John Leavy’s Blog

The old marketing methods are dead. The days of the salesperson being the gatekeeper of the information are long gone. The fond memories of grabbing some out-of-date sales material off the warehouse shelf and stuffing it into an overnight envelope are over.

Today, people are making decisions on their own terms. They do a lot of the investigation over the Internet and move at their own pace.

Relationships need to be built and then information is passed along over time. Push “the sale” too quickly a person may find them self out in the cold.

The days of large marketing budgets with no accountability have ended as well.

So what replaces the old marketing ways? In two words “the internet”. At first, companies moved their marketing methods to the internet in the form of an expensive web platform. They had no clue what decision-making paths were, what needed to be done to move visitors along the sales funnel or how visitor conversions took place. If they did do pay-per-click or search engine optimization the site might have been flooded with visitors but people still did not sign up or purchase their goods. The companies either stopped their paid search campaign or fired their SEO person. Later they restart one or the other and hoped for the best - again.

The purpose of this book is to help identify what’s necessary in creating a strong web front. One will learn what it takes to attract interested visitors to the web site. This book also covers; how to design decision-making paths so visitors move down the sales funnel. Conversion strategies that lead to a strong ROI over the internet are talked about in great detail.

The first part of The Ultimate Guide to Internet Marketing- No Visitors … No Conversions … No Revenue outlines defining web site goals. Writing compelling content, strong calls-to-action and designing decision-making paths are also dealt with. The web site must have a professional look-and-feel and ease of navigation. How to develop a Content Repurpose Strategy is also talked about.

The second portion of The Ultimate Guide to Internet Marketing- Being Found in All the Right Places identifies the many internet watering holes where “ideal” prospects congregate. Places such as; Pay-per-search, natural search, download portals, social sites, eZines, blogs, community sites and webinars.

The almost third portion (2.5) of The Ultimate Guide to Internet Marketingtries to get a beed on the fast moving Social Networking Communties.  

The third section of The Ultimate Guide to Internet Marketing- Generating Leads Closing Business outlines the tools to use when measuring visitor stats on the web site with Google analytics. We’ll want to track visitors to the web site, note how they get there, where they navigate to and how long they stay. Next we’ll want to investigate how to measure the effectiveness of our visibility campaigns across the internet. Last, are our efforts bringing success; are people downloading our offers, are they moving down the sales funnel and are deals being closed? In other words, is there a return for our investment (ROI) from the internet?

The last section of The Ultimate Guide to Internet Marketingdeals with what it takes to set a solid foundation for any internet venture. The topics that are talked about are; trust, commitment & patience, unique selling advantage and customer benefit messaging, creating good benchmark data to check back on what progress is being made, gathering “intel” on the competition and defining marketing goals & expectations.

To help show where the responsibility might lie for a certain tactics The Ultimate Guide to Internet Marketing; created these “people icons” at the right helps show where the responsibility might lie. The business owner is the first image, followed by the marketing person, the web person and the SEO individual. For instance, in the section titled, “Professional Look-and-feel”; the responsibility most likely lies with the marketing person and the web designer.