Internet Marketing Essentials, Lesson 4: How Internet Marketing Works

From the last lesson, we learned that marketing was essentially the act of solving problems. I spoke of the marketer as, ideally, a “middleman”, someone who brings together people who have a problem with the solution that they are looking for. This is really as simple as it gets; for some reason, people tend to make it more complicated than it’s supposed to be.

Regardless of whether you conduct your marketing online or offline, it’s all the same. You’re still the problem-solving middleman. A marketer who works “offline” tends to work as part of a team. They might be charged with the task of trying to sell a product and finding the group of people who the product is best suited to.

This may involve surveys, giving out free samples and getting people to do short questionnaires. At any rate, it’s time consuming and a lot of it involves the marketers themselves having to go out and collect this data.

The great thing about the Internet is how everything is connected. You can be on different sides of the planet and still be talking to someone who understands what you are trying to do, or who is looking for the exact solution your product offers.

The next best thing about the Internet is that most people use it, at some point at least, to find information. There are numerous ways to do this. One of the most popular is to type your search query into a search engine, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo!.

In other words, information is being virtually force fed into this search engine on a daily basis, every second. This is a marketer’s dream come true; gone are the days where you have to go out and painstakingly collect data. All the data that is needed is right there in front of you, on your computer screen.

Think about it. If someone is typing in the phrase, “how to lose weight”, what do you think that person is after? Information on how to lose weight, of course. Then again, they might be after a diet, an exercise or a liposuction clinic in their local area. Whatever they are after, they will type it in.

Someone who types in, “how to lose weight by skipping rope” has a clearer idea of how he or she wants to lose weight than the first person. If you provide them the means of “how to lose weight by skipping rope”, what do you think you’re doing?

Being a marketer, of course!

In the next module, we’ll talk about how Internet Marketers actually make money with these search queries.

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