Why Internet Marketing Isn't What You Thought?

Why Internet Marketing Isn’t What We Thought It Would Be?

November 8, 2011

Internet marketing has the same goal as traditional marketing: to create and build demand. There are a lot of influencers, gurus, bloggers, and experts offering their wares on the Internet. There are no barriers to entry, anyone can offer just about anything on the Internet – and they do. Everyone on the Internet drool s over those with larger audiences and followers, but how did they do it?

Recently, the 7 billionth person was born into the world. There are 2.095 billion Internet users in the world as of March 2011. No surprise, North America, Australia and Europe have more than 50% of their populations using the Internet. However, Asia has the largest number of users with 44% of all Internet users in those regions.

We envy those with 100,000+ website subscribers or 50,000+ Facebook fans. If we put this into perspective, that’s 100,000 subscribers out of a potential of 771 million Internet users in North America, Europe, and Australia. That’s 0.01%, a very small market penetration. One blog brings in $3 million in revenue with their 129,000 subscribers.

8 Lessons and Observations

1. At this point, there are more inactive and abandoned blogs than active ones. Going it alone is difficult, building an audience on keywords and SEO is a long marathon process. Content may be king, by connections are the almighty. It’s easier to build an audience by borrowing someone else’s audience. If you’re an online retailer, it’s still easier to get started by offering your products on the big shopping portals, such as Amazon and EBay, because it where a huge number of shoppers search first. If you’re a blogger, it’s about guest posting on the larger, established blogs or being featured in the online press.

2. There’s a big difference between trying to build an audience through established bloggers versus the online media. More than likely, a blogger has their own area of expertise. They want to promote others who complement their outlook, not promote a different one. They also want to promote others who can help them build their audiences. On the other hand, the media is all about offering stories about others to their audience. They have no expertise of their own. They have an ongoing, perpetual problem – they have to print something that’s of interest to their audience. Anything is better than a blank page!

3. Many online businesses first build an audience and then sell into it. That really successful blog I mentioned earlier did this. They built their audience and then found a way to monetize the audience. A more common approach is you have a product or service, and then you find the audience for it. This is how brick and mortar operations worked. The Internet doesn’t have to work in the traditional way.

4. There are plenty of online services that offer to build links, find fans, and generate traffic for your site. But is it worth it? I tracked more than one venture-backed website for entrepreneurs and start-ups. The stats can ramp up quickly with these services, but the audience stalls quickly at a few thousand. And not all audiences are the same. There are a lot of people who will follow your page, many people who will subscribe, but they aren’t really interested in what you have to offer at all.

5. If you try joint venture marketing, those partners want you to reciprocate with their own wares. As such, they don’t want to bother with promoting people whose audiences aren’t a similar size or greater than theirs. There are a lot of online joint venture training programs offered on the web, most tell you to do find big partners. However, those big partners aren’t interested in the little people or newcomers. As such, cobbling together enough small partners to make a big pool is possible, but very time consuming. I tried this once and after six weeks, it was consuming all my time. It was just easier to hire someone to do it for me.

6. Finding online experts, media, influencers and bloggers to promote you or your products online is tough. It’s has the returns of direct marketing – slim. You have to reach out to a lot of people to just get a few to respond and allow you to access their audience in some way. Many of the so-called gurus tell you to spend a hours researching every touch point and to personalize each and every correspondence. Isn’t this the same as ‘customizing’ your product for every customer, the same as the ‘one off’ approach, both of which don’t work to build a company? At direct marketing response rates, this customization is absurd. As an experiment, II tried both ways. The generic correspondence had a 1% response and the customized was 2%, but the later consumed an enormous amount of time. Every personalized response took 5 times as much work.

7. Public relations specialist and online promoters can use their contacts to get you access to an audience, but only you can convince that audience of your worthiness. You can be featured in major publications, get tens of millions of views, and still not get traffic and not get any increase in sales.

8. I laugh at those headlines that say you can connect on social networking or online for 15 to 20 minutes a day. Yes, but only if you are strictly a consumer. If you are the 1% of creators, it takes a lot of time. Just writing a quick blog post takes a minimum of 20 minutes, detailed ones can take 8 to 10 hours. If you are one of the 9% of participants then you are engaging in a dialogue, and that’s not a 15 minute activity either – to read, watch, listen, comment, and converse takes much longer.

Internet marketing is a lot harder than it looks and more difficult than the experts lead everyone to believe. It’s not for the faint of heart, or those that want quick results.