Internet Marketing Hunters
If Internet Marketing was a woman, I’d date her in 2017 for celebrating our 20-year anniversary.
Being married to “her” for 20 years was not that easy, but the fact “we” are still together means a lot. You can say I know each inch of her body, her bad habits and tempers as well as with the joys she can offer. Twenty years with her and she can still allure me with her promises.
She is not a woman. :)
What is it then?
That’s the question that cannot be easily answered when someone asks you “what are you doing for a living?”
It’s not 100% of “something”… it’s many things; it can give you everything or can lead you to nothing.
My definition is this one:
Internet Marketing is Gold Mining On The Net.
I call it: Money Hunting.
It all starts with Panning.
Like gold panning Internet Marketing at it’s lowest level is “mostly a manual technique of separating gold from other materials.” Obviously “Gold” stands for knowledge and practices that bring money, while all “other materials” give “coal” ie. failures as results.
When panning for gold, instead of “wide, shallow pans” the “wannabe” Internet Marketers use low-quality resources: free knowledge by wagging online, free or cheap hosting, free or cheap software and — today — an unfocused use of social networks.
Like gold panning, Internet Marketing of that level is the “easiest and quickest technique for searching for gold (ie. money), but is not commercially viable for extracting gold from large deposits, except where labor costs are very low or gold traces are substantial.”
For our analogy, consider “labor costs” as the paid resources and tools one can use and the “substantial gold traces” as “laser targeted” efforts to specific audiences of hungry buyers.
When that happens we move on to Sluicing.
“Using a sluice box to extract gold from placer deposits has long been a very common practice in prospecting and small-scale mining. A sluice box is essentially a man-made channel with riffles set in the bottom. The riffles are designed to create dead zones in the current to allow gold to drop out of suspension. The box is placed in the stream to channel water flow. Gold-bearing material is placed at the top of the box. The material is carried by the current through the volt where gold and other dense material settles out behind the riffles. Less dense material flows out of the box as tailings.”
Sluicing in Internet Marketing is analogically possible with the use of “Businesses in a Box” whereas the “water flow” stands for “funnels”. It’s the level where the marketer started focusing on list building by offering free resources as a bribe to the visitor of his website for signing up with his newsletter. Then he flows the leads to specific offers ie. digital products he “curated” or to other marketers’ products using his affiliate links to generate commissions.
That method by itself is enough for one’s life if used properly.
Marketers usually sell products with “resale”, “master resale”, “private label” or “white label” licenses that allow the buyer to either resell the product “as is” or to use it (aka. curate it) for creating his “own” product. While the common practice is to just “sell” the products as is, those that spend time on curating the products and creating their own offers get the best results. A “business in a box” usually has the form of a package of materials that can be used for selling the product, like:
- a report or an ebook
- a sales letter
- promotional articles
- banners
- promotional messages (swipe copy)
- etc.
When sluicing for gold in Internet Marketing one has reached a stage where he pays for professional tools, like
- a professional hosting
- an autoresponder
- a way to accept orders online
The flow of the money comes by the implementation of a very basic “funnel” to the “money box” that is consisted by:
- a free offer (it can be a resource via resale rights or any other type of license that allows the free delivery of the product) that can obtained by signing up with the marketer’s newsletter
- an Irresistible Offer (IO — a term coined by Mark Joyner) that follows the signing up
- a re-direction of the non-buyers either to a resource similar to the free offer “made” by the marketer through the compilation of resources obtained with “rights” or to a similar product created by another marketer with the use of an affiliate link — for getting a commission.
Here is how it works:
- Visitors come on the “landing” or “squeeze” page,
- See the free offer,
- Sign up with the newsletter to get the “freebie”,
- Either buy the IO and the money comes or
- Buy the suggested product and commission comes,
- Or buy nothing and are added to the marketer’s autoresponder as “potential customers”.
From there, it depends on how well the marketer has structured his autoresponder’s follow up messages that are scheduled to be sent to the leads in intervals, say 1 day after the subscription, then 1 week after the first message, then 4 days after the previous message and so on.
The more “leads” are funneled to “box” the more “gold” aka. money can come. The more “Businesses in a Box” the marketer acquires, the more freebies and IOs he can create, hence maximizing the possibilities to get more leads — that results in more money.
The marketer of that level knows already that the “key” of his success relies on the “traffic” he gets to his “freebies”. The more traffic flows to the landing/squeeze pages, the more people will be lured to get the freebie, the more people will reach the IO, the more money can come as a result.
Additionally, sluicing for gold on the Net introduces the marketer with one very crucial term:
Conversions
Both in online and offline sales the seller needs to achieve the best conversions for getting the most money from his offers.
The conversion in Internet Marketing has to do with numbers as answers to the following questions:
- to how many leads was the promotional email message sent (N)
- how many leads opened the promotional email message (N1)
- how many leads that opened the message also clicked on the link inside (N2)
- how many leads of those that clicked on the link inside the promotional message eventually visited the website with the money-making offer (N3)
- how many leads of those that visited the website eventually ordered (N4).
The mathematical type is this one:
((NxN1xN2xN3xN4)/10000000)xP
whereas P is the price of the product promoted.
Example:
- N= 1000 subscribers in a list
- N1= 100 subscribers (10% conversion) open the message
- N2 =80 of those leads (80% conversion) clicked on the link
- N3 is in most cases equal to N2 = 80 visited the website
- N4=8 of those leads (10% conversion) ordered the product
- P=$10 is the cost of the product
Let’s apply the numbers to the type:
((1000x100x80x80x8)/10000000)x$10
In simple words:
If one sends a message to 1000 people, 100 of them open the message, 80 of them click on the link inside, those 80 visit the website with the offer and 8 of them order, and if the product is sold for $10, then $80 comes as a result. If the product of $10 was another marketer’s product that offered a 50% commission, then the money coming in the pocket is $40.
I know what you’re thinking right now…
“If the numbers above reflect the average numbers of Internet Marketing promotion… why should I bother to become an Internet Marketer?”
Well…
Even with “Panning” and “Sluicing” a marketer with a list of 1000 leads can generate that $80 or $40. Perhaps every day. In the comfort of his house.
It’s the excitement of generating that money out of “nothing” like coming “from inside the computer” along with the “luxury” of “working” whenever you want to, that makes Internet Marketing an addiction — exactly what gold mining does to gold hunters.
And as it happens with Gold Mining, profits come when you scale the efforts.
That will be the topic of another article. ;)
