Mind your Business

Making Money in your pyjamas, cashing in while you sleep… .

Maybe, I should try and go to sleep at reasonable times occasionally, maybe then I would make money?

It always sounds so good: You need no money to start, you need no product of your own, you don’t even need a Website, and even less you need to know any technical stuff, like HTML.

Then one day, you realise, the first step into Online Business is: Go Online - and that does not mean, “log on to the Internet”,  it means enter it, be present on the Internet, publish something by yourself. Without an own Homepage you just don’t exist.

Now some might want to grab some free page builder which never produces the page one wants, and it almost fright which prevents them from clicking the HTML button. And HTML is so easy, once you know what those tags mean. Don’t think you need to write it fluently, every website has a source code, one can always look up, what the exact phrasing is. Of course the first template is work, everything else is copy and paste. So it is indeed no use to believe in this myth about no website needed to start Online Marketing.

Even when one can find a good Affiliate Program - what could one do? Advertise one’s Affiliate links? And where? In the old days (about five years ago) some people indeed looked at sites in traffic exchanges, but today advertising just does not work anymore, means, it does not sell. -

Yes, it is quite frustrating to see, that from advertising at most ten percent of sales are made, while it is at least eighty percent of the work to be done. And all this work is wasted, when all the traffic goes to different Affiliatepages.

So why not invest the three months of work and waiting for visitors to present them a Homepage as perfect as possible, from which they might eventually buy?

When all the advertising  goes to such a Website, there is at least a second chance the visitors might something else interesting there.

The preparations have to be done first, and they take a lot of time. (So what is the bit money for domain and hosting beside this?) And one has to seriously learn what does not know. Doing second steps first is a bad trap so many like to put up for themselves. Of course, they want to see results within reasonable time. And actually, there is no time for proper set-up, because everything on the Internet changes so rapidly one can hardly keep up. (And on top of that one even must always stay informed.)

Internet Marketing is real work without much result for a long time at the beginning, (I even doubt, it will still make many people rich at all,) but when it is done diligently and planned well, one can finally make a living online. So indeed, when a first thing needs to be completed, to start the next quickly, it can happen, one has to work day and night.

Next step is: make this perceptible to the Real-Life-People around you….

What does Social Marketing on the Web2.0 mean?
You join a community, add as many people to your ‘friends’ list, and start sending them as many ads as you can, before they remove you….
Is it just me who makes a difference between marketing and advertising?

About two years ago, the ‘MySpace Butterfly’ was born. It started as a joke, sending your friends a link to what was sure to be be opened, like something funny, which contained an ad. Now some guys certainly followed the advice to quickly fake a profile of a sexy Blonde, who claimed to show her nude photos, others skipped the joke and sent out their plain ads right away. So, when the short life of the butterfly was over, it bred a monster that destroyed social communities.

Now people in social communities are afraid of networking, because nobody likes to be advertised, even less to be sold to.

That sure has not much to do with Social Marketing.
Wasn’t the primary idea of taking part in web2.0 to ‘go out’ without having to leave your house, meet with old friends and find new ones, as the majority of young, non -marketing, people still do?

Forums, groups, chat rooms – the social club, or the pub on the Internet. Building relationships with other individuals, discussing about God and the World, personal problems, and …why not your interesting and lucrative business, or the helpful stuff the marketer just happens to have at hand?

That would be Social Marketing, or as it is also called, Relationship Marketing.

Everyone has heard about the rules, that appear in many ‘how tos’, like ‘how to write a sales letter’, ‘how to niche-blog for marketing’, and so on: Tell the people what they need it for, appear trustworthy – which means, make yourself known before in a positive way.

Everyone is an expert in something s/he likes to do, and it can be something very simple. There is hardly any hobby, one could not find affiliate-products for or even write an ebook with short instructions or tricks about it. Why should it be so complicated to tell ones Internet friends?

I suppose it is, because everyone strives to learn ‘the Secrets of Internet Marketing’. In fact, there are no real secrets, just a vast multitude of skills that needs to be learned. Among the most important is how to advertise – on the technical side. Naturally, everyone is happy to have learned a new skill, and rushes off to use it.

Marketing Psychology is something that would need longer and deeper explanations – but it is indeed hard to teach that, because the typical ‘newbie’ does not have the patience to learn things, that will not immediately show results. They ask for the straight way to the money, they want to know HOW and mostly don’t have the question WHY on their mind.

And the gurus teach, what they want to learn, otherwise nobody would consult them (and they would not earn money).

To solve the secret of Marketing Psychology can be just too simple: Market to people like would want to be marketed to, approach them, as you would like to be approached. When you belong to the same group, share the same interests, you do not have to learn to read their minds in order to know what they want.

The ‘money making’ mindset is often an obstacle to success. It is much better, to think about a business one can identify with before starting to plan it. That gives you the advantage, you can automatically also identify with the customers and website visitors you target.

Two basic principles: Know your product/subject. Know your target group.

Next, you can enter any community, interest-group, or forum as yourself and do Social Marketing in a natural and effective way and thus earn money. - Unless the advertising- and spam monsters have driven all possible customers away….

Somehow I have more blogs than I can handle. Could it be, I have a blogaddiction? Should I ask my Doctor? Has anyone heard of such a thing before?

On the other hand - howmany blogs are too many? - once they are all properly set up…?

Long ago I started blogging. This was my first step into my Internet Presence. At that time I did not even know, that Internet Marketing existed. But without knowing what I would need these experiences for, I came to know the Internet, how to get in contact with people on the net, and that I had to create traffic.

Internet Presence is the basis of an Online Business. Not only in Germany I can see, that marketers treat the Internet as a vast adboard. But advertising alone is not marketing. Advertising does not create money, because it does not sell.

Mainly, advertising does not create relationships, and that is, what the most promising kind of marketing is all about: Social Marketing in the Web 2.0. Now I wonder sometimes, if that isn’t dead, before the majority of marketers even know what it is about: Making serious and helpful offers to online friends who can use them.

Instead they chase everyone away with advertising. This unfortunately renders blogs in social networks completely useless, because as soon as someonestarts a blog, they suspect s/he will be writing about business, and then sell whatever to the readers.

People do not only dislike to be sold and advertised to, they have almost developed a paranoia. Blogging for Business - Obstacles

I do agree, with a comment I once got, blogging is no longer what it was before each and every Internet Marketing newbie started it for “making money” instead for what it is: Personal communication and interaction with the world (means customers and prospects for the Intenet Marketer) - Information in opposition to advertising. Personal Branding, building of relationships - of course with the far distant aim to sell something. The times, when those who could spend the most money on advertising and SEO won the competition are over. This is, why now we do Social Marketing.

Instead of banners and ads, blog addicts can spread blogs all over the internet, which have impact, because ‘content is king’.

This is somehow setting up the business in the wrong order - first the main website for the central offer should be there, and then some blogs as planets. But while there is no own product and still the necessity to learn some basics, blogging as and about one’s hobby can be a better and quicker start.

Now I must learn, how to organize my blogs and lenses around my half-finished websites. Like having the posts I link to ready before I write something that touches a certain subject.

On the technical side,  blogs are great SEO tools. For some time, I will not have to work and worry about links from other domains, and blogs get listed in Google almost the minute they are published, because they ping the services, which get crawled more quickly than any static website.

So I guess, Blog Addiction is not such a serious illness after all for an Internet Marketer.

At the moment I’m trying to set myself up in 5 or 6 social networks at the same time, some I joined months ago and forgot, until I received their messages. And right in the middle of all this I found Today.com and applied at once, before I could forget it. This time, joining here, I thought I should really have a profile more or less worked out.

Now that that is done, I can finally start my own blog, on one of my domains, Uhus im Internet.de. Lots of content in my head still, and I can write double, unique content each time, with thinking just once - obviously I do it in two different languages. (Uhus meaning people online 50 plus and Under Hundred, BabyBoomers, like me.) So much about organization of work.

It also does make sense, to have a halfways nice basic profile before deciding to join communities and forums, including various signature lines, then you don’t have to think something up again and again. But what I should actually be doing is setting up my salespages, advertise my leadcapture page, surf traffic exchanges and read and send safelist mails…. One can really waste a lot of time on the Web 2.0.

Then why do I do it?

Not because the Gurus, who now have enough time for that, tell one should be and market in social networks - I was in some already before I knew something like Internet Marketing existed at all. (Wished I had known, IM was so much easier at that time - more about this later.)

(sideline: I don’t use the word Gurus in a negative connotation. Many of them are great, and from whom else should I have learned all the things I know. Without negative qualification, for me it is just a short positive word, like a title.)

Apart from the fact, that also an Internet Marketer needs some fun sometimes, it is necessary to mingle, to communicate with all kinds of people, build relationships, also outside business. An important part of work is networking.

Unfortunately, most people I meet mix that up with network marketing and flee. In online marketing communities it is the same, with the only difference, that there they mix up network marketing with downline hunting in addition. So they don’t network, but just spread useless advertising all over the place, including their ‘friends’ ‘ profiles. 

Only to spam their friends inboxes too, they add as many as they can. And - to come round to the main point of this post again - many don’t have a proper profile, not even a name. But the keywords are  Social Marketing,  Relationship Marketing,  Social Network.

How can anyone build a relationship without even an own, recognizable Name? (and how do they plan to do business without?) Can you imagine to have a friend called ‘Colon Cleansing’ ? - I rarely decline friendship requests, but that one sure, however healthy that might be, and some others I declined too, who had only their companies’ (Ag)logos for a picture, which is worse than no picture at all.

I better close for now, before this becomes a rant, not without a fazit:

All kinds of web activities, that look like playing to those who are not concerned with online business, are part of the work of of an Internet Marketer.  And they are not for plain advertising. Advertising is important too, but if any at all, it brings only a momentary effect. For finallly reaching success, it needs a long time of diligently building an Internet Presence first.  Personal  Branding. 

Not for getting famous, as some frown, or for hiding. On the contrary, one must always be oneself, always accessible, and, most important, always recognizable.

I am the mixture of me and my virual self: ~Neila~ Sabine R., the Spacelady  of… (Well, my homepages are still under construction, and my old blogs in English and Denglish a bit neglected, but if I can, I edit this resourcebox soon, otherwise, please keep on reading my blog here.