Social Biz Startup Kit

Internet Marketing Strategies: A Simple Business Model for Your Business Online

Internet marketing strategies are powerful business success factors when they build on a simple business model and plan. There are three essential success factors for an internet marketing foundation for your business. They are the building blocks for establishing a successful online business enterprise:

1. Your Simple Business Model: how you’ll begin sharing your knowledge, experience and message–your Marketing Pipeline

2. Your Marketing Funnel: where your audience encounters your products, programs and/or services.

3. Your Business Development Plan: a blueprint and action plan for how you’ll build your business structure and your marketing and sales process over time.

Think of your business on the internet as needing a structure (like the framework of a new building or the shelving and equipment in a new retail store) and business processes (like the systems in a new home–plumbing, electrical, air conditioning). A simple business model is a blueprint for the start up of a new business and it includes the physical or technical requirements AND the processes and systems that operate the business, like marketing and sales and accounting (and more).

Your Internet Marketing Pipeline

Your business needs a blueprint for a simple business model to get started. You need to turn your internet marketing business ideas into a blueprint or map so you can see how people who don’t know about you and your business will:

• Find you.
• Get to know you and the information you offer.
• Be exposed to your offers.
• Convert to sales and become customers or clients.
• Refer new people to your services and/or products.

Illustration: Simple Business Model–A Marketing Pipeline

Internet Marketing Traffic Sources

One task of starting up an internet marketing business or system is to identify strategic sources of traffic by finding where your target market “hangs out” – the groups, communities, social networking sites, content sharing sites, blogs…where people in your target market go to find information and share with others online.

And don’t forget “offline” sources of traffic: your business networking meetings, paper marketing pieces like your business card and brochure that can send people to a web address, and  the sign-up sheet in your store where people sign up to get on your email list. Currently popular across generations is Facebook. If you have a traditional “bricks and mortar” business like a retail store, Facebook is a great place to reach people just like your current customers who aren’t living in your local area.

Internet Marketing Landing Page

A Landing Page is the place (or places) where you send traffic to opt in, enticing them with something you give away like free information (a DVD, a booklet, or a sample or your product or service), a Giveaway, in return for their contact information for your list. In the example above, where customers sign up on a list in a retail store, the Giveaway is the email sent to them containing information they want (e.g. sale notices or coupons). Your online marketing system should have web pages with forms where people sign up to receive something in return for their contact information. These sign up forms are called “opt in boxes” and are usually created in your email marketing program (AKA “autoresponder”) which automates the whole process of getting someone on your email list and sending out emails to everyone on your list.

List building is your highest priority internet marketing strategy to kick-start your Social Biz!

Internet Marketing Hub

Every internet marketing business system needs a hub, a central place to send prospective customers for valuable, new and helpful information. For most businesses, this means a web site (with a blog).  For the internet marketing start up and the best search engine optimization results (more people finding you online), we recommend WordPress. Your WordPress web site becomes your internet marketing hub by becoming the “go to” place for your content (blog posts, office hours, product descriptions or recommendations). It’s the place you send people (every time) from your emails, from your business card, from your direct mail and from other content you post online (e.g. video you post on YouTube and links you post or share at Facebook).

If you already have a web site for your business but you don’t have a blog, it’s simple to add a blog. Blogging will make your web site easier to find on the Internet. Every time you post content in your blog search engines will “index” it as a new web page. If you are strategic in how you structure that information, your information will be seen by people already searching the Internet, ready to buy what you offer.

Internet Marketing and Sales Funnel

Your internet marketing and sales funnel is the “place” where people encounter your product offers:

Free offer(s): Free valuable information that helps people in your target market address immediate questions or problems.

Starter offers: could also be free or inexpensive, samples or products that make it easy to get started with you (e.g. low cost information products, “door openers” and “lost leaders”).

“Always have something to invite people to” offers: a regular, on-going event that makes it predictable for people to meet you, get to know you better, encounter samples of your products and services and easy for people to bring along or refer new people (e.g. a personal trainer who hosts a healthy cooking demo once a month or a social media strategist who hosts a coffee Meetup and min-workshop once a month).

Make it easy to switch offers: products or services that will replace others your prospective customers already use but they switch because yours are more valuable or more convenient or come with valuable extras (like your customer service and bonus offers).

Core offers: the primary product or service or package of products and services you market online.

Internet Marketing and Social Biz Startup Kit (An Example in Practice)

Traffic: We gather new people from Twitter and Facebook, articles we publish online, Yahoo and LinkedIn groups and various other social media and content marketing sources. (Please come tweet with us at Twitter and “Like” us at Facebook.)

Landing Page: We currently have 3 places where people can opt in or subscribe–our Facebook custom welcome page; our Social Biz Startup Kit landing page;and  our blog for Social Biz Startup Kit.

Marketing Hub: We send people to the Social Biz Startup Kit web site as our central marketing hub.

Marketing/Sales Funnel:

1. Our Giveaway is a Social Biz Quick Start Checklist and Guide. We also do free monthly webinars. People who opt-in receive a regular email newsletter published each time we create new content including checklists, how-to articles, videos, etc.

2. Our Starter Offer is our Social Biz Quick Start Membership for beginners or our Social Biz Intensives for intermediate and advanced internet marketing topics.

3. Our Core Product is our Social Biz Startup Kit. We have a Premium Offer which combines the Social Biz Start Up Kit online marketing training with a package of other training and coaching products and services over a 12 month period.

Our online marketing training for small business focuses on your simple business model, your internet marketing pipeline and internet marketing and sales funnel in Module 2 of the Social Biz Startup Kit.

If you’re just getting started with internet marketing, focus on developing your first marketing pipeline and build your list and your relationships with list subscribers and social networking members. If you’ve already established your list-building process, begin work on your first paid product or service and the web pages to pre-sell it to your list.

To your great internet marketing success!

Daryl Lozupone and Kate Williams

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