Let us assume that you have this dream of Make Money Online. And you would love to have a little piece of that huge pie that is 6 trillion dollars worth of sales yearly and growing. Before you can start working on this business opportunity you have to go through some learning phases.
Wikipedia defines marketing as:
The activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product, service, or good.
Now we know that let us look at it in a very basic manner The most simple and high-level description of Marketing can be explained by this simple model:
So it happens in the interaction of two parts of the connection. That means we need both sides to resonate to get the desired result. To elaborate on that a bit more, if the potential customer has no need for the offer then the sales will not happen unless the salesperson can persuade the customer that he does not see the benefits (yet). Or the salesperson offers something else that is more in line with the need. That is just a demonstration of how marketing and sales work in the traditional physical world. Where marketing focuses on conditioning and creating desire and need and demonstrating what benefits the buyer can expect when he takes the offer. We all know how this works for cola and cigarette advertising. And advertising is still the only way to get people in the position that they will consider buying from you.
The basics still apply to Internet Marketing with one exception, in most cases, there is no life salesperson to persuade the consumer to buy the offer. Only when there is pre-sales communication through email, telephone, or chat. But the majority of sales are purely system-based and automated. Let us see what there is more to Make Money Online (MMO).
The Marketing & Sales Processes In Internet Marketing
In internet marketing we use a few terms that were not common in traditional marketing in the world of brick&mortar; stores and shops:
- Traffic – potential customers/visitors of your offer page(s)
- Cold traffic – people that do not know you nor know what you offer
- Warm traffic – people that are expected to know you and have an idea of what you offer
- Leads – potential customers that have expressed an interest in what you offer
- Buyers – leads that made a sale
Advertisement platforms showing your offer(s):
- search engines like Google, Bing, and Youtube (organic and paid)
- social media platforms (FB, Instagram, Pinterest, etc, mostly paid)
- sales platforms like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, etc. (fee charge for sales)
The way to get people in front of your offer (to reach as many “eyeballs” as possible)on the internet differs from the old physical world. I illustrate that with the following examples.
The traditional way
The potential customer needs a product and more or less knows where to look for it. The supermarket, the superstore, the hardware store, apparel stores, etc. If the potential customer will turn into a buyer is in the hands of the salesperson(s).
One on one interaction.
The internet way
- Search on Amazon or WallMart (most comparable with the traditional superstores)
- Search on Google and Microsoft Bing and -Yahoo (possibilities to buy are shown based on the search term)
- Click on an advertisement on social media like FB, Instagram, and the likes (almost always cold traffic)
Amazon gives an excellent overview of different offers of the same product. Especially for buyers that are keen to get the cheapest price for a product a fantastic way to purchase.
Search Engines are a good option for sellers because the customer is searching for the product or information by using a search word or keyphrase. So the searcher is probably in the mood to buy. If the seller has an offer that matches the search term(s) then there is a high chance the searcher will buy. There is less opportunity to find the best cheapest seller which is good for the seller.
Regarding Facebook and other social media, the seller relies on the willingness of the FB visitor to stop scrolling (the advertiser needs a good “scroll stopper”). The scroller person might start to read/watch the advertisement of the seller (showing engagement) and might go even one step further and click click the link presented in the advertisement.
The landing page that will receive the customer after clicking must do the majority of the sales work. Convincing the customer/consumer to click the add-to-cart button and ultimately pay for the product so that it can be shipped to him/her. Sometimes a sale needs more steps to go through before the customer takes the buy decision. In that case, we talk about a sales funnel.
So far we explained the process that is resulting in sales if well built. But it is not only the process itself that helps in this respect. The takeaway of this section is that we must match the “need and the offer” in order to have a chance to be successful.
Products And Services
Selling physical products through the internet is mostly defined as eCommerce.
If you are the developer and owner of a physical product you can sell your products through any of the methods mentioned before. You can create your own webshop or you can list your products on mega shopping platforms like Amazon, Walmart, or eBay. The advantage is, the marketing is done for you. Amazon collects visitors as a beehive collects bees. The disadvantage is that you have to invest in product development, product manufacturing, and stock. And you are prone to excessive competition (in many cases there are numerous sellers of more or less the same products.
This does not mean that you cannot sell physical products if you do not own any. The dropshipping business model allows internet marketers to sell products they do not own, but that they buy once they have a sale for that product. The advantage is none of the disadvantages of the product owner model, but the disadvantage is the higher marketing costs.
Comparing traditional and internet marketing can easily lead to the conclusion that the only difference is the way we market the offers. Nothing is less true than this. The Internet created a whole new set of marketing & sales opportunities that have even more benefits than the world of physical products.
More than 65% of all Internet sales are for digital products:
- E-books
- courses
- coaching and education
- webinar training
- entertainment (games, casinos. video on demand e.a.)
- SAAS (software-as-a-service/cloud-based software).
This created a whole new set of opportunities for Internet marketers. You can create and sell these digital products yourself or you find buyers for these products developed by other sellers. The latter is called Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is not limited to digital products. Many sellers of physical products have Affiliate Programs running, but the margins on these products are not as high as for digital products. It is obvious why that is. The production/duplication of digital copies of a product does not cost anything. Of course, the seller has organization- and infrastructure costs that have to be covered from the sales, but that is a much smaller portion of the product costs than the seller has with physical products.
The concept of Internet Marketing
We can draw a generic model of the concept of internet marketing based on the basic model that I sowed in the beginning of this post.
Extension of the basic model leads to adding the creation of the product:
Although Internet Marketing focuses on the process to persuade the customer to buy the product, the other part, the logistic side of things can not be ignored. The reason for that is that the sale is a promise that has to be fulfilled. Setting up a business on the internet comprises the organization of fulfillment, aka the logistic process after the sale is concluded.
It is possible to minimize the effort of setting up an internet business by focussing on turning potential customers into leads and leave the rest of the business to the sales and fulfillment organization. This is the principle of the earlier mentioned Affiliate Marketing.
Next article with dive into the different ways to promote and advertise within the concept of Internet Marketing
The conclusion
There are many ways to make money online.
- eCommerce (selling physical products that one owns or that are purchased in bulk and stocked)
- eCommerce dropshipping (selling physical products to customers, manufactured/owned and stocked by third parties)
- eCommerce affiliate marketing (bringing leads that might buy to physical product sellers)
- selling digital products that one owns
- selling digital products created by third parties (affiliate marketing, bringing leads to those third parties)
- selling webinars or online training and courses
- selling software as a service (SAAS)
- selling mobile apps
The first step after the phase of awareness and overview is getting more insight on what business model to choose from. Weighing the pros and the cons and then go for it. Besides the structuring of the internet marketing and sales and the organization of the fulfillment and supply chain, there is a lot more to put in place but that is for another article.
It took me about 4 years to understand about 80% of this internet marketing space and even then it is just the global level. To assemble the business machine you need to become successful you need to dive in very detailed and sometimes technical aspects of the building blocks.
To answer the question in the title about the easiest way to make money only I dare to say that none of the business models is easy in the sense that one can earn a huge revenue without major input.
If you translate “easy” to “fastest” then in my experience the Affiliate Marketing model is the easiest to start with. There are different ways to exploit that business model and I will elaborate on this in the article, “How to set up an Affiliate Marketing Business from scratch”.