Because you are so busy with life, family, business, social activities and learning more about Internet marketing, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the basics of using a website to help you make money.

Let’s say you’ve created an Internet marketing engine to drive traffic to your website:

• You’ve got a blog
• You’re adding new content to your blog every day
• You’ve got a professional email service pushing visitors to your site on auto-pilot
• You’re using photos, and graphics
• You’re optimizing the photos and graphics to generate traffic for your site
• You’re using video
• You’re creating a series of videos and optimizing them to generate traffic to your site
• You’re taking advantage of local search opportunities
• You’re using social media to drive traffic to your website
• You’re delivering great products/services which results in a stream of happy customers and clients and positive testimonials
• You’ve established an excellent reputation and word-of-mouth referrals from your happy customers, which is also driving traffic to your site
• You’ve established a growing network of incoming links
• You are using offline marketing actions, such as direct mail, print ads, radio, and TV, to drive even more traffic to your website

Jeez! Your Internet marketing engine is really pumping a lot of visitors to your website. How come you’re not turning more of those visitors into customers and clients!?

Before diving into a hefty evaluation of your entire Internet marketing machine, simply review what you are giving away for free.

A large percentage of those visitors are only coming one time. And they are visiting for a remarkably short period of time.

You’ve only got a few seconds to engage them and help them in some meaningful way, so that you can develop a relationship which will yield a greater benefit for them, and more business for you.

Many people who land on your site are looking for specific information: some need to solve a problem or to get an answer RIGHT NOW. Others are gathering info to support buying decisions that may be made sooner or later.

Even if some of these visitors determine very quickly that you are providing something they want, if you do not engage them, you will lose a number of your most interested visitors – every day.

And an easy way to engage visitors is to offer them something for free that is relevant to why they arrived on your site in the first place.

On top of that, you should present that free giveaway like you were selling an expensive diamond, because that’s how valuable it is for your visitors and for your business!

When you give away something for free – in exchange for their email – you have an opportunity to help them and of course, as a result, you are building a relationship, which is further developed through an automated email campaign.

In short, no matter how much (or how little) traffic you have coming to your site, if you are not engaging your visitors and offering something valuable enough to capture their imagination – for free – you have lost an opportunity to help them because the likelihood that they will ever return is very low.

If should be emphasized that whatever you are giving away better be GOOD, so that it will genuinely help your visitors, which will result in building a relationship that will be mutually beneficial.

Oh! One more thing. Giving away something valuable is also useful for building incoming links, which is just one more reason to really make sure your giveaways are REALLY GOOD!

Certainly, if you are an established author, traditional publishing makes sense, since you can focus solely on the writing and let the long-standing publishing machine do all the rest of the work.

But for everyone else, getting a book deal is somewhat akin to winning the lottery. Regardless, even if the likelihood of having your work accepted, printed and distributed by a traditional publisher were not so low, there’s still the matter of giving up a certain amount of editorial and design control that is unappealing.

Having been personally involved in the production of several self-published books (including one that became a #1 New York Times best seller), and in reference to the rise in popularity of the print-on-demand publishing model, I find it difficult to fathom why a writer would punish him or herself by contemplating a traditional publishing avenue.

Print-on-Demand Publishing is Not Vanity Publishing

First of all, let me ensure a proper understanding of print-on-demand publishing, which is very different from vanity publishing.

Vanity publishing is when you pay a company to print your book. You pay them a chunk of money and they delivery you a bunch of books, which sit in your garage until you toss them out some years later.

Print-on-demand publishing does not require upfront payments nor does it require the purchase of any quantity of books. In fact, you could upload your book online and buy only one copy.

Print-on-demand books are more expensive, per book, than getting a volume of books printed, but they are reasonably priced and, again, you don’t need to put up any capital to have a finished book.

Typically, a print-on-demand publisher will also handle sales of the books to others, including handling credit card transactions, shipping, returns, customer service, etc. (Of course you still have to get people to want to buy the book!)

NOTE: not “all” print-on-demand publishers handle their sales the same way, and some do not have phone support, nor do they accept returns. Other print-on-demand companies have very liberal return policies (but you may pay a premium for that, as well).

Check the resources at the bottom of this page and determine what is most workable for you. (I happen to like Lulu.com and Cafepress.com, because I have used them both for a number of books, however, like all such services, they each have advantages and disadvantages).

Three Important Caveats

1) Although technically speaking, you can prepare your book and have it ready for purchase for absolutely no cost on your end when using print-on-demand publishing, you would be wise to pay for professional copyediting, proofreading, and indexing to present your work at a professional standard.

2) As well, you should also have a professional cover designed for your book. The design of the book, and title, are a vital marketing factor for any book.

3) In fact, marketing the book is the primary responsibility you need to assume if you want to sell more books than to just yourself.  No matter how good your book is, you will not find the world flocking to buy it just because you have published it.

A Word About Blogs and Self-Publishing

A blog requires a good amount of writing to keep it current and to keep it fresh. If your blog is focused on a particular subject area, it also stands as a ready made resource for you book.

In fact, a savvy marketing concept is to promote your book on your blog, and promote your blog in your book, so that the book and the blog are synergistically promoting each other.

Self-Publishing Resources

Click this following link for a list of self-publishing companies from Writers Digest magazine. Although there are a number of different types of self-publishing companies represented, I would suggest the print-on-demand services that have no setup fees. Additionally, you might want to consider the relative merits of the add-on services those companies provide for preparing your book for publication and for marketing your book. (As noted above, your book needs to be presented in a professional light, and it won’t be sold without marketing efforts).

Final Note

By the way, if you really and truly want your book printed and distributed via a traditional publisher, self-publishing your book (and marketing the heck out of it), may provide a better opportunity for your book to transition over to a larger-scale publishing model. Literary agent, Andrea Hurst says:

We’re looking for one set of qualifications: a highly marketable hook and a product that has sold at least 5,000 books in (preferably) just a year or less on the market.

In brief, for writers who want to take control of the publishing process, print-on-demand is the way to go.

Consumer scams are not new.

As an example, in the 1920′s, the Ponzi scheme (bogus investment swindle) was a notorious way to bilk individuals from their savings.  However, the idea of that specific scam goes back earlier, to 1857, when Charles Dickens described it in his novel Little Dorrit. The recent example of Bernie Madoff, operator of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, is testament that old ideas can be given a fresh suit to steal from people anew.

Of course criminal behavior goes back much earlier than Charles Dickens depicts. One of the Ten Commandments (“You shall not steal”) is indicative of how long criminal acts have been problematic to Mankind.

Nowadays, a modern way for criminals to put on a new suit is by cloaking themselves behind the Internet.

Examples of Internet Scams and Fraud

The list of ways that theft is perpetrated via the Internet is seemingly endless.

The FBI maintains a website resource of “Internet Fraud” and how to avoid such.  The FBI notes that the most common categories of Internet fraud include:

• Internet auction fraud
• Non-delivery of merchandise purchased from websites
• Credit card fraud
• Investment fraud
• Business fraud
• Nigerian Letter Fraud

That last is so well known as an example of Internet fraud that the FBI lists it on the same page as its own singular category. Although it has been bilking individuals of their savings “online” since the 1990′s, the scam goes back decades earlier in the form of direct mail and faxes. (For more info, click here for the Nigerian email scam.)

Work-at-Home Scams

Due to the recession and a demand for new income sources, “work-at-home” scams have seen substantial rises in activity. The following article and video from the ABC NEWS Business Unit, Google Sues to Stop Work-From-Home Scams, highlights a number of such scams, including the widely propagated Google work-at-home scam, which includes “fake news articles, fake news blogs and fake testimonials to promote their services and direct them to credit card processing sites like the one run by Pacific WebWorks, Google said.”

Furthermore, the article states “Google is warning customers to be wary of the following work-from-home promotions: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.”

Protect Yourself from Internet Scams

Internet fraud is common. And even though “auction fraud” is one category listed by the FBI, the vast majority of purchases made via auction sites, such as eBay, are fairly transacted.  In other words only a small percentage are fraudulent.  The same is true for business fraud and online credit card transactions in general: the vast majority of purchases made over the Internet are transacted fairly.

On the other hand, work-at-home opportunities are particularly prone to fraud. According to the ABC video (link above) 54 out of 55 such work-at-home opportunities are scams.  That means any time you see an advertisement for some work-at-home “opportunity,” there is a very high likelihood that its sole intent is to scam you out of your money.

The US Justice Department lists a number of ways to avoid becoming defrauded, including:

• Being Careful About Giving Out Valuable Personal Data Online
• Being Especially Careful About Online Communications With Someone Who Conceals His True Identity
• Watching Out for “Advance-Fee” Demands

For more info on protecting yourself from Internet scams click on this link from the United States Department of Justice on Internet Fraud.

1: Make a decision that you want to develop an online business and commit to some amount of time you can devote to it – ideally every day. (A failure in establishing personal commitment here will make the rest of these points moot).

2: Determine the business focus. If you already have an offline business that you want to promote, then you have a place to start. Otherwise, determine your area of focus around these two variables:

a) Are there people who will purchase a product/service you are offering?

b) Are you interested enough in this product/service that you will be able to devote some time to it every day?

3: Start a blog on that subject.

Although there are very simple and entirely free blogging platforms that you can use to start immediately (Blogger.com and WordPress.com), a better choice is to pay for your own website name and host your own blog software. Here are the steps to accomplish that:

a) Buy your own website name (less than $10.00/yr)

b) Subscribe to a web hosting service (less than $10/month)

c) Download and install the WordPress blogging software (free) from WordPress.org (note the “.org”).  Many hosting services will walk you through this process.  (For more info, click the following link for You Need a Professional WordPress Blog).

4: Start an email subscription service, such as an email newsletter, to develop a subscriber base that you can build a relationship with. Click here to for more information on giving away valuable, free information, to build an email list.

(In fact, this would be a good place to plug my own free newsletter: to find out more, click Skyworks Orbit.)

5: Create content every day on the subject of your blog. This is important enough that it deserves special emphasis. You will need traffic arriving to your website. You can either buy traffic or grow traffic naturally. If you are going to develop traffic naturally (free), you’ll need to develop a lot of content over time. The more content that you have, the more reasons search engines have to bring traffic to your site. There is considerably more to know about this subject, but for the sake of simplicity, recognize that a lot of content is needed. (Click here for more information on Generating Free Traffic with Blogs).

6: You need a product or service to sell online. This relates to point 2 above. If you already have a service and/or products, you are already set. (Even so, you will want to consider NEW products and services). One simple option (not the best option) is to create an eBook that can be sold from your blog. (Or, you can hire someone to write an eBook for you.) However, generally speaking, eBooks are not as effective as they used to be, especially since, for many subjects, there are lots of established “Free” eBooks already. The point is you need some kind of product or service, and if you don’t have anything to sell right now, physical products, and especially digital products, represent business opportunities that can scale up more effectively than providing services.  “Scaling up more effectively” refers to increasing  business profits with an increase in sales, without a proportionate increase in labor.  (If you sold 10 widgets last week, you may be able to sell 20 widgets this week without hiring more staff).  On the other hand, in some cases providing services may be an easier to way to start a business.  Conversely, since there is only so much time in a day, the amount of service that can be delivered by a business is limited, even when more personnel are hired to deliver the service.

7: You’ll need a way to accept money online. There are many shopping carts available online, which facilitate the exchange of money on the Internet.  A very simple one to start with is Paypal. Although there is no fee for using Paypal, they do take a small percentage of your payment as a commission. As your business grows, there are other paid options, that will save you money, as long as you are generating enough business to make it cost effective.

8: Steps 5 and 6 need to be repeated to expand your income opportunities. Furthermore, if you have a product/service that is purchased month after month (consumable products, such as vitamins, and/or online services that are paid monthly, are some examples), the built-in repeat sales establish a very good business foundation.

NOTE: Although these steps are relatively simple, it should be emphasized that there are more details to know to expand your business faster. Further, step 5 includes an ongoing and continuous flow of activity that should not be undervalued.

The real point is that it is SIMPLE to get started!

“How do I make money on the Internet?”

Whether it’s a business person tasked with increasing their company’s revenue, or an individual looking to start an online business, that question is fundamental to their mutual purposes: leveraging the Internet for profit.

So, let’s review the basic online marketing business models, in terms of advantages and disadvantages, and see what may resonate with your needs.

By the way, the first two online business models don’t even require that you have your own product or service.

1) Publishing Advertisements On Your Websites

This is relatively easy to understand, since the ubiquity of magazines and newspapers have familiarized readers to this model.  Just like magazines and newspapers sell ads to insert into their pages, which then have the opportunity to be viewed by their readers, websites can display ads on their web pages.  Publishing Google Adsense, (which are contextual ads targeted to display offers that are relative to the content of the target website), are easy to set up.  As your site gains a larger audience, then other types of ads can be displayed, which will generate more revenue.

a) Advantages: Easy to implement.  In fact, this is the easiest way to get started if you don’t already have a product to sell.  Just set up a website (most often a blog), add some content that readers are interested in, and post some Adsense on it.  When your website(s) become more popular, seek higher-paying ads to display.

b) Disadvantages: Unless you manage to cultivate a LOT of traffic and establish some authority for the subject of your website(s), you will not make much money.  And to get to the point where you can publish higher-earning ads, and leave Adsense behind, your website(s) will need to achieve some relative level of popularity.  Furthermore, if you are selling a product or service, this type of ad income may very well reduce your income, because it takes visitors away from your site.

2) Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is all about advertising products and/or services that are provided by other companies.You are completely your own boss and you make a commission from every sale you make.

a) Advantages: No product or inventory required. No need to be concerned about customer support, or shipping, or handling the business aspect of providing the product or service you are selling. This is a pure marketing activity. Your activity is solely focused on becoming as efficient as possible in developing sales to derive the most amount of commissions possible, for the least expense.

b) Disadvantages: You are assuming all the risk for promoting some other company’s products and services. Because this is a very competitive business model, if you are buying traffic, you will lose money before you make money and you will need to continually monitor and refine your marketing performance to stay competitive.

3) Selling a Product

Similar to point #1 above, this is easy to understand. It’s what every physical and online store is doing: selling products and (ideally) making enough money to bank a profit.

a) Advantages: It’s the most basic business model. People need to buy things and someone needs to sell it to them. It’s relatively easy to scale your business up. In other words, if you are selling 10 widgets a week, as you increase your marketing effectiveness you can scale up to 20 widgets a week to make more profit.

b) Disadvantages: You need a product (not much of a disadvantage if you already have products). You need to manufacture or buy the product and unless you use drop shipping (shipments directly from the manufacturer or distributor to consumer) you need to ship the products yourself. There is more personnel and complexity needed to administer this type of business.

4) Selling a Service

Although this is somewhat a variation to selling a product (#3 above), it’s different enough to deserve separate mention. This is primarily a lead generation activity. In other words, unlike selling certain products, it cannot be conducted entirely online. The very nature of providing a service requires personal involvement.

NOTE: There is also the opportunity to sell software-as-a-service (SaaS), but in spite of the name “service,” the actual marketing activity falls under the category of selling a product (see above) or selling a subscription (see below).

a) Advantages: Selling a service is also a basic business model. People need to buy services and someone needs to provide those services. But unlike selling products, there is no products to manufacture or ship. Hence, this type of business is easier to launch than selling a product. You are selling your time to provide the service. This is a business that can be established with lower startup costs and if you are providing a service that is primarily consumed on a localized basis, then your competition is relative to your geographical area.

b) Disadvantages: There is only so much time you have. Sure, you can hire others to meet a growing demand for your service, but even so, this does not scale up as readily as selling products. Although there are exceptions, there is a potentially greater opportunity to make more money selling products than services.

5) Subscription Revenue

This is a powerful business model. Whether it is based upon a membership site or paid newsletter or software-as-a-service (SaaS), or any other way that customers will pay you on a continuous basis (often monthly) this means you are developing streams of revenue, not just individual sales. In other words, you are building a business model that continues to expand more than any of the other opportunities described here. In fact, in certain circumstances, this can include selling perishable products. For example, vitamins and health supplements can be marketed so they are automatically billed and shipped on a recurring basis.

a) Advantages: Very profitable business model. Since most of the work and expense in marketing is in generating that first sale, by using that same effort to establish multiple, ongoing (monthly) sales via paid subscriptions, each new sale has a greater impact on the business than in the other models outlined here.

b) Disadvantages: If you think any of the earlier business models are competitive, then step up to a game of even higher competition. Because this model is so lucrative, you need to be sharp. You’ll need a very good newsletter, or membership service, or product that can be continually auto-billed and shipped (continuity sales), because this attracts a lot of savvy business players who are seeking to carve out and defend their piece of the same pie.

Of course you are not limited to just ONE of these business models. You can mix and match as you wish.

The reason savvy business owners love Internet marketing is because it’s effective and economical (compared to using only traditional media). Never before in history has so much communication power been in the hands of any person who has a computer, an Internet connection and a willingness to learn.

INTERNET MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES DO NOT STAND STILL

The reason some hate Internet marketing is because it’s so effective and so economical and yet so unable to stand still, that it can create confusion as to what is pertinent at any given time.

The technology of Internet marketing is evolving every day.

However, all of it still boils down to using technology to enable more efficient communication.

And if you think you are tuned into the world of Internet marketing because you have a static website that communicates as a one-way flow to visitors (like a brochure), you are missing some of the greatest opportunities ever developed to help you promote your business and/or your message.

INTERNET MARKETING IS ABOUT 2-WAY COMMUNICATION

Internet marketing ties together creativity and communication, by way of technologies that incorporate copywriting, design, graphics, promotion, audio, video and other factors that make it easy for communication to go back and forth.

The concept of using technology to facilitate two-way communication between your company and your visitors, customers and clients has been around for many years. But the ways to bring that about are continually getting easier, more effective, and more popular.

Ten years ago it would strike some potential customers odd if you did not have a website. Nowadays, it might strike some potential customers odd if you have a website that was only a static, one-way communication media, without regularly updated information.

ARE YOU USING A BLOG?

Adding a blog to your existing site, or even completely upgrading your website to a blog architecture is such a simple and important advancement, that by NOT having a blog, it would be similar to not having a website 10 years ago.

Blogs not only allow instant feedback from visitors, but they are a much better platform for driving new visitors to your website, especially when intelligently used as part of a marketing program to create expansion.

Are you using a blog?  If not, you are missing a simple opportunity to boost your web presence.

There’s more to know about this, and if your are interested in getting a foothold on the BASICS of this Love/Hate dichotomy of Internet marketing, be sure to sign up for the “The 7 Orbits of Internet Marketing.” It’s free!

In fact, infomercials became so prominently profitable that more and more money poured into the industry and by the dawn of the 21st century, big brands started pumping money into the infomercial profit party in a much bigger way. This raised the profile of the infomercial industry as a whole, and furthered the acceleration of rising rates.

Having been involved with some of the most successful infomercials, I have observed that infomercials, as an advertising media, have matured in a way somewhat analogous (although not nearly as fast), as what has happened in the Pay Per Click advertising channel. PPC has become a massively successful advertising model. As a result, advertisers have rapidly driven up PPC costs, over the past few years.

Further, the level of sophistication in PPC strategies to stay profitable has also increased.

In a similar way, the costs and risks associated with creating and testing infomercials have skyrocketed since their humble beginnings.

So, when someone asks me if they should produce an infomercial, rather than delve into the relative merits of their product or service and how broad the demographics are for the market that buys it, I simply ask how much testing has been done through less expensive media?

(For more info, click “Testing” Your Way To Internet Marketing Success).

PPC would still be the least expensive and the fastest way to test how well a product will sell on the Internet. When that has been refined and scaled up to maximize the demand and profits, enough information will be gained to really determine what are the best keywords and the driving factors that underlie this product’s success. And all that data will be very important as a research basis for scripting and producing an infomercial “test,” to see how it would do on a limited trial basis as a TV advertisement.

There is much more to know about creating infomercials (which is a high profile component of Direct Response Marketing), but the simple answer about whether you should create an infomercial for your product would be based upon how well it’s selling on the Internet and using the supporting info to help evaluate a translation to TV.

Stated another way, for most business persons, the question about whether a product would be successful as an infomercial shouldn’t even be considered until it’s been tested online and then tested in smaller geographical regions as a TV commercial.

There are certainly many others, but if you are contemplating various software foundations to build a website upon, you would be wise to become familiar with either, or both of these as they would be a good choice for many website developers.

Setting up websites has evolved considerably since the mid 90′s. In brief, it has become much easier.

A person with nominal knowledge of the Internet can set up a dynamic website pretty quickly. Of course, if a person is willing to devote more time to the subject, one can create more specialized and customized websites.

This article is not a technical treatise of Joomla and WordPress, but is a simple overview, specifically for non-technical users who are contemplating a software platform for their own website, or as a website for a group of users.

Website Content Management Systems

Website Content Management Systems (WCMS) allow non-technical users to work together as a group to easily add website content (such articles, photos, audio files, videos, etc.) on an ongoing basis.

Particularly for groups of contributors, website content management systems readily facilitate multi-user collaboration with varied levels of security access and coordination between administrators, editors and writers. (Which means that certain non-technical contributors, such as writers, would not have access to other portions of the website other than their own articles, and could not inadvertently and adversely effect changes anywhere than their own articles).

Heck, even if you don’t need the power of coordinating multiple contributors to maintain and update a website, these systems make great foundations for websites managed by one person.

Open Source Software

For simplicity’s sake, a compelling note about open source software is that such is free to use. Even more compelling is that popular open source website platforms, such as Joomla and WordPress, enjoy extensive communities that work independently and/or collaboratively to continuously expand the innate capabilities of the core software, while also building additional applications that extend the capabilities of what the basic software was intended to accomplish. Stated another way, from a user’s perspective, it’s like becoming the owner of a high-performance car (for free), that is continuously being tuned up for you (also for free), with more functionality being routinely added (also for free).

There are many more open source website platforms, but WordPress and Joomla are two big ones, and when it comes to blogging, WordPress stands alone as the premier service.

WordPress and Joomla

The differences between Joomla and WordPress used to be more significant, enough so, that for simplicity, I used to state:

♦ If you want a larger, more sophisticated website, go with Joomla. (I also used Joomla’s earliest iteration, which was Mambo, before Joomla development forked away from Mambo in 2005).

♦ And if you just need a blog, use WordPress.

Nowadays that simplicity still has merit, but the distinction has become blurred, and as both systems have expanded, their innate capabilities have overlapped each other. For example, you can use WordPress for much larger and more sophisticated websites, and Joomla certainly includes blogging functionality and just as well, could be used for smaller websites.

Joomla and WordPress Features

Even as late as 2008, a comparison of the “basic” feature sets between Joomla and WordPress would have been more useful. However ongoing advances have served to make those differences less important – at least from the perspective of a non-technical user. (By the way, Joomla and WordPress are built upon the same technical architecture).

Both Joomla and WordPress offer tremendous capabilities in terms of how to present the look and design of the site via “themes” in WordPress and “templates” in Joomla. There are countless free (and paid) themes and templates for both services that you can integrate into your Joomla or WordPress site to radically change the site’s design. Additionally, since this is open source software, you can start with an existing theme or template and make changes to that, to fine tune the presentation of your site in a way that better suits your needs.

♦ Want your site to look elegant or brash? Just pick a look you like and install it.

♦ Want your site red or blue? Easy! And just as easy to change it again.

♦ Want to use images or design elements that are not on any other site? You can customize Joomla and WordPress templates and themes as you wish.

Both WordPress and Joomla offer extensive opportunities to customize and improve functionality via “plugins,” “components” and “modules” for Joomla, as well as “plugins” and “widgets” for WordPress.

♦ Want to customize the way photos are displayed?

♦ Want to improve search engine optimization functionality?

♦ Want to integrate additional commercial applications?

Each of these (and much more) can be achieved with the various plugins and other add-ons that are continuously being developed and refined.

Special Note About WordPress

If you are new to WordPress, there is an important difference to realize: There are TWO different platforms of WordPress from the same company:

♦ WordPress.com is a completely free online platform that is extraordinarily easy to set up and use. However, that is not the WordPress that is being referred to in this article.

♦ WordPress.org (note the “.org”) is also free, but requires a web host and website address to build your website on (just like with Joomla). For the purpose of establishing a unique online identity that is completely under your own control, the WordPress.org version is the service that this article is referring to.

WordPress or Joomla: Which is Right for You?

Although the differences noted above, regarding whether you need a large sophisticated website (Joomla) or a simple blog (WordPress) have merit, the distinctions are less significant than in the past.

However, I’d say that WordPress is somewhat easier than Joomla to just simply get started publishing content right away.

But whether you go with Joomla or WordPress, ultimately you are going to want to customize it. If you have ready access to friends or associates who are already more familiar with one platform or the other, I’d go with the platform that your friends/associates are familiar with, because at certain times it can really speed up your website’s development to simply ask someone.

Having said that, both WordPress and Joomla have great online support communities, so you should be able to get any question answered relatively quickly.

Here’s an update on Nov 18: WordPress Wins CMS Award.

Although the delivery of the “Big Brand” message became more subtle through the latter part of the 20th century, the concept of “frequency,” and hitting the public repetitively with the same message, did not change.

For example, if you think of “Big Brand” marketing messages, such as the large soft drink manufacturers, fast food chains or car companies, the message may be designed to position their product, in your mind, with the concepts of “youth,” or “happiness,” or “luxury,” or “wealth,” and/or “family.” However, the real power has been in pushing that message out, over and over and over and over to imbue it within the public psyche.

HUGE amounts of money are invested every year to forward this model – because it works.

But if you or I don’t have multiple millions to invest in marketing the old way, we can not only gain a tremendous cost advantage by using 21st century technologies and methods, we can also achieve a greater degree of effectiveness by engaging with, and interacting with the types of prospects that are interested in our products or services! In fact, new media marketing (which is changing and evolving as you read this) is so effective, that even the big brand advertisers are moving a larger percentage of their overall advertising budget to the internet and new media technologies.

The question is not whether 21st century marketing technologies are effective, or whether your business should avail itself of the same; the question is HOW MUCH are you taking advantage of new media and new technology marketing right now?

One suggestion that I can offer is click on my “FREE” page and take advantage of any or all the items there to expand your business with 21st century marketing technologies.

Another (somewhat related) perspective reflects an inherent confusion among inexperienced individuals who simply do not understand that online marketing is more than setting up a website. Although establishing a website is infinitely simpler and less expensive than building a physical store, neither offers any guarantee that the business associated with either property will ever make any money.

Establishing a website is “not” Internet marketing. The game of marketing via the Internet doesn’t even begin until after a website is established and at that point the activity of the game revolves around how to get people to visit the website and buy the products/services.  (That’s a simplified statement, since a professionally launched website would integrate Internet marketing elements from the initial design).

Traffic Generation

Generally speaking, there are two ways to get visitors to your website.

1) BUY TRAFFIC
Just like you can advertise any business in many ways (direct mail, trade shows, magazine ads, newspaper ads, radio, TV, etc), there are myriad ways to advertise online, with pay-per-click being the most common.

2) DEVELOP TRAFFIC NATURALLY
This has to do with search engine optimization, and embraces a panorama of various activities that entail considerable work.

While building traffic through either, or both, methods, you would also build up an email list of subscribers that you regularly send messages to with special offers.

These activities require resources. Buying traffic results in immediate activity.  SEO results in a lower-cost sales process, but further down the road.

Affiliate Advertising

Selling products for others is a popular way to get started as an Internet marketer. You don’t need to create products, you don’t need to maintain an inventory, you don’t need to handle the customer service and other matters related to selling products or services. An affiliate marketer drives visitors to a sales site, and collects commissions for those visitors who make a purchase.

In fact, an affiliate marketer does not even need a website.

Hence, driving visitors to sales pages for the purpose of generating affiliate commissions seems to be the easiest way to make money online. (And it is often promoted as such).

Affiliates take the risk with their time and money and the manufacturer benefits from the sale, and only pays commissions when sales are made. It’s a win-win scenario when you match up the right affiliates with the right manufacturers, and especially the right affiliate payouts (commissions).

Affiliate selling is a large industry and a rapidly growing industry. All manufacturers of products/services need/want affiliates to sell their goods.

And of course, affiliates need companies that pay affiliate commissions.

Since affiliate marketing is such a great opportunity for manufacturers, they often compete to provide the best “offers” (including affiliate commissions) in the industry to attract affiliates.

However, the concept of affiliate marketing can also be presented to newbies as a get-rich-quick scheme which ends up generating at least “some” business for manufacturers while frustrating the affiliate who is beginning to learn the same things note above: Internet marketing and its subsegment of affiliate marketing, require more activity then simply setting up a website. The two general strategies for driving visitors (noted above), applies to affiliate marketing as it applies to any online marketing.

Conclusion

Online marketing and affiliate marketing “can” be relatively simple.  At least the barrier to entry is low and the mechanics of driving traffic can be learned by anyone with a diligent desire to study and apply such knowledge.  However, to expect success as an online marketer in general, or as an affiliate marketer in particular, from the notion of merely setting up a website, would be an over-simplification of what it takes to become profitable.

For more info on affiliate marketing, visit this link:
http://skyworksmarketing.com/what-is-affiliate-marketing/

There are numerous advantages to this: not least is the opportunity for the client and myself to gain some awareness of how we operate. But more importantly, the process results in a very workable and actionable program that has a great degree of success. Furthermore, as a result of the ongoing communication throughout the process we are usually able to flesh out some budgetary parameters (if they were not already clearly established).

Unfortunately, not all clients are inclined to invest funds for something that will not show an immediate return on investment (research/planning).

So, what to present?

Since I offer free, 30 minute phone consultations, I’m usually able to gain enough information to establish a very fundamental outline, based upon our meeting.

Following is one I proffered this week.

TWO PRONG SEARCH MARKETING ATTACK

I) PAID ADVERTISING
Develop/Test short-term lead generation strategies, in conjunction with existing sales/marketing team.

II) NATURAL SEARCH MARKETING
Develop long-term Search Engine Optimization strategy to raise company  profile in the search engines to deliver more prospects and customers for lower cost.

GENERAL PLAN

1) BASIC RESEARCH to establish:
a) The specific market(s) that will buy
b) The marketing “hot buttons” for the product/service
c) Market positioning for the product/service
d) Keyword competitive analysis

2) KEYWORD RESEARCH to establish:
a) Core keywords for the industry
b) Popular keywords related to the products/services
c) Relevant but less popular keywords

3) PUBLIC RELATIONS:
a) Create/announce newsworthy events
b) Establish publicity activities
c) Integrate video opportunities
d) Determine unique industry research that can be developed and promoted
e) Press Release strategy

4) ESTABLISH PAID ADVERTISING STRATEGY (based upon keyword research):
a) PPC
b) Display
c) Test campaigns

5) ESTABLISH SEO STRATEGY (based upon keyword research):
a) Content development (articles, videos, interviews, research, etc).
b) On-Page SEO
c) Off-Page SEO
d) Social Media
e) PR (see 3 above)

6) DIRECT MAIL:
a) Establish targeted campaign(s) based on research above
b) Integrate with online activities
c) Test campaigns

Or in fact, has marketing become more complex, more misunderstood, less efficient and more costly?

In brief: I would answer “Yes” to both questions.

Marketing Misunderstandings

21st century marketing, particularly Internet marketing services, are prone to misunderstanding.

On the one hand, the technologies of Internet marketing may appear so alien to some, that the whole subject is confusing.

On the other hand, there are some aspects of Internet marketing that are simple enough, that given an understanding of certain components (like, say, how to create a blog), that one may consider the entire subject relatively simple.

Therein lies somewhat of a danger. As an analogy, some individuals might believe they are competent photographers because they have a digital camera and have taken some good photos. However, the difference between a competent amateur photographer and one who is a true professional can be so significant, that it defies logic and rational economics at first blush.

Why will companies and/or advertising agencies pay thousands of dollars to utilize the services of a top pro as opposed to a photographer who would potentially charge a lot less, but lacks pro experience?

One reason is because the cost to re-shoot an unsuccessfully executed project can be higher than the original shoot, and in the process, careers may be damaged as a result of a failed project. Stated another way, the cost of failing now may be considerably higher than the cost of getting it right later.

In simple terms, what it takes to provide PREDICTABLY good images, under specialized and/or pressured circumstances – on demand – is so different than what it takes to turn out good photos at one’s leisure, that the value difference between an amateur and top level pro can be exponential in terms of cost.

Returning to marketing, and achieving PREDICTABLE results, the difference between an experienced marketing professional and one who is not, can, in some circumstances, equate to the success or a failure of a company. Which is why some companies will pay large sums to consult with outside marketing professionals, when they are already funding large budgets internally for marketing services.

The understanding and misunderstanding of professional marketing is further complicated by the fact that the rate of change in marketing technology, and the execution of such, has evolved in more ways since the advent of the 21st century than at any point previously. Even highly successful marketing executives who may have retired several years ago, are out of the loop in terms of modern marketing technologies.

Internet marketing has not only dramatically changed the calculus of marketing in general, but the changes are still evolving every day!

Modern Marketing: Good News, Bad News

The good news is that such changes have resulted in lowered costs in certain areas, and simplified services in others. For example, setting up a website has never been easier. Nowadays, it’s possible to set up relatively sophisticated websites for a fraction of the cost of only a decade ago. Furthermore, the skill required to set up such a site is also a fraction of what was required a decade ago.

However, the bad news is that the simplicity and low cost of setting up websites has led to misunderstandings about the “marketing” of products and services via the Internet. The problem is quickly realized by any business which has set up a website and then experienced the unhappy reality of very few visitors arriving and the website not making anywhere near the profit that was anticipated.

21st Century Marketing: Best News!

In brief, 21st century marketing changes have resulted in good news and bad news. However, here’s the “best” news: never before has there been so many ways to measure and quantify the results of marketing, via the Internet. Which means the results of “professional” and/or “amateur” marketing services are now subject to the level of scrutiny and evaluation that have been required in the realm of scientific discovery and advances.

Stated another way, never before have marketers, and purchasers of marketing services, been able to so effectively gauge what they are gaining from their marketing investments. The relative merits (or not) of marketing campaigns and marketing services are more transparent than ever.

“How much sales increased” is a vital statistic. But it’s also invaluable to know “exactly” where those sales came from and how to improve sales further. The application of market testing in combination with modern analytics, speeds up the efficiency of marketing campaigns while reducing costs.

More importantly, in terms of establishing a marketing campaign or professional marketing services, one can better understand what lies ahead through the guidance of a marketing pro who can embrace the existing technologies, as well as a specific company’s circumstances and business goals, and coalesce these components into a customized strategy for the benefit of the client and the client’s expansion.

Customized, Professional Marketing Strategizing

For example, following is the Skyworks Marketing 4-Point Propulsion Strategy, which is a relatively simple approach to resolving dynamic and complex marketing problems and opportunities:

1) Conduct a consultive Analysis of a company’s current and/or past marketing activities.

2) Prepare and present a customized Marketing Program to expand the company, with an emphasis on low-cost, hard-hitting technologies for the most economical and sustained expansion possible.

3) Oversee execution of the Marketing Program (using the company’s staff and/or Skyworks Marketings’ resources).

4) Train company staff to apply cost-effective marketing technologies to continue to propel the company higher.

The net result of applying standard marketing principles, with modern marketing technologies (internally or externally), for the purpose of achieving marketing goals, all in combination with performance measurements, is an effective way to increase a company’s bottom line.

Conclusion

New marketing technologies do create marketing efficiencies. Simultaneously, they create confusion for those who do not understand the technological opportunities. This creates an apparent paradox of simplicity and complexity; efficiency and inefficiency.

The net result as it applies to you revolves around time and money: Do you have the personal bandwidth to learn it all? Or should you hire a marketing professional to guide your business growth?

Of course, not all images (or other intellectual property) are allowed to be shared this way, hence, the existence of Creative Commons licensing for any given work is the means to differentiate which images are eligible.

Here are the mutual advantages for you and the image creator:

1) You can use Creative Commons images for no cost.
2) The creator of the image gets credit.

It’s the second part that makes this whole exchange workable. The creator who grants a Creative Commons license to his/her images, is offering such images to be shared. In return, the creator simply wants the image to be rightfully attributed.

And now Google is helping to connect creators who grant a Creative Commons license to certain images, with those that are looking for such images to illustrate their content.

For more information, click on the following Google post, Find Creative Commons Images with Image Search.

Even if you are not an inventor, this is a practical, real-world, inside look at what it takes for an entrepreneur to persevere and succeed.

Here is the excerpt:

The key terms to negotiate in a patent license are royalty rate (typically 2 to 6 percent of gross revenue for products), annual minimums (important in case the product doesn’t sell), upfront monies (which licensees hate), and length of deal (you want a chance to renegotiate after a few years if you get a homerun!). Of course, there are other points to be negotiated, and the language of each can be argued, too. The final document can be more than 20 pages, so there is plenty of opportunity to run up a large legal bill. But if you can agree on the first four points, you can agree on the rest.

The royalty rate and term discussions are relatively straightforward, but it is difficult to argue for upfront fees or annual minimums unless the product has an established history. Therefore, you really have to guess and see what the market bears.

Click the link to read The Inside Story of the Life of an Invention, Part 3, as well as the entire 6-part series.

Setting up a website and optimizing it (SEO) for relevant search terms, and especially incorporating local search, if your service caters to local clients, would be another obvious way.

Establishing local pay-per-click campaigns to drive leads to your website would be an application of paid online advertising.

In fact, there are many lead generation models to be considered for a variety of ways to cultivate leads for your freelance service.

Online Freelance Boards

Finally, there are online freelance job boards.

♦ The good news is that such services do facilitate ample connections between freelancers and paid clients.

♦ The bad news is that they have a reputation for including freelancers from countries who work for less than minimum wage.

Overseas outsourcing is a viable alternative for businesses looking to hire various freelance services: but they aren’t the right fit for every business need.

Problems with communication, timely delivery and lack of a real understanding for specific industries has inspired companies to seek U.S., or at least English-speaking, freelance support.

Regardless, using freelance job boards can be approached as an experiment. Put your toes in the water and check the temperature before considering these job boards as a primary media for getting the word out about your services.

Here are a few online freelance job boards to consider:

♦ Elance.com
♦ iFreelance.com
♦ GetAFreelancer.com

Craigslist.com can also be tested out as a source for generating local leads for your services.

Underlying every method noted here is the concept of getting your name and business out to the world, your industry, and your community in as many ways possible.

Stated another way, “Creative Commons” is an organization and a series of specialized licenses that you can associate to your work, for free, to control its distribution.  The licenses boil down to controlling the rights to your intellectual property. However, the “control” is quite different than copyright laws. Creative Commons licenses “do” allow your work to be shared and used by others, but with certain limits (see licenses below).

As stated on their website:

Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The Creative Commons licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”

In essence, you are granting your work to be shared, but you want such work to be properly attributed to you.

NOTE: Creative Commons is “not” copyright, which is a highly restrictive legal control over your work (which, unfortunately, is abused on the Internet).

Further referring to their website:

Creative Commons aspires to cultivate a commons in which people can feel free to reuse not only ideas, but also words, images, and music without asking permission — because permission has already been granted to everyone.

One way to look at using Creative Commons licensing is as a media for promoting your work and your name to others without those individuals needing to contact you. On the one hand, you don’t get paid, but on the other hand, your work may benefit from wider distribution than you might have been able to gain. Used well, the wider exposure might be leveraged into paid applications for other work.

Another way to look at Creative Commons is as a potential opportunity for free advertising for your business, your art, your words, your software, your ideas – your intellectual property.

The following are the six primary Creative Commons licenses:

Atribution

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

Attribution Share Alike

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

Attribution No Derivatives

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution Non-Commercial

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license (see below), but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Check out the graphics and info on A Checklist to Choose Which Internet Marketing Channel is Right for Your Business.

Here is how they describe it:

We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.

I like the look with the large image and the hover-play for video search, as well as the image search display with hover-enlarge feature. I’ll check this out more over time.

The Wave was announced at a developers conference as an open source opportunity for external (non Google) developers to start building applications for it, before it’s made available to the public.

Among other things, it integrates live-share email, instant messaging, blogs and additional social networking features.

Does that phrase for hyper-worked executives and business owners apply to you?

If you are running as hard as possible just to keep up with the demands of daily activity, you are not left with much creative energy to develop and refine new marketing programs to expand your business and profit.

Outsourcing is not only an effective way to pay someone else to handle relatively routine tasks, freeing you up to actually lead and expand your business, but it’s also an effective way to scale up a business as it is becoming more successful.

Outsourcing Examples

Most businesses have experience outsourcing printing, or perhaps bookkeeping, and legal services, for example.  But how about mailing? How about product fulfillment? How about incoming sales calls? Database management? Even customer support can be outsourced to companies that specialize in these services. I’ve taken advantage of all the aforementioned outsourcing opportunities for millions of dollars worth of product sales.

Direct response marketing through direct mail, radio, and/or especially infomercials, is heavily reliant upon outsourcing since the demands for handling orders that can come in over relatively short periods of time require much larger personnel than a company would typically need all year long.

Managing Outsourced Resources

Effective outsourcing is really a matter of responsible management and leadership: Whether it’s you or a trusted executive, someone needs to maintain good communication and oversight of these resources.

As part of integrating outsourced services into your business, you would be wise to to research, investigate and test various services on a smaller scale, before committing a large marketing or production campaign though a series of outsourced support services.

When it’s also working well, it’s a great business model!

On the other hand, when things are not going well, for example, while a series of small scale marketing tests are proving unprofitable, at least you don’t have a large staff to keep busy while developing the next successful promotion. With outsourced services, you only pay for what you need. (Although the cost per item typically goes down with larger volume of service).

Outsource Domestically or Overseas?

A topic that will surely come up when you consider outsourcing is whether to go overseas, or to outsource domestically. Manufacturing, customer support and software development are a few of the international services that come to mind for cost-saving considerations.

Personally, I prefer to outsource as near to my office as possible to enable regular meetings for oversight, refinement and/or problem solving.

On the other hand, if you wish to outsource product fulfillment, as an example, and you are anticipating large orders, there are advantages to using top-tier fulfillment companies, which tend to be located on either coast, or in the middle of the country, for shipping advantages.

13 Potential Outsourcing Areas:

1. Incoming calls and emails
2. Customer service
3. Bookkeeping/Accounting
4. Article submissions, social media activities and website updates
5. Lead Generation
6. Legal services
7. Copywriting and ad creation
8. Office management/administration
9. Contact and prospect follow-up
10. Computer, network, and database administration
11. Manufacturing
12. Product fulfillment
13. Software development

Outsourcing Risks

I’m an advocate for outsourcing, but it is not without its risks. Your particularly needs will dictate how well outsourcing will benefit your business. For example, if your customer service communications require complex knowledge of a product/service, you may be better off hiring and training your own staff.

If more than half of your incoming calls could be answered by a service that is trained on the most common questions/answers, such a service could be used to handle calls more efficiently while forwarding calls or emails that require more specialized handling.  But in that process, some calls may not be handled well.

Some managers are quite content to work with overseas software developers and others would rather work with someone they can meet with face to face.

Security of data and proprietary information is a concern for any business but may be a much more sensitive issue for others. In which case, this will be a determining factor of not only which companies to consider for outsourcing, but may preclude outsourcing at all.

In short, for many businesses, outsourcing is a way to increase productivity, while maintaining a smaller staff than might be otherwise required for your company’s volume of sales. For some businesses, outsourcing may be all that separates their bottom line from being in the red or the black.

Google Alerts will do just that.

Some other uses for Google Alerts include:

• Keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams
• Monitoring a developing news story
• Keeping current on a competitor or industry

Google Alerts are available in plain text emails as well as HTML messages. In October 2008 Google also made alerts available as RSS feeds.

It’s simple to use, easy to sign up for, and free.

http://www.google.com/alerts

Entering your name and email below and clicking “submit” is forbidden, dangerous and would have legal repercussions.

The intelligence that you would be exposed to could lead to lawsuits against your business for unfair business advantages.

Furthermore, even if you successfully avoid local prosecution, you will eventually be sued by national government agencies around the world for monopolistic practices after having achieved domination in your business.

But in my discussions with clients and potential clients who are interested in making money online and/or are very frustrated about NOT making money online (in spite of their honest efforts), I have observed that some folks have adopted a notion that it’s all supposed to be so easy and fast.

Most people seem to have no difficulty embracing the concept that starting a traditional (non-internet) business requires a lot of hard work. Why might they think differently regarding an online business?

My opinion is that the widely available “get rich quick” educational courses that comprise the “Internet Marketing Information Business” have fostered an unreal expectation among otherwise intelligent folks. The marketing and selling of information products about Internet marketing is a massive industry with huge profit margins. The ugly truth is that the primary purchasers of this information – newcomers to the world of marketing in general – are simply making the sellers rich. In other words, it’s a perverse reversal of outward appearance.

People who know nothing about marketing are spending thousands of dollars on courses to make the sellers of the information wealthy. And then the buyers, who were enticed by how easily they would be able to get rich, are then confronted with the daunting task of consuming, deciphering and mostly applying the information.

NOTE: I am not saying that the information, per se, is bad or evil. I’ve been in the marketing technology industry since the mid 90′s and I consume quite a bit of this information on an ongoing basis. In spite of all my experience, I’m continually learning more (which keeps the industry exciting and challenging). To emphasize the point, I’m a huge advocate of increasing one’s knowledge through education and training.

What I decry is the circus-like atmosphere that has integrated itself within the marketing profession, founded upon a promotion of the notion that “ANYONE can get rich on the Internet if they buy my course!”

The Internet and the many related marketing technologies are simply new media channels. The principles of marketing, and for that matter, any business at all – providing a good product or service for a price that others will pay – have not changed.

In some regards, the use if Internet marketing technologies has made things more complex, since there are more new things to learn and since most any kind of business CAN benefit from applying Internet marketing principles.

Just as at any other point in history, marketing is a primary driver of business and profit. That has always been the case, and it’s just as true today as it has always been.

What has been distorted is that a whole body of Internet marketing technology, which does require some specialized knowledge, has been promoted as something that is as easy as eating apple pie.

The good news is, that the barrier to entry to starting an online business is low. But to succeed, one still needs to invest a considerable amount of sweat equity (time, study, trial and error) as one would in any other business.

More good news is that for anyone who already has an off-line business, learning more about leveraging Internet marketing technologies to increase your earnings can be very fruitful. But even so, it’s not automatic. There’s a learning process that one would need to evolve through.

Conversely, you can also hire someone else to help you, or to do the work for you.

In conclusion, I urge anyone interested in the subject of Internet marketing to study, and especially, to apply the principles that they are learning. But if you do so with the notion of instant success and overnight riches with very little effort, you are merely perverting the intrinsic value of what’s in front of you.