Internet Marketing Quiddity

*** File under "Business Strategy" in your IM Index Mind Map - click for details. Internet marketing blueprints. The much searched-for golden egg of making money on the Internet. We are all searching for that one effective, sure-fire, guaranteed step-by-step guide to riches. Preferably, it should be "secret" and "never-before-revealed". We are all ready to make the sacrifices of time and effort. And we are even ready to learn a few skills (HTML, how to use FTP, CPanel etc.) All we need is someone to give us the exact steps. The formula. "Just gimmi the goddam blueprint!" Here is what Ralph Waldo Emerson has to say about this:

"As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble."

An Internet Marketing blueprint is, in essence, a "method". So we could paraphrase and get:

"As to Internet Marketing blueprints there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully create his own Internet Marketing blueprints. The man who tries Internet Marketing blueprints, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble."

I couldn't agree more. Time and again, I read sales material about some way to make money on the Internet, and a key "benefit" of the product is that it is 100% Practical - No Theory! In Emerson's terms, that means "100% Method - no Principles". And in Emerson's view - and mine - that is a recipe for failure. And people love that idea because it means (they assume) that they don't have to think! They don't mind working hard and perhaps learning a few skills, but thinking? - no thanks! Here's a specific example from my own experience. I recently signed up to follow a blueprint about Social Marketing. It is probably one of the best and most comprehensive step-by-step guides to building traffic using social networks and blogging. But I have to say .... "phew"! To be fair, the people who put it together make it clear that it's hard work, and they don't pretend there's no thinking involved. But the amount of detail is massive. To follow it through requires a huge amount of dedication (which they make clear from the outset). And few people actually manage it all. I quickly realized that I was never going to be able to follow all the steps, and for a lot of the time, I had no idea why many of the steps were there, nor what many of the terms meant. So I stopped following the steps and decided to try and extract the Principles. What I've ended up with is a Mind Map containing the concepts, the principles and the resources organized in a convenient form. And now, I can develop my own blueprint - my own step-by-step guide - that fits in with my own needs and time availability. The guys who put this system together are honest, respected people who know their field inside out and back to front, and they've put a huge amount of effort into making their system easily accessible and easy to use. But it could be so much better. They are no different from 99% of other people providing guidance in the Internet Marketing world (and many other worlds as well). Knowing a subject well is not a qualification for being able to organize and structure it so that others can learn it. The way people learn, the mix of theory and practice, the different types of expertise, and how they are acquired and developed, the forms of practical support needed for different types of task and different stages of learning - these are all deep and complex issues that are not considered by people creating learning and guidance systems. These are - dare I say it - knowledge management issues!

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Technorati Tags: emerson, ForFB, internet marketing blueprints, internet marketing strategy, making money on the internet, ralph waldo emerson

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*** File under "Traffic Analysis" in your IM Index Mind Map - click for details.

If you've developed your internet marketing business far enough to create a website, one of your daily routines has to be to analyze your website traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of an internet marketing business. Without knowing how much traffic you are getting, and where it is coming from, you're dead in the water.

The first step is to decide what tools you are going to use for analyzing your website traffic. And then you need to set up a regular routine for checking and analyzing that traffic.

Tools for analyzing website traffic

Cpanel - Awstats

The simplest tool of all is the Awstats facility that comes with your cPanel website hosting administration interface. If you search around on your cPanel page, you will most probably find either a direct link to Awstats, or something like "Web / Ftp Statistic" - which should itself lead you to Awstats. Click that and investigate the facilities available. You'll find things such as:

• How many hits, how many visits and and how many unique visitors your site received (per day, per month)
• What hours in the day were most popular
• IP addresses of visitors
• What Spiders and Bots visited you
• The lengths of time people stayed on your site
• What pages they visited
• Which sites they came from
• Which keywords were used if visitors came from a search engine
• ... and a great deal more

Google Analytics

This is another free tool - but it is much more comprehensive than Awstats - and you need to put some effort into setting it up.

Firstly, you'll need a Google Adwords account. Google created this tool primarily to help their Adwords users test their Adwords campaigns better, but you can use the tool freely without ever setting up an Adwords campaign.

With Google Analytics you can do everything that you can do with Awstats, and a great deal more - including setting "goals" for your site, and have Google Analytics measure the success of those goals under different circumstances, such as for different traffic sources.

To set up Google Analytics you also need to add some code to every page that you want Google to monitor. This can marginally slow down the loading of your pages, but is a very small price to pay for the huge amount of information you get. If this were a commercial tool being sold to the general public, I would expect to pay several hundred dollars for it.

But it's free from Google - no strings attached!

Click Tracking Tools

The third option is to install a click tracking tool, or subscribe to a commercial service. These tools provide a lot of functionality that you cannot get from tools such as Awstats or Google Analytics. This functionality includes:

• Link cloaking. This allows you to create URLs that you make public, but when the user clicks on the link, they get taken to a different URL. The most common use for this is when you are promoting an affiliate product. Instead of promoting a long and complex URL that you are given from your product vendor, you can use a short URL based on your domain name. For example, the click tracking tool I use is GoTryThis.  If you hover over that link, you'll see a nice, friendly, URL linked to to my IM-Index.com domain, instead of this long a ugly ULR that I would have had to use:
  https: //members.gotrythis.com/aff.php?aff=242
• Also, with link cloaking, you can change the URL that your link points to if you need to. For example, if the affiliate product you were promoting went off the market, you could easily substitute a different one just by change the destination URL. The fact that your cloaked link was widely publicised all over your sites, in your newsletter, on bookmarking sites etc. would not matter at all.
• You can arrange to alternate between different destination URLs: this can be very useful when testing different products or different pages within your site.

Regular Routine

Setting up your testing tools is not enough.

You need to make use of the data that the tools gather for you, and use that data to adjust your business operation in some way. Otherwise, all your time would have been wasted. But that's not quite as easy as it appears. Of all the information you get, what is important? And how do you know how to respond to it?

The answer is - you have to start with some planning and some goals. That topic is far too big to include in this article, but you should be able to see that it makes sense.

For example, if you want to make 2 sales per day, what does that mean in terms of visitors to your site, and conversion rate of visitors? If you're not making those sales, what is happening? Which traffic sources aren't giving you the traffic you want? Which are converting the best? How are your visitors behaving when they reach your site?

Decide what needs to happen for you to reach your goals, use the tools for analyzing website traffic to check what is happening, make some changes, and then use those tools again to check what changes as a result.

Based on your goals and what you need to check to see whether you are achieving them, write down your daily routine or checking your website traffic. That will ensure your time spent analyzing website traffic is used most effeciently and effectively.

Technorati Tags: ad tracking, analyzing website traffic, awstats, click tracking, ForFB, Go Try This, google analytics, Traffic Analysis, website traffic analysis

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Recently, I attended an exceptionally stimulating one-day event at Henley Management College. The subject was Jazz in business. See Jazzbusiness @ Henley on Sergej van Middendorp's blog.

What has this to do with internet marketing? Read on to find out....

If you know anything about jazz and improvisation, you will know that "being in the groove" is a state accomplished musicians reach when they are playing at the peak of their performance, and are perfectly musically and rhythmically aligned with each other.

The groove has been defined as "what makes the music breath". This, and other concepts were explored and used as metaphors for business.

The idea of being in the groove can be applied to almost any discipline - including internet marketing. I would regard an internet marketer as being "in the internet marketing groove" when they have developed all skills, discipline and the focus to be able to play a tune and make good money.

The good internet marketing teachers and trainers are now making it clear that you can't become rich just by following a simple plan for 4 weeks. Just like becoming an accomplished jazz musician, it takes time and effort and practice.

They have to first learn to play the instrument and follow the music (follow a pre-set plan) before they can learn to improvise (create their own plan) and finally hit the groove (make music that breaths - or build a business that makes money).

So - I thought it would be fun to trace the steps a newcomer to internet marketing has to go through on their way to the internet marketing groove.

If you've been around the block a few times yourself, see if you recognize any of this. If you're new to internet marketing, here's a gimpse into your future.

Step 1: Naive Enthusiasm:

"Hey! This is great! An easy way to make money sitting at home with no distracting people-issues and relationships to get in the way."

Step 2: Free Learning & Free Everything:

"I'm downloading loads of free stuff and joining lots of free sites. It's getting a bit hard to manage it all, but I'm certainly learning a lot. I'll get the full picture soon and decide where to start."

Step 3: Sales-Pitch Overwhelm:

"STOP! Everyone's shouting at me and telling what I must do, what I must buy. My in-box is overflowing. I keep getting mesmerised by 25-page long sales letters and my credit card is melting."

Step 4: Reality-Check:

"Now I'm totally confused and depressed. I can't keep track of all the stuff I've been gathering. Nothing seems certain - there are too many differences of opinion about everything. I now know enough to realise just how little I really do know. And to cap it all, I'm sick and tired of being treated like an idiot by the same old cynical sales pitches and ploys: any more hype and I'll throw up!"

Step 6: Breakthrough:

"OK! I've worked my way though those problems and I've disciplined myself to focus. I've found someone I trust who's advice I plan to follow and I know enough to have a go. It's been done before, so why not me?"

Step 7: The Invisible Barrier:

"What keeps going wrong? It's not as if I don't try. I've bought several great step-by-step guides where everything is explained in detail. An yet, there always comes a point where things fall apart. Somehow, for one reason or another, things just don't work out, or I find I can't continue with that approach. What the hell is happening?"

At this point, people continue in one of three ways:

Step 8a: Burger Flipping:

"I give up! My online dream has turned into a nightmare. Back to the big M." (No - that's not Microsoft.)

Step 8b: Head Banging Determination:

"I'll try this. I'll try that. I'll try the other. I'll try anything. I'm going to stay positive! I can't see this so-called 'invisible barrier' anyway! So I'll just keep doing what I'm doing till something changes."

Step 8c: Finding The Groove:

"I wised up in the end. I finally got past those step-by-step guides (they did help, though, for sure) and establish my own personal relationship to internet marketing. I continue to work on that relationship, and constantly nurture it. And when I hit the groove - it's great! That's where the money is!"

Are you in the internet marketing groove?

Tell me if you think I've got it about right (or not!).

Alex Goodall

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