Internet Marketing — Not A Slam Dunk Pt. V

Without Customers You Have Nothing More Than A Pretty Website!

Whether you are an interent business owner or you travel to work everyday to your local real world business, your business is NOT really a business without an ongoing stream of customers.

So, I thought I’d spend some time talking about what i personally think is the most important, and at the same time the most difficult topic — TRAFFIC.

If you’re in the ‘brick and mortar’ world there are lots of ways you can get new customers. You can advertise in the media (newspaper, radio, TV etc.); you can have a huge sale with all kinds of signs in front of your store and people walking with crazy costumes; you can send out flyers via regular mail or you can rely upon word of mouth as well as probably a ton of other things. Well, the same applies to your website as well.

There are an abundance of ways to get traffic to your online business but not one of them by themselves is going to take your online business to the level of success you desire just like one type of marketing will never create or maintain a successful ‘brick and mortar’ business. It takes a combination of a number of strategies to be successful. In marketing this is called a «marketing funnel».

Just visualize a normal funnel with the wide end at the top and the smaller opening at the bottom. At the top all of the various marketing strategies we’ll discuss in this as well as other parts of this series start to drop new leads (customers) into the funnel with all of them eventually ending up at the bottom which happens to be your business.

It is the funnel concept that makes an online business survive long term. If one type of traffic strategy stops working, the others will pick up the slack. If you count on just one marketing tool, well, what happens if that one just stops working. The answer is your business dies.

So if there is one thing I hope you get out of this series of articles it is that you must attract customers to your new internet business by using a wide variety of tools. Keep what works and change what doesn’t. Always look out for what is new.

Marketing is not a static concept. It changes all the time and if you want your online business to stay current and entertaining you must stay up with what is new not only as it pertains to what is contained in your website but also to the tools you use to attract new leads (customers).

In Part VI we’ll lay out the various strategies typically used in internet marketing and give you some guidelines to go by in order to minimize the trial and error so often associated with being a new internet entrepreneur.