Chris Rohrer asked:


With any online business today online and offline marketing plays a big key to either your business succeeding and making a lot of money, or failing and you losing a lot of money. However marketing online is not all that easy as some may make it out to be. If you jump into it to fast you can quickly lose a ton of money if you market wrong. So lets take this time to go over the correct ways of how to market and make money online.

First you will want to set up some type of marketing budget that you can follow for the month. When you do this make sure that you do not to set your budget to high, because you are just starting out so you will want to take your time and test things at first. A good marketing budget to set would be a couple hundred dollars. This will allow you to test a number of things like google awords, yahoo, and maybe even a good press release.

This moves us into the next part of how to market and make money online. You must test your ads first. Not every ad you post or submit is going to work. So make sure you test your ad to first see what kind of results you get from it. At the end of your test if you like your results you have gotten then you know this ad will work, and you can then invest more money into it.

The next most important thing to do with any marketing campaign is to track your ads. You could have the best ads in the world running, but if you are not tracking to see which ads are converting into sales you could be wasting a lot of money and not even know it! So make sure that no matter what type of ad you are running that you have a way to track it, and see if it is worth keeping or not.

Finally you will want to stay educated. There are always new ways to market online and offline. So it is very important to read up and educate yourself on these new ways of marketing. You can do this by reading messages boards, or surfing the web for new ways to market. Always remember though. Test every new marketing spot you find before you go and invest a lot of money into it.

Adrian Bold asked:

Do you spend a considerable amount of your marketing budget on traditional offline marketing approaches such as radio, television and newspaper advertising? You could be significantly losing out.

Like it or not, the coming of Internet Marketing has sounded the death-knell for traditional methods of marketing and associated advertising. Newspapers are rapidly shedding staff; even the UK’s Channel 4 Television can no longer survive without merging with another channel due to the drop in advertising revenue it had previously relied upon.

So why is offline marketing dying off?

Compare the traditional direct mail marketing technique with online email marketing approaches. Take a sales letter and mail it out to 10,000 people. Add up the cost of stationery and postage, even with discounts for mass postage, you need a good budget. Now compose an email, add your database of 10,000 customers and email it directly to their inbox in less than 10 seconds. The cost is nothing and you essentially require no budget.

Furthermore, recent research indicates that direct mail only generates a 2% response rate; email marketing generates 5 times as much. Offline Marketing cannot compete with these results.

Is it a surprise that traditional offline marketing methods are dying off? Their share of the market shrinking, revenue receding as the online marketing sector grows and takes over the lion’s share of the market?

If we contrast the range of offline marketing, we easily reveal an important weakness in the traditional approach. Offline marketing is limited by geographic location. Newspaper circulation or television/radio broadcasting range limits the effectiveness of the offline marketing campaign. Online marketing campaigns are geographically limitless. If you wish, you can advertise your product or service to millions of people across the entire world.

Broadcast and print advertising has always been expensive, and in their dying days, they still won’t compete with the Internet on cost. Online marketing offers targeted marketing, rather than blanket marketing at a fraction of the cost.

That neatly brings us onto the ability to target your exact customer. Offline advertising can only attempt to do this by hoping enough men are watching football, or women are watching Desperate Housewives. With the online alternative, you can target the very customers that are already looking for your products or services. Again, offline marketing cannot compete with this level of accuracy in finding customers and bringing them to your website.

Using Internet Marketing rapidly reduces the time between a potential customer seeing your marketing and responding to it. Online marketing promotes immediate reaction, generating immediate revenue. Your customer sees your ad. The customer reads your ad, they like what they read, they check the price, and it’s good. They click to add the product to the shopping cart; they fill in their details and click to pay. Within three clicks or so, you’ve made a sale. Traditional marketing methods simply cannot produce these rapid results, or the volume of increased business that they are capable of producing.

Whilst some people will cling on to offline marketing, suspicious of the Internet’s success, their competitors using online marketing are increasing their sales by the hour.