Protactix

Just a preview of what will be coming as I continue to relate my experience in developing useful internet marketing assistance. Here are some great sources to review….

25 SEO Experts to Follow on Twitter

- Management; Todd Mintz — E-Kleck-Tik SEO / PPC / SEM / Internet Marketer; Stoney deGeyter — All-around nice guy. Dave Snyder — Co-Founder of Search and Social and IMBroadcast.com; Page One Results — Internet Marketing Consultant Since

Tynico Montgomery

- Indeed; you are missing out if you are skeptical of this new form of marketing. Online marketing and promotion is used by shrewd entrepreneurs who want to reach the millions of internet users across the world. The internet has made it …

Tony Robbins’ stamp of approval :: TonyZayas.com

- Secondly, this is mainstream validation for the skeptics that Internet marketing is something that ALL business owners intent on having success from this point forward (even if you’re already successful)

What is Internet Marketing? – Alun Hill .com

- Still Internet marketing has gotten a raw deal. If you mention to any group of professionals that you’re an Internet Marketer and that you work full time on the Internet… you will receive some very skeptical looks and more than one

Washington DC Internet Marketing

More »

By the way, I’m writing these posts a bit after the fact. The blog starts telling the story from the beginning so that it makes some sense, but the point is that as I am writing this, I’ve come along way towards know what in the dickens I’m doing with internet marketing.

If you see something that resonates with you as you read this blog, don’t hesitate to reply or make some comment.

I’ve gotten far enough down the road that I can help out and I’m glad to do it.

I started the blog because many of the brick and mortar or offline business owners I know found out that I knew something about increasing a business’s sales by using the internet and I started getting questions.

Typical situation number one: the business had spent money on a website and the web site had no meaningful impact on the success of the business. Of course, if money is spent on a website and the website just sits there, any money spent is a lot of money, but for some of these small businesses, thousands had been spent, and some of the web sites looked very good, but a good looking web site that brings in no sales pleasing only to the web designer.

If you’re like me, if it’s a choice of looks or sales, I’ll take sales.

Typical situation number two: the business had “always” advertised in the paper or on the radio or spent a bunch of money on yellow page ads. Over the years, the returns on these advertising mediums had been good enough or even very good. But, recently (which means a different period of time for different businesses), say maybe over the last three or four years, the productivity of traditional advertising had been decreasing.

As you might expect, the problem as analyzed by the traditional advertising mediums was that the business was not spending enough. The sales people told the business operator that the ad spend was just not keeping up.

Most of the business operators in this situation had no website, and frankly thought (like I did originally) that the web was either not effective or not appropriate for their business.

So the word got out that I was some sort of an internet guru (not true, at least not yet), but what is true was that I knew a whole lot more than most, and what I did know was helpful.

More »

Internet Marketing to me was all about wild health claims and instant diet pills.

The regular news media presented (and still does in many cases) the internet and particularly internet marketing as a wild west sort of traveling medicine show where crazy money making schemes lived next to products that didn’t work beyond the credit card charge back period.

It never occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons the off line new media presented such a negative view of internet marketing was that internet marketing was (and is) not only a direct competitor of the offline news but is constantly chipping away at offline media revenues.

Of course, that’s not to say that offline media is biased or would ever present anything but an objective viewpoint, but it does make me wonder.

If I’m challenged by something I don’t understand or if someone tells me I don’t understand something or I’m told I’m wrong about something, my response is to learn how to do it.

For example, I didn’t get a chance to fly on an airplane until I was a teenager. Growing up in the 50s, when flying was much more dangerous than it is now, I was all too aware of plane crashes. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bobber all died in one crash in 1959.

After I got out of school, I realized that flying was necessary for business in the 70s, but I was still terrified of flying.

The cure? Learn how to fly. I did learn how to fly and went on to get my license for not only regular planes, but also multi engined planes and I learned how to fly on instruments.

Eventually I even flew aerobatic airplanes and turbo props.

Same thing about the water. Answer? I learned how to sail and learned how to pilot power boats. At one point I ferried a small (22 foot) open boat from Florida to the Bahamas (using only a map and compass- no loran or GPS in those days).

What this has to do with internet marketing is that I resolved that I would have to learn about internet marketing, before I dismissed it as a viable marketing vehicle.

More »

I got a new assignment to run a company that had been in business over twenty years. In that twenty years, management had added not one, zero, no – new customers except customers that had been referred by a sister company.

This company’s market was not only nationwide, it was world wide, and the budget allowed for no salespeople besides me.

Begin to cold call? Who? Where?

And if you do cold call, who runs operations while you are cold calling?

As luck would have it ( and I mean luck ) I ran across an old friend and former business associate who had been very successful in our former business.

Both of us had gone separate business directions, and as often is the case with business associates, once the business meetings are over the personal relationship drifts. We stayed in touch, but we talked personal stuff, not business.

In setting up for the new assignment, which was near my friends home, I ran into him and we did the usual “what are you doing now?” He told me a bit about his current business, which included a slice of internet marketing.

I listened to what he was doing but virtually instantly ignored the mention of internet marketing.

It simply did not register with me. I ignored it.

Looking back, I know why.

More »