Internet Marketing Page

Charecteristics of internet marketing

This is a specialized branch of the information products market and it is relatively new as compared to other areas of the internet business. The products are targeted at those aspiring internet marketers who are hungry for information on how to be successful in setting up and running an internet business.Ordinary people will have very little interest on these products.

Malaysians should aviod internet marketing when first started

The Malaysian government has always encouraged us to go online so that we may not lag behind others.While this advice from our government is sound, it tells very little about the danger of the internet business.We are left to find our own ways in the dark. It is very sad that most fellow Malaysians are always been exposed to this sector of the internet business when they first started.We Malaysians are only interested to sell our finished products which are not digital in nature. Some even intend to market raw materials which our country has abundance of.But none of the internet marketing gurus can teach you how to sell these physical products effectively.They only know how to sell digital information products, many of which are simply old books in new covers.

Much safer for Malaysians to go into eStores

Many of the internet marketing products flooding the internet are stale, outdated materials rehashed by the so-called "gurus" and sell to fresh and unsuspecting new comers.The "gurus" advertised about themselves alot and gained some reputation so many will believe that they are selling useful information but found out it to be otherwise when they buy the products.
In order to avoid wasting valuable cash and time, we should stick to developing functioning online stores despite the many drawbacks I mentioned earlier on. If we work hard to find ways to over come them, and hopefully our government will slowly make things easier for us and we will be successful in the end.
For example, if we do not insist on selling "buatan Malaysia" products, we can always use ship-dropping to overcome the problem of high shipping costs. A drop-shipper is a wholesales company who will handle delivery of your clients' orders and charge you at wholesales prices.You will not be billed any shipping and handling charges.The only snag is that you can only sell the products in their catalogs and not our own "made in Malaysia" products.But still,this is a good starting point and we can learn along the way and find ways to sell our own products eventually.

Internet Marketing Gurus

An internet marketing GURU is a person who has made a name for himeslf/herself in one area of internet business, like list-building, adsense-income generation, traffic-building, sales copy-writing,affiliate marketing, finding niche products, etc,etc...None of them dare claim to be expert in all areas, so they always work as an "elite" or "masterminds" groups, in a "you rub my back, I'll rub yours" fashion.Whenever one of them launches a new product, the rest will promtly give good testimonials on the new product even before seeing it.That is why their products sell so well, I mean, who will question the quality of a product which bears the testiminials of all the "Gurus"?

Life cycle of an internet business

Everybody loves secrets, here I would like to tell you one internet business secret. The big secret is there is no secret about internet business.There is no best system, there is no perfect system, there is only one system, The System.No matter how complicated, how complex every guru tries to make it to appear, the basics of the system still remain the same.There are only 5 parts in the system, if you ommit 1 part it will not be effective, add any extra part to it will not make it more effective either.The 5 essential parts of an internet business are as follows:

market
product
promotion
back-end
duplication

1. Identify the market

Many internet businss owners failed because they created their products without doing some market research to find out whether there is a market for their products.They spent time and money in creating their products, but no body is interested in their products.So all their money and efforts went to waste.
If you go and fish in a pond where there is no fish in it, no matter how good and advance your fishing gears are, and no matter how long and how patient you are, everybody knows what the result is. You will not be able to catch any fish.
Likewise,if you love surfing and are looking for a place to surf, you should go to a beach where the waves are strong and big. If you go to a beach where the sea is calm and smooth like a mirror, you will not be able to surf no matter how advanced your expensive surf board is.
In online business you must do the same thing, find the right market( like the right pond and beach)in order to be able to sell your product.Find out what is hot on the internet. One good place to start is the Yahoo! Shopping section.Browse through the various categories and take note of the listed most popular items and you will have a fair idea what items are selling well on internet.Another place you can look at is the eBay top sales sections.
Major search engines like Yahoo!, Google and MSN can also be used to search for popular products.Key in your search terms or phrases (keywords)at the search boxes of the search engines, from the results returned you will be able to know whether your selected products are hot or not.
List down all the products which you are interested in and join any active forums of each product, ask questions and study the responses. Read the messages postd by other members and find out what information they are hungry for or problems they need solutions for.Record thse information and proceed to the next step.

2. Offer a product

With the information collected from previous step, you can proceed to create a product which is either th answer to the questions your identified market is hungry for or a solution to the problem whcih your market is facing.Create it in the form of an ebook, CD or even hard copy book if you wish.

3. Promote your product

Now that your product is ready, you should go back to the same group of people who are waiting for this product and tell them about it.There are several ways to do it. The most straight forward way is to post some thing which is not relative to your product in the forums instead of outright advertising so that you will not be kicked out by the forum administrator. But you can still let all the members know about your product by putting a link to your landing page and a short clear tittle of your product in your signature.This is acceptable in most forums.
Use adwords to promote your product, but keep a close watch of your expenses against profits, else you may over-run your budget and end in a loss.This will happen if the conversion rate of visitors to your website is low, which means even though there are many visitors coming to your site but few actually order your product.Each visitor lands in your site by clicking on your ads, and each click costs you money.In this case, the more visitors you get the faster you will be running into a loss. Therefore you must have a compelling sales letter to convince the visitors to make a purchase.If you do not know how to write a compelling sales letter, pay someone who knows to do it for you. This is very important.
If you have a mailing list, send out emails to the list, maybe you can close some sales there.
Let people know about your product, there is no use to have a great product if it is sitting in your website which very few people visit.

4. Follow up with Back-end sales

When a customer buys your product and is happy, his trust in you increases. You will be able to sell him more products once he trusts you.It may be a more in dept version of the ebook he just bought and going at a higher price. It can also be an ebook related to it.In this way, the product which you created will not end up s a one-time wonder.

5. Duplicate the process

You have to use an auto responder to handle messages to your customers automatically.Messages to be sent out are payment received acknowledgement, thank you message, instruction to download and many follow up messages to complete the back-end (upsell) sales proccess.Then this site will sell your product for you automatically and you don't have to worry about it any more.
When all these are settled you can create another market, and another and another....so you will have multiple streams of income.

What the Gurus say

Some internet gurus will sometimes offer to coach you in running your internet business successfully free of charge, provided you follow their instructions and take actions.Why do they it, they said they have made enough money and want to do some charity by helping out struggling internet marketers who have no luck so far. How noble!

Motive of the gurus

But soon you will find out their true motive.They are using the free courses to promote products of their friends' affliate programs, and of course, their own products.At the end of the course, you will not only buy many tools and software from them but will also become their affiliate.

How the gurus make money

Let's see how they cleverly introduce the sale talks starting from the first module, that is during the "identify a market" phase.

During module #1

Here the guru will really teach you the importance of finding the right market. Then he will list out ways to identify a profitable market. But they will always encourage you to use the "keyword" method to find the right market, they will then recommend some keyword generating software. They will argue that if you were to find the tons of keywords associated to a certain keyword it will take up so much of our time that it becomes unprofitable. All right you are convinced and buy the software. Then they will tell you how to find out from the tons of newly generated keywords which one is the most searched by internet surfers. And amongst the most popular search terms how to find out which one has the least competators, so that you don't have to compete so hard. Again they will recommend software tools to do it.The gurus say you may do it manually, of course, but you will miss out many opportunitis if you are too slow to respond to the change of the market. The gurus will tell you this. You buy again!

During module #2

After identifing the profitable market, it is time to decide on a product to meet the demand of the market. You don't need a software to help you think of a product, do you? All you need to do is collect the required information or solution for the market's need (problem)then create an ebook. Aha, this is another opportunity to sell you some thing - the ebook generator, then the ebook cover generator. That is not all, if you are not a good writer don't worry. The gurus will sell you their Private Label Rights (PLR) articles, ebooks, software package. With these materials you are allowed to change the tittles and names of the authors to your own legally and use them in whatever ways you like. Hopefully you will find what you want from them and create your product quickly.

During module #3

You need to tell the world that you have a new product, so you advertise. I guess this area is the most crowded one among the 5 modules of the internet business. Majority of the gurus are specialised in this area, naturally you will receive most of the offers to buy products here. First you will be offered to buy web hosting and domains, then ready made templates complete with Google Adsense enhancement.
Some gurus will offer you a course on how to create mini sites which are actually single page websites with a long sales letter as content.
The gurus will urge you to buy a list-building tool or join a list-building course in order to build a huge list which you can send emails to promote your new products.
Some gurus who specialise in traffic generating will promise that their products will help to attract visitors to your website like ants are attracted to sugar.
There are also gurus who advise you to use Adwords to drive traffic to your site. How do you know which adwords is working and which is wasting your money? Well the gurus have the answer, they will recommend you to buy their adwords tracking softwares.
Having lots of visitors to your seite is not enough, you need to convince them to buy from you. The gurus will then ask you to join their courses in copy-wriring to learn how to write compelling sales letters. They also offer courses for you just to learn how to come up with effective headlines.

During mdule #4

In fact, there is not much to learn here. You just need to come up with a more expensive product to offer to existing customers. But the gurus have some thing for you, they will offer you a course on how to successfully to set up a back-end system. They will teach you how to convince the customers why they need the more expensive product. Why can't they just tell you right away in the free course itself instead of a paid course? It seems nothing is free these days.Some of the gurus will simply offer their afiliate programs for you to use as up-sell products. Outrageous!

During module #5

The most obvious product the gurus will recommend here is the auto responder software to handle all your incoming and out-going messages.Some gurus willoffer courses to teach you how to write compelling emails to be sent out by the auto responders at regular intervals.

Conclusion

What will you be selling if you have completed a course from the internet marketing gurus? Internet marketing information products, of course! You have not learned to sell any other thing except information products centering around internet marketing. And you have joined many affiliate programs selling these products. Becoming a budding internet marketer seems the natural and only path you will take.
Count the number of softwares and tools you have to buy if you really want to complete the free course. And the average cost of each product the gurus recommend is around USD97.00 (RM368.00). If you failed to purchase the recommended tools you will be accused of "not taking actions" so you deserve to fail. By taking actions it means taking out your credit cards and click on the "order now" button. Failing which you are said to be not proactive and not deserved to be successful in the internet marketing business.
It will be a wise investment if these products really help you succeed, unfortunately most of the time these products will be collecting dust and won't help you one bit because the after sales support is very poor.

Have you ever stopped and watch a roadside medecine seller operates (at Jalan Alor and Chow Kit Road in KL or at Kg Air in KK)? He will attract passers-by with his gong or loud speakers at full blast and lure them to form a circle around him. When the crowd is big enough he will perform some magic tricks or "kungfu" stunts. At the same time his assistants will be busy setting up some stuff which are supposed to be needed for more stunting acts later on.Then the merchantiles will be promoted and the audience is urged to respond quickly so that he will get on with the promised performance which everybody is eagerly waiting for,also he will give as a bonus for the good crowd tonight the price is slashed to half.Suddenly a guy standing just beside you yells,"I'll take a dozen!" You stare at him and ask,"is it really that good?" The guy replies at the top of his voice so that everybody can hear him,"yes,I bought a few bottles last time.It is so good that my friends and relatives finished all for me. I'm going to buy more this time,just in case!" So you also quickly reach for your wallet and buy a few bottles. Ah forgot to mention, the interesting performance which was promised is never performed, because the medecine seller has made enough,he just closes up and leaves. It is doubtful that whether he actually knows how to perform it.

The internet marketing gurus operate exactly in the way as the roadside medecine man and they go one step further. On top of their merchantiles they also sell their gongs,magic tricks sets, their sign banners and teach you their tricks and stunts. They will urge you to open another stall to perform the same acts and sell their goods at the same time.Do you still want to become an internet marketer? You are nothing but a digital version of a roadside medecine man!

What I do is to join a membership site which will allow you to download most, if not all, the products which you need to get started.The problem is if I post the address of the site I joined, I will be doing exactly what I accuse the gurus are doing. So I refrain from doing it. If you are really keen send me an email :
E-mail me