Wow! Everyone's busy as bees. Great to see there is a lot of sharing of ideas and information.
Some quick pointers: even if you struggle with HTML / PHP / ASP / whatever, keep at it. I'm no programmer, but I understand enough to make changes to scripts and write some really simple ones. Even that little bit of knowledge has helped immensely. Like most of you, I learn by doing. So, everyday I push my coding abilities as far as I can. I try to do as much of the script writing as possible. If I get stuck, I hire someone to finish it.
Which brings me to my second point, make sure you put a value on your time. It's one thing to try and learn new things, it's another thing to beat your head against the wall when you don't need to. If you can't afford to hire someone, then trade services. Sex for coding usually works if you're a female... Errrr... Just kidding, but content for code is often a good trade. I know a lot of coders that can write some complex code, but can't write good sales copy to save their lives.
Anyhow, always make it a habit to look for ways around your limitations. We are all handicapped. Just in different ways. My handicaps: not a good copywriter, poor coder, and horrible graphic artist. No big deal, there are people out there that I can either hire or trade services with. My point is this: you have all the skills you need, the ones you don't have - others do. Network with each other. Go to Affiliate Summit and shake hands with people. Talk on the phone. However you want to do it, it doesn't matter,
just do it. (Nike paid me for that
)
Okay, enough "Rah Rah" pep talk. Let's get into advertising / marketing.
Ever hear of the Four P's of Marketing? In case you missed Marketing 101, here they are (ripped from Wikipedia):
- Product: The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.
- Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts. The price need not be monetary - it can simply be what is exchanged for the product or services, e.g. time, energy, psychology or attention.
- Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, branding and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
- Placement (or distribution): refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or services is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc. also referring to how the environment in which the product is sold in can affect sales.
Here's how you can relate the 4 P's to Internet Marketing:
- Product - what product or service are you pushing? How does it relate to your website's demographic? Is is incentivizable? If so, should you incentivize it?
- Pricing - Pricing can affect how well the item converts. Often new internet marketers (notice I didn't call you n00bs) want to push the item that has the highest payout. But if it has a high payout, does it have a high cost to the consumer? Either through a long, multi page offer (time cost) or through an actual purchase (monetary cost)
- Promotion - Pretty self explanatory. How are you going to promote your site? SEO, PPC, YouTube, social networks, banner ads, CPM ads, etc... Also, what type of promotion would be best suited for your audience? Video, banner, text? Are you going to focus on branding your site, or just pushing a product?
- Placement - an extension of promotion. What's your demographic? What sites do they visit? Do the sites they frequent have lots of flash, music, etc or are the sites fairly static (no moving images, no music)? What times of day are they most likely to buy? What kind of language do they respond to? "Hip hoppers" are more likely to respond to slang than a white collar executive.
Lot's of questions, but you need to be asking yourself questions all the time. The more questions you ask, the more you will learn. The more you learn, the better you can narrow down on you target audience. The better you target that audience, the more you make. The more you make...you get the idea.
Homework assignment: Write out a list of at least 10 questions. Things you need to know about your site, niche, audience. Then go research and find the answers.
Then look at your site again, and apply that knowledge. There will be things you'll want to change (most likely). Don't take the easy way out and say "Yeah, yeah, I already know all the answers", because, if you do know all the answers, share them with me. I certainly don't, and I know that I would be much richer if I did.
Last, share at least one of your questions with the class and what you learned through your research AND how it applied to your site.
That will be all. Go forth and discover.
Oops, almost forgot, Google's Adplanner kicks ass at helping you figure out what your potential demographic is by studying your competitors demographics.