When you begin in Internet and online marketing you often don’t know where to start. Generally, you will surf the Internet looking for information on online marketing or Internet marketing, and you will run across a guru who will, for a very steep price these days, teach you how to make money in your online venture.
Following the advice of such gurus, you will spend a lot of money on their products and be “encouraged” to buy special products, at a supposed discount, from other “inner-circle” marketers. Your guru will also be available for coaching, but at a high hourly rate.
Is it possible to build a real, legitimate online business on a budget? Yes it is, and business consultant Tom Antion teaches you how.
Antion, a public speaker in addition to a business consultant and the publisher of the Great Speaking ezine, learned Internet marketing the hard way—through much trial and error. At one point he made an association with online marketing legend Corey Rudl, and received an invaluable education. Antion shares his insights in this book.
The book is divided into seven chapters, although the last two are less important than the first five. The five main chapters are organized around Antion’s three-fold method for Internet marketing (a “three-pronged attack”)—website, email lists, and products. Thus, there are chapters on creating a cost-effective website (including traffic generation and order fulfilment—the use of an online shopping cart system), the website sales process, creating and distributing a “kickbutt” ezine, and developing products.
Antion discusses the many ways of generating traffic, from using articles to create backlinks to submitting to search engines to using keyword ads. His main focus is building content. To enable such a focus, he suggests creating an ezine. For me, the chapter on creating ezines was the best chapter in the book. Therein, Antion establishes how to create an ezine, why to create an ezine, and how to get subscribers, including the use of pop-up boxes and exit pop-ups.
Once you have created an ezine, the content becomes material for your website and for others to reprint (which will bring more traffic to your site). This material can become the basis for products you can develop, and Antion presents a very strong chapter on product development. For example, he urges marketers not to stop with ebooks, but to develop physical products, CDs and DVDs, courses, etc. Your content can become a goldmine that you can re-use and re-use in a number of different formats.
If there is one weakness to this book, it is that the book is a merely a crash course for beginners; there are no advanced techniques in it. Yet, that is most likely the author’s target market, and those who are exasperated with the high cost of Internet marketing materials from the gurus will find all the help they need and more from this low-cost book that really does offer “low-cost/high-return tools and techniques that really work.” With beginning marketers in mind, I rate this book 8/10.
Jeremy M. Hoover is an online freelance writer and online business consultant, focusing on marketing writer's work online. If you need content developed for your website, contact Jeremy at his website, http://jhooverwebcopy.com. To find out more about his marketing for writers, visit this webpage -- http://jhooverwebcopy.com/bookmarketing.htm. Read more marketing articles by Jeremy at http://jhooverwebcopy.blogspot.com.
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