FREE 5 Day Marketing Course
Day 1 - The Basics

Welcome to your first day of instruction.
You may be new to the net or you may be
a seasoned Internet Marketer trying to
learn a few new tricks. Either way, this
course will have something for you.

Let us say at the outset that this course
is by no means all inclusive. We will give
you some great information here, but it is
just enough to get you started. Internet
Marketing is tough business and should
never be taken lightly. A persistent
approach is needed, and you should always
be open to new ideas.

The Internet is still a very new medium
and no one really has all the answers. An
"expert" in this field is one who has done
a lot of testing and can speak intelligently
about what has worked for them and what
has not. Anyone who tells you otherwise
is not being completely honest.

Good marketers know that the bottom line
is *testing*. Advice offered may or may
not work for your site. You absolutely
*must* test it to see if it works for you
or not.

What we mention here are some of the classic
methods of advertising on the Internet and
will require some work on your part before
you will be able to get them to work.

This is a *shallow* look at the whole
picture without question. However, throughout
the course, we will tell you where to
go for a deeper look and where to get
important resources and tools that will
help you along the way.

Online Marketing can be extremely lucrative
if done properly, but can be a colossal
waste of time if handled poorly. Use
caution and take this very seriously.

With that said, let's get started with the
first lesson!

This first lesson will cover some theoretical
principles you must understand. This
information should be well absorbed before
we attack the practical stuff.

There are two primary tasks every Internet
Marketer must complete:

a) Attention.

Before anything else must happen, you need
to get the attention of the web surfer. This
is not an easy task as his attention span
is short and there are millions of others
out there competing for his attention as well.

b) Action.

Once you have the attention of the websurfer,
you need to entice him to act. Of course,
there are a great many "acts" he must do
before reaching your final goal, but you
need to guide him each step of the way or
he will be gone.

If you focus on these two steps at all times
and have a clear intention in mind of which
steps you want him to take, you will do
very well.

Of course, it's not as simple as that... Before
we go any further, though, let's look at some
of the basic principles upon which Internet
Marketing is based:

a) Utility is the bottom line.

If it works, it works. Do what works. If you
have been doing something that works and most
people advise against it, they are wrong. By
the same token, if you get some great expert
advice and it is not working for you, you
need to change your tactics.
 

b) The average web surfer is more interested in
information than in widgets.

That is, most people do not go to the web to
buy products, they go there to find information
or for entertainment. This is not to say
that people do not go online with the intent
to buy. They most certainly do. However,
I'm sure you'll find from your own personal
experience that you spend far more time
online browsing and searching than you do
product hunting. Everyone is targeting the
one ready to buy. Your time is better spent
making good solid relationships with the
casual surfer and *telling* them to buy,
not waiting for them to seek you out.
 

c) Every campaign must be tailored.

What works for one site may not work for
another.
 

d) Marketing is not an exacting science.

It is quite difficult to tell which
techniques are working and which are not.
You can analyze your server logs and see
where hits are coming from, but you can
never know exactly what causes an increase
or decrease in traffic. For instance, if you
place an ad at site X and you get a bunch of
hits from site X, you can not be guaranteed
that the same ad at site Y or another ad at
site X will be effective. All you know is
that particular ad worked at that time at
that place. From there you can make educated
inferences. That is not to say you should
just give up on trying to figure out why
things are happening. *Absolutely not!*
You should spend as much time analyzing and
testing your campaigns as possible. However,
you need to be sure to take what you learn
with a grain of salt. The net changes faster
than you can imagine. What works right now
may not work tomorrow. You need to be
aware of this and keep your marketing approach
fluid.
 

e) Do no harm!

The golden rule of medicine should be heeded
by you as well. Don't start any aspect of
your campaign hastily. Remember that you are
not just trying to get people to buy your
product but you are also building an image.
People will buy what they think is good,
regardless of how good it really is. If they
think a product is shoddy, they will not buy
it even if it is the best thing since sliced
bread. When you start a particular phase of
your campaign, ask yourself: "What image is
this creating for me and my products?"

f) Don't be afraid to take risks or be
unconventional.

This may seem to contradict the above rule.
Well, it does, but it is valid as well. The
greatest minds of history have always gone
against convention and done things that they
knew were right. The Internet is changing
so rapidly that innovation is not just
a nice thing but a *requirement*. The
market is absolutely huge. *Global* in
dimension to state the obvious. Conversely,
so is the competition!

Can you strike a balance between these
last two rules?

In the next few lessons we'll dive right
into some practical things you can do to
promote your website *right now*. Print out
this course and save it in a file somewhere
for review. These concepts will give you
a leading edge later on down the road. I
wish I had realized them years ago. They
would have saved me hours of wasted time.

Since you're fired up to learn more *now* and
you don't want to wait for tomorrow's
installment, check out
The New Webmasters Internet Business Disc

http://members.tripod.com/~jmfishman3/index-2.html

This is my complete resources, which provides
a distillation of my many years of Internet
market testing. You'll learn fool-proof
formulas for marketing any product.