Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Marketing Your Way to e-Riches
This book is about attracting more customers online so that you can make more money. It covers what you can do, how to do it, and, more importantly, what you should be doing to find your own e-riches.
Whether your business is Web-based or brick-and-mortar, and whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, a partner in a small company, or working in marketing for a multinational corporation, there are new tools online that can help you do your job better, sell more product a and make more money.
If you read my first book, Internet Riches, or subscribe to my free
E-Commerce Success email newsletters at ScottFox.com, you know that I’m a successful online entrepreneur myself. So my focus in this book is on teaching you how to grow your audience using free and low-cost techniques. These include social networking on Facebook,
MySpace, and LinkedIn, blogs, e-mail publishing, viral video promotions a and updates to traditional techniques like word-of-mouth marketing and public relations, plus more technical disciplines like
RSS, autoresponders, microblogs like Twitter, podcasting through
iTunes, and more.
If you read e-Riches 2.0, you’ll learn the basics of building your audience using all of these new marketing tools plus smart tips on search engine keyword advertising and affiliate programs, too. (These last two are actually paid advertising strategies, but they are so cost-effective and different from traditional marketing techniques that I want to introduce you to them, too.)
This material is not just me talking, nor is it full of vague theories.
e-Riches 2.0 is full of practical details from my personal experience a plus dozens of profiles, case studies, interviews, references, and studies from other real-world experts and real people who are using these new tools successfully. Their success is not just theory but actual (profitable) fact that I want to share with you.
Reading e-Riches 2.0 will make you a smarter, more modern marketer.
This includes becoming clever enough with Web 2.0 online marketing tools to:
• Successfully “do it yourself” in the new world of online marketing
• Save a lot of money by learning many of the complex-sounding techniques that high-priced consultants will try to charge you for
• Impress your techie friends, colleagues, and boss
• Become a better manager of marketing campaigns and employees
• Learn to be a smarter client if you choose to hire consultants
• Advance your career by leading the most successful new marketing campaigns for your company’s products
All of these will help both your career and your wallet.
The Online Opportunity for You
I know you want practical guidance. I wrote my book Internet Riches
because I was fed up with best sellers that offer only vague strategies for “attracting abundance” as substitutes for a real action plan.
Internet Riches taught people how to start their own e-businesses based on their personal expertise and interests.
Now I’m back with e-Riches 2.0. This book takes the same practical a detailed approach. I’ve again researched, evaluated, tested a studied, and analyzed all the new marketing tools that I could find online for you. In the space we have available here, I’m going to give you information on the best strategies I have found, plus tools you can use to evaluate and prioritize them depending on your needs and business interests. (And the education continues online at Scott
Fox.com, where updates to this book and a worldwide community of fellow marketers and entrepreneurs is available to you 24/7.)
Despite constant media coverage of bad economic news, the
Internet Gold Rush is still happening today. Never before in history have you been able to reach so many people so quickly, so easily, and so cost-effectively. So, my question for you is:
What are you doing to profit from the Internet Gold Rush?
There are now more than 1.5 billion people online. That means that no matter how obscure your product or how targeted your pitch, it’s likely that there are people on theWeb right now who want your product.
The trick is for you to reach them cost-effectively. You need to let these potential customers know that your product is the solution to their problems. That’s the purpose of marketing and your job as a marketer.
All the new tools available online may sound overwhelming, especially if you are new to the online world, but thesemarketing techniques are known and knowable. I have detailed in this book a set of specific, tactical steps for attracting the recurring traffic that your business deserves.
I’ve even summarized my recommended online marketing philosophies into 9 Commandments for e-Riches Marketing Success and also created a Top 10 List of Online Marketing Success Tips to help you (see Chapter 1). If you follow these steps, you will increase your marketing reach online and learn to make more money.
For additional coverage and updates to these topics, please visit
ScottFox.com. Your purchase of this book entitles you to a free trial membership in my online coaching community. (See the front of the book for more details on this Special Offer.)
The Four Audiences for e-Riches 2.0
A key factor for success is a desire to be outstanding at Marketing. It does not
matter how great your entrepreneurial idea is, you have to be able to convert
it to sales. That’s why marketing is such a vital skill.
—Chris Cardell, Cardell Media
You should read this book if you are:
1. A corporate marketer or agency employee. Your employer needs your expertise in order to compete. If your marketing campaigns are not attracting new customers daily, you will soon lose your job to someone who “gets it” better than you do.
2. A small business owner or partner. For the first time in history a small businesses like yours can compete with the “big boys” worldwide.
But being good at marketing is a key entrepreneurial success factor that entrepreneurs often overlook. It’s naïve to think that just having good ideas and working hard to produce great products will lead to sales success. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that you can find success with a product or service without being committed to spending a significant amount of your time promoting it. Who else is going to do it?
The huge Internet audience offers tremendous upside if your business can get your product marketing messages out to the right people. This book teaches you how to use inexpensive online marketing tools to do that.
3. E-business curious. You may not be a marketer, but you are smart to be curious about the opportunities and challenges offered by the
Web 2.0 world.Maybe this is because you want to help your colleagues in other parts of the company (or maybe it’s because you have one foot out the door of your current job and you want some advice on how to grow your after-hours hobby into a business online!).
Either way, this book will introduce you to online marketing in plain English, plus give you a strategic framework that will allow you to better analyze and understand the importance of new media marketing techniques, both to your own life as a consumer and to your career.
4. Worried about your financial future. Globalization, uncertain financial markets, technology, and our friend the Internet are combining to restructure the economy to eliminate the long-term security formerly offered by corporate jobs. If you are unemployed a under-employed, unhappily fully employed, or simply looking to upgrade your professional skills, this book can help you retrain yourself for the opportunities of today’s “information age” economy.
Internet Marketing Is Your Future
If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
— General Eric Shinseki, Secretary of Veterans Affairs,
former Chief of Staff, U.S. Army
You need to learn to love the Internet!Why? Because it’s cheaper and has wider reach than ever before, and because everyone—yes, everyone—
is coming online.
Even if you don’t see it at the moment, the Web and e-mail are extending further into your life all the time. Mobile browsers bring
Google into people’s pockets; BlackBerries bring e-mail into the middle of dinner. Tools like RSS feeds and Twitter bring constant updates from people you may barely know.
Just think ten or even five years forward: The screens in your living room will continue to grow, as will those on your desk. In fact a you’ll probably have two or more screens soon. Your gadgets will get faster and more powerful so that they combine phone, e-mail,
Web browsing, iPod, camera, full streaming video capabilities, and so on all the time everywhere. Soon all this will arrive in your car, on long-haul plane flights, and in your kids’ classrooms and pockets, too.
This means opportunity for smart marketers who embrace the new platforms and the unique ways in which they can extend brands and messages into people’s lives.
The increasingly targeted marketing messages of today are better than ever at anticipating customers’ interests. And tomorrow’s will be better still. Haven’t you been surprised when Amazon.com suggests a book that you already own and love? Imagine that targeted marketing on steroids and working to promote your business online!
The tremendous, worldwide reach of the Web has also changed the ways in which customers expect to be able to interact with you and your products. You have the opportunity to take advantage of this increase in customer interaction and two-way feedback to enhance your relationships with your audience, differentiate your brand from competitors, and sell a lot more product.
Excerpted from e-Riches: Next-Generation Marketing Strategies for Making Millions Online by Scott Fox. Copyright © 2009 Scott Fedewa. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.
