What is Internet Marketing?

In this post it is important to note that what I mean by IM is the art of making money online by generating free traffic through various existing online platforms – not by selling products to others (which I would call the Biz Op community).

IM is a really interesting industry.  It exists because the internet is massive, global and still very young;  a  combination that creates a ton of market inefficiencies.  IM is opportunistic and exists to feed off of these inefficiencies.  As the internet ages, markets begin to equate themselves and the loopholes close.  But the internet is still just a baby and there are more businesses coming out  every minute, and more opportunities to exploit.

Most people that practice IM don’t realize this.  They are chasing the dream because they are fed up with the North American live-to-work mentality.  But they cannot fully succeed in IM until they realize what IM truly is, and acquire the mindset that you need to succeed.

Once you accept and embrace the fact that you are an opportunistic blood sucker, you can happily work at identifying existing opportunities.  Once identified, you need to exploit that opportunity for quick cash, scale it as fast as humanly possible, and rinse and repeat until that opportunity dries up.  While doing this you need to also be in the early stages of multiple other opportunities as well (always have a few irons in the fire).

IM is not passive income.  You need to stay abreast with the industry as a whole, as eventually your income stream will collapse.  If you haven’t stayed on top of things and had multiple irons in the fire then you will be scrambling to make up that lost income.

To me, IM is a way to make some pretty large amounts of cash with a relatively low turn-around time (6 months minimum), and next to zero seed money.   That is unlike any other business out there, but the fact that you are creating a business around an inefficiency also means the shelf-life is limited, and in the end you aren’t creating a long-term asset.   Recognize this before you invest in IM.

SEO is the perfect example of this.  We are exploiting the fact that search engines are still young and stupid.  But despite their growing pains, Google is indeed growing and improving.   It is getting harder and harder as Google’s ultimate goal is to have a pure PPC search engine that is as relevant as their organic engine, so they are on a mission to kill SEO.

So what does it take to succeed in IM?   You have to find opportunities that few other people know of, focus on seeing if they work and have a strong ROI, and if they do, focus on scaling them.   If you aren’t the best at finding opportunities, you can follow blogs and gurus and look at the products and methods they promote.  If an idea makes sense give it a shot, but always be skeptical of their promises and analyze the opportunity.

Ask yourself if it so good, why are they selling it?  Most product developers are also IMs, and they make an important choice when releasing a product – should they keep it to themselves or expose it to the world.  If the idea seems to be one that will cease to work or cannibalize itself if thousands  of people are doing it, you should probably avoid it.   Be conservative and think of what it will cost, what the return is, whether it’s scaleable, what the cost of scaling is and what the shelf-life is.  And in a worst-case scenario, how can you escape while still maintaining an asset?

A successful IM understands that most projects will not work out, and tries to go through projects a few at a time, and get as much out as possible.  Just be wary of spreading yourself too thin, and be sure that you’re able to put at least a couple hours of conscious attention into each project you’re working on, every single day.  If you can’t do that, scrap the project and devote your mind-share to fewer things.

One final thing I’d like to add is that the creation of an “Authority Site” would not be IM in my opinion.  If you are going at it the white hat route and doing inbound marketing for traffic, maybe creating a product and buying traffic but not focusing on SEO  – you are building a business not exploiting IM.   This has the same limitations and benefits of building any other type of business.  Much longer to positive cashflow,  much more difficult to scale efficiently, but less risk of it dying and you are creating a more tangible asset.

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