Marketing on the Internet

By Luke Parrish

Selling things on the internet can be very lucrative. You can also waste a lot of time if you aren't careful. It takes experience, education, and hard work to make money honestly at any thing, and internet marketing is no exception. I've decided to put this article out to help keep people on the right track. Here are some things I've learned.

Give Something Away Free

One great way to sell a lot of things is to give something away. One of the most obvious examples of this is AOL giving away free CDs and diskettes of their service. I remember getting those things in the mail a lot - they would have things like "20 FREE HOURS!" printed on them. People would look at it and subconsiously think something like "Hmm, 20 free hours. Minimum wage is $5 an hour, so that makes $100 FREE. Seems a shame to waste it." Then they'd put the CD in the drive, click through, and get hooked. Now they have a cool email address at aol.com, they are used to the AOL service, etc. How many people are going to quit using AOL the instant they start having to pay for it?

So, as you can see, a great way to sell a product is to give a person enough of a taste of it to get to where they have to have more. Then sell it to them. As another example, Edventures.com has a free Space Engineering course that they just give away free. It might seem at first glance that this is a waste of money, just giving away their hard-earned intellectual property. But this earns them a LOT of subscriptions. Why? Because a person is more likely to buy something they know a bit about, especially if they like it. The potential customer knows that Edventures.com can and will provide similar courses when they subscribe.

Another advantage of giving something away for free is, people will link to you for free. Freebie sites, freeware sites, all sorts of places like that. Because free stuff is a popular subject. Because people like the idea of getting something for nothing. And if you can link to a free download, course, etc., it can help make you very popular. And being popular means more banner impressions.

Make A Nice, Professional-Looking Website

If you want people to buy your product, it's very important to look nice, professional, and uncluttered on your web site. Make the site look pleasing on more than one browser. Especially the top two, Netscape and IE. Even better, make it HTML compliant - use The Validator to make sure it looks all right on all browsers.

Personally, I shy away from fancy backgrounds. Big images on high-traffic pages should definately be avoided. Keep to small "thumbnails" that people can click on to see the big image if they want to. Also, it's very important that you make sure that your main site is not plugin-dependant. Look at it with a browser without the plugins enabled. If it pops up with annoying little windows trying to get you to download the proper plugin, you need to take another look at the HTML. It's ok to have a game or something that's plugin-dependant (say, a game that works on shockwave) but it's important that the main parts of the site be done in HTML. Even Java and Javascript can be annoying. Make sure it at least works ok in a bare-bones browser.

Establish Your Credibility

If you want people to buy from you, they must know that you aren't out to rip them off. I recently read an article about a guy who tried to sell US$100 bills in an internet classified for $10.95. The ad was full of exclamation marks, and did nothing to establish the fellow's credibility. Nobody even tried to buy them. So if you can establish your credibility it helps a LOT. (BTW, the guy was an internet marketing expert and was trying to prove a point.)

To establish credibility, you need to provide contact info, and not just a throw-away email address. Also, an endorsement or link from another site helps. Testimonials help. Especially with full names. When you get a positive comment from someone, get their permission to quote them. Giving away things for free and having a nice site both help with credibility, as does word-of-mouth recommendation. Also, tell the truth. That gets you a lot of points. Recommend good sites, and tell people what to expect. Make well thought-out statements that give people the feeling that you are sincere, honest, and you know what you're doing. Then they'll think "Hey, maybe this guy is fer real!"

Adjust And Track Your Ads

It's important to track who clicked on which ad. Put little codes using the question mark after the URL. Say, "http://luke.hn.org/?article." Then, when I look at the server logs, I can see a reqest for "/?article", but it doesn't affect your browsing at all. When you find an ad that gets good response, use it. When you find one that doesn't get good response, remove it. Also, try to think why it did or didn't get good response. This helps in the formulation of new ads.

Do All You Can To Promote Word-Of-Mouth Advertising

I've created a neat perl script that allows people to just put their name and email address in, along with the name and email of a friend, and it just sends them a link. This helps a lot, because something from a friend is more credible than something from you, besides which sending it to them yourself would be regarded as spam, even if you could get their email address. Another thing you can do is start a contest where people get entries for telling friends, as a sort of motivational aid. Make sure it's something people feel comfortable recommending. Example.

Have Fun!

Almost anything can be fun if you genuinely determine that you are going to like doing it and have a good attitude towards it. And internet marketing is no exception! Besides being heaps more pleasant, you'll get more done better if you like what you're doing, and you won't get frusterated nearly as easily. Think "hobby," or "fun," rather than "job."

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