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What is Internet Marketing?

Internet marketing is often confused with traditional marketing techniques. But while they do have their similiarities, there is one big difference. For the most part traditional marketing is all about chasing people around and trying to get them to notice your products, i.e., cold calling. When internet marketing, on the other hand, is done properly, people come to you asking about your products. Tired of chasing people around? Try internet marketing.

Understanding internet marketing and its potential for your company is not going to be easy. Its hard especially if you have to overcome years and years of brainwashing when it comes to marketing in general. We all have an intuitive grasp of basic marketing techniques. After all, we see them at work every where we go and at all times of the day. We see them in television commercials, magazines, banners, posters, brochures, yellow pages, classifieds, newspaper ads and on benches at the bus stop. We experience them when we buy a car, when we shop for clothes or look at a new set of golf clubs. They are everywhere. And we all know how they work. The problem is that they won't work and can even be counter productive if used to sell your products online.

Marketing techniques are basically all the same. They find ways to put a product in front of you whether you want them to or not. They often don't care if you not interested in their product and will spend most of their energy trying to convert you into a buying customer. And the lengths that they will go to are often astounding. Flyers in your mailbox, cold calls, and commercials on the TV are prime examples. Its as if their purpose in life is to elicit some sort of emotional response no matter what the cost. Even if it means offending someone. Dancing girls, eye-catching designs, blinking lights, music, comedy acts, crazy light shows. In their mind, the risk is worth it.

This is the kind of thinking you have to toss aside when you want sell your products online. And there is nothing worse than trying to apply traditional marketing methods to a website. The results are often counterproductive. The next time you see an animated flash introduction to a website with a ship intro button, you'll understand. Here is a company trying to generate some interest in their product using a traditional marketing technique. The sad part about this, is that instead of converting their visitors into buying customers, they end up irritating them. Its as if they invited you in to their store and then ignored or punished you for coming in.

Internet Marketing vs Marketing
The problem with applying traditional marketing techniques to a website is that they wrongly assume that a website is like other forms of advertising. Its not in two important respects. First, a website is invisible or hard to find unless we actually take the time to look for it. We rarely go looking for other forms of advertisements, i.e., a TV commercial, street sign or magazine ads. Instead, they often find us. Second, even when it is easy to find, a website doesn't have to spend as much energy converting visitors into buying customers. If, by some miracle, they found your site out of the millions of websites out there, you can pretty much take it for granted that they are already interested in what you have to offer. Trying too hard to generate an interest in your products might only serve to drive them away.

Most forms of advertising don't have a problem finding us and often find us when we were interested in something else. This is why advertising mediums like TV beer commercials try so hard to generate an emotive response in their audience. They know there's no interest to begin with and this is why they have to go to the lengths that they do. A website, on the hand, is hard to find unless someone was already interested in it. If you think about it, not only did they go online and go to a search engine, but they entered a relevant keyword, probably scrolled through a dozen other sites, and then finally clicked on your link. If they actually found your site, you can pretty much assume that they are already interested. Using a website to generate an interest in your products is virtually redundant. In fact if you try to show someone your website or make them interested in what it offers without their permission or participation, i.e., using email spam or large animated banners, popup windows, you only end up causing a lot of resentment.

A website has a lot in common with your local grocery store. It has products in it. They are often described in some detail and are usually represented by pictures. But unlike other stores, this one has no conveyor belt of people walking by it. In fact, this store is in the middle of a desert and there no roads around for miles. And unless people can find this store, traditional marketing schemes serve no purpose. Signs, banners, commercials and other forms of advertising work because they are often easy to find and see. Their visibility is rarely an issue. Indeed, most forms of advertising are hard to avoid seeing. They come at us from all directions, even in the privacy of our own home, whether we want them to or not.

What is Internet Marketing?
The best way to understand internet marketing and its potential for your business, is to make a clear distinction between marketing and internet marketing. In some ways, the phrase itself is a source of confusion. While internet marketing is a kind of marketing in that it uses a website to put a product in front of you, it can't do that without your input. Traditional marketing methods can place a product in front of you regardless of whether or not you were looking for it. In fact it's pretty easy to do and they don't need your permission to do it. Telemarketers are famous for this. But internet marketing requires your participation. It can't show you anything unless you look for it and therein lies the beauty of internet marketing as a marketing strategy. Its something that should take place before traditional marketing methods are applied.

Forms of advertising can be divided into two categories: those that require input from the potential customer and those that don't. Most traditional forms of advertising fit into the second category. You're watching a football game on TV, and a commercial comes on advertising a new car. Did you do anything to solicit the showing of this commercial? No. I just wanted to watch the football game. You get a phone call from a marketing firm asking you if you would be interested in their new product. Did you ask them to phone you. No. Are you irritated that they phoned? Yes. This is how most traditional forms of advertising operate. No matter how hard they try, they are often intrusive and rarely catch us when we were actually interested in what they offer.

A website, on the other hand, can't show you anything, unless you look for it by typing a keyword into a search engine. So, while traditional forms of advertising are passive and require no input from your end, internet marketing is a proactive form of advertising. Instead of reaching you when you just trying to watch a football game, a website can only show you some products if you were looking for them in the first place.

The Goal of Internet Marketing - Visibility
Understanding the distinction between marketing and internet marketing can have an enormous impact on how you invest your money in a website and whether it makes you money. Suppose you build a store in the middle of the desert. Does it make sense to spend all your time making sure that your store, and the products in it, look good or trying to make them interesting? Or does it make more sense making sure that people can find it and that it is informative and helpful? While traditional marketing assumes that your website is easy to find and is largely all about converting visitors into buying customers, internet marketing is more about making sure that you have visitors in the first place and that the site is informative. There is no point worrying about converting visitors to your website unless you have them. Spending all your energy and money, for instance, making your site look good is really a waste of time, unless there is a lot of traffic to your website. Devoting your energy to increasing traffic to your website and making more visible is a much better investment and that means appearing at the top of the search engines.

It is the goal of internet marketing to make your website visible, i.e., appear at the top of the search engines when someone takes the time and effort to look for it. And that is accomplished by making the site as informative as possible while targeting as many relevant keywords as there are products. This is the objective of a strategic internet marketing service. While it is a marketing technique for making your site visible and easy to find, it can't do that without your participation. Instead of trying to show you something that you may or not be looking for, it is the goal of internet marketing to find out what keywords you are using and targeting them. Of course, once your site is easy to find, you need to have the right information there so that they can learn about your products and make a purchasing decision. This is the only point where internet marketing and traditional forms of marketing become merged into one simple strategy. Think about your visitors, give them what they are looking for, and make sure that nothing happens without their permission.