kickstarter ✴ Trawl through your contacts list and send everyone an email about what you’re up to with the business Put a link to the website at the bottom ✴ Set up multiple websites each with a slightly different take, or aimed at different target audiences ✴ Put a popular product on special offer and get out an email blast on this ✴ Set up your email autoresponder Track each step in the chain via analytics and fix or drop the steps where most people drop off ✴ Set up a YouTube channel and make a whole series of videos for it Make sure to keyword optimise each title and description so you get found both on Youtube itself and also on Google Search ✴ Add chat to your website so that customers can easily get their questions answered Although this is a book about internet marketing, let’s also mention some of the offline stuff too If you’re doing it right, you will have have refined your message online so that you have a proven message to advertise to people when they aren’t behind their computers or reading their phones ✴ print and send postcards to your list ✴ print and publish Recommendation Cards which reward existing customers who recommend a friend ✴ What sold best on your website? Put that product into a newspaper ad ✴ … or on the radio ✴ … or try it on Tel-Sell Appendix 2 Further reading You will probably know most of these books if you’ve been involved in internet marketing for a while If not, these are the ones to catch up on Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords: How to Access 100 Million People in 10 Minutes (Ultimate Series) by Perry Marshall Although specifically written about AdWords, this is one of the greatest books on internet marketing in my opinion Lays out all the basic principles to succeed online No B.S Direct Marketing: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Direct Marketing for Non-Direct Marketing Businesses by Dan S Kennedy Dan Kennedy is not really an internet guy, he’s a direct marketing guy However, everything he says here applies to the internet These are the enduring principles of marketing and making sales Launch: An Internet Millionaire’s Secret Formula To Sell Almost Anything Online, Build A Business You Love, And Live The Life of Your Dreams by Jeff Walker This is probably the ultimate manual on email marketing Jeff is an original thinker who evolved his own system The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss This book was the original inspiration for many people who gave up the corporate world and made their own life Some of the concepts are a little out of date now, but the basic concepts are timeless The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t by Nate Silver This is supposed to be a book about forecasting, but I found the approach goes much wider If you’re going to succeed in any business then you need to learn how to think in original ways and this book may help to open that up for you The Art Of War by Sun Tzū I don’t know that business is war, but it feels a lot like it sometimes I prefer to think of this book as laying out the basics of strategy Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout The reason I quoted this several times in the text is because positioning is almost essential on the internet, (which hadn’t even been invented when Ries and Trout wrote the book) Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard You’ve read the books, you’ve listened to the gurus, you’ve been to the seminars If your business still hasn’t made it, then the problem is you And if it’s you, then this is the best way I know to fix it A few blogs to follow This field is changing all the time These are some general blogs if you feel yo want to keep on top of all the new developments, although they are probably overkill for most people Search Engine Land Search Engine Watch Blog Seomoz Daily Seo Blog Perry Marshall Blog Traffick: The Business Of Search References 1 www.ontargetresearch.com 2 http://returnonnow.com/internet-marketing-resources/2013-search-engine-market-share-by-country/ 3 http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results 4 techcrunch.com/2015/02/07/the-army-of-ghostwriters-behind-king-content/ 5 http://numberoneonthelist.com 6 http://adwords.blogspot.nl/2015/02/staying-on-top-of-adwords-numerous-new.html 7 http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/02/how-does-facebook-make-its-money/ 8 http://analytics.blogspot.nl/2014/04/understanding-multi-device-user.html 9 http://blogs.smartertools.com/2011/08/29/the-value-of-email/ 10 http://www.ontargetresearch.com [...]... So, before you run away with how brilliant your idea is, take a look at the competition If someone is already saying it, then you have to say something different or at least find a different way to say the same thing From your customers’ point of view, it s not all about you, it s about them They’re just not that into you Chapter 1 Wrap Up • The basic principles of marketing are easy to learn but hard to do • Your customers aren’t half as interested in you as you think they are... Unlearn everything you think you already know about them and come up with an objective way to find out what they actually want (Hint: you can test for it on the internet. ) • When you find out what your customers want, give it to them Even when you’re sure they’re wrong • And don’t do anything in isolation either There are competitors out there doing things which will interfere with your own plans You need to include that in your thinking Chapter 2... saying is obvious, but the reason I’m hammering it, is that it s really a lot harder than it looks It was watching the worst presenters at these conferences I attended that really brought the lesson home to me Exhibit one: This guy had such a complicated set of slides that he had to present it with his back to the audience, reading the text of his own slides off the screen because it was too much to remember what he’d written There’s nothing stranger than watching than a guy... doing it all and no one is doing it all right Every web innovation offers new possibilities that haven’t been thought of yet and even the possibilities that have been thought of might not be done yet in your in field, meaning you can just copy it straight over Perhaps you’ve despaired once or twice, looking out there and seeing that all your competition have websites with shopping carts and seem to be doing better than you... Change your mind about what you want to say in your promotion and then take just a morning to update what your website accordingly, (and then just for the hell of it, try to compare with how much it used to cost people to change their printed promotion.) After you’ve done that, quickly and easily run a test to find out if your customers actually react better to this new message than the old one ✴ Start a Kickstarter project so that your customers finance a product before you even... By my count, Google alone is making around twenty significant changes to their advertising platform every year I don’t see how any one person could ever keep up with all that, but it s possible to know about them and to look for new opportunities within it Even more exciting, most of these changes are as open to smaller advertisers as they are to big-spending corporations In fact smaller companies are often more nimble, with simpler decision making processes than their bigger counterparts... It can also be inspiring to look at this from the aspect of how new technologies get adopted The population varies in how open they are to any new thing Let me use a well known marketing graph to show you what I mean It groups the different stages in a product’s life cycle according to how it gets adopted Figure 2.1 How a new idea gets adopted This graph is called the Product Diffusion Curve, I guess because if it was called the Product Adoption Curve too many people would understand it. .. but in advance they thought it was all of them The age of the internet blew this out the water If you have a product idea you can put up a website, pay for some online advertising, hand make the first few products and watch what happens If it s going to fail, let it fail fast, then get out and start working on the next one Now that’s really listening to your customers 4 … and give it to them Once, I dimly remember, it was in the 1980s and desktop computers were an exciting... There’s nothing stranger than watching than a guy with a microphone talking loudly at a screen Even more so, when he appears to be genuinely surprised at the sheer brilliance of each slide (which he had written), as it comes up before him We could call that bad presentation technique, which is true, and leave it at that However, if you only slightly thought about it: How difficult would you want to make it for your customers/audience to find out about your product?... insane rate and we were under strict orders from our customers to keep the parts coming Unfortunately for them, we had our production on allocation Allocation meant that we tried to give each customer a fair share of the parts we made There simply wasn’t enough capacity in this industry to produce all the components for which there was demand Our salesmen didn’t need to do any selling, but they did need to visit the customers to try and placate them about why we weren’t delivering more parts to them