Marketing Insights

Over the course of 4 years now I’ve identified a few excellent sources of information on online (and offline) marketing.

All the folks I recommend I’ve signed up with and experienced first-hand. These are all great programs with solid information.

CAVEAT: There is SO much hyperbole and snake oil on the net when it comes to building the web-based part of your business and marketing yourself online in general. It’s really hard to know who to trust and who’s just pulling your wallet.

I have spent a lot of time reviewing and buying some reports and programs that really didn’t help, or were pretty weak on useful information. The “Internet gold rush” seems to be motivating some folks to take questionable, or outdated and ineffective information and re-package it (poor writing included) with the wild hope that they will sell enough of it to get rich overnight with no effort at all.

The process of building and promoting a truly successful web site is essentially very simple. There are four key steps which any course you purchase should include:

• Keyword and market research
• Building your site structure correctly
• Optimizing your site for social and search engine traffic
• Adding great content on a regular basis

The following programs are very mainstream and teach all the basics mentioned above. In many cases this will be more than you need to be successful. They also come with excellent guarantees and no snake oil.

Getting Started with the Basics

My very first course explained everything in depth and covered all the basics. That was Derek Gehl’s Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet. I still like the program a lot as it’s much cheaper than many of these types of courses (some of which sell for $2000 – $10,000) yet it includes pretty much everything the more expensive ones do and it’s better organized. Of course it took me 4 years and $1000s spent on other products for me to figure this out.

My only beef with them is that they have a hell of a lot of loud hyperbole on their sales page which I think hurts their message a bit. The product itself is a solid, well written training course and worth many times over the $200 or so that they charge for it.

It consists of a couple workbooks with 64 lessons (2007 edition, the 2009 may have more) taking you all the way from brainstorming to optimizing and monetizing your site. All you need is this course. Ignore the offers for SEO training, etc. You will do amazingly well with this and the SEO guide I recommend below.

Search Engine Optimization

For in-depth training in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I was recommending the excellent program by Aaron Wall over at seobook.com, but that program has been closed for some time.

Alternatively, a much less expensive and still very in-depth option is to pick up a copy of Jerry West’s excellent Google Best Practices SEO training guide. Print it out, sit down, and start taking notes because there’s a LOT of info here and you’ll want to start applying his ideas to your site immediately. This will be the best $47 you could possibly spend on an SEO training course. Ignore the others until you master this one.

Finding Out What People Want—AKA, Market Research

A critical component of your online success is discovering what everyone is looking for online. Are they searching for your service, or product? Are there any other sites competing with you and offering the same thing?

There are some great programs that will teach you how to research your topic and see who’s looking for what you have to offer and how to basically see if your ideas are good or a waste of time. I’ll eventually add some recommendations here, but for the moment, you can learn a heck of a lot by simply using the Google Keyword Tool [free].

Email Management

When you’re ready to start your newsletter and/or autoresponder system,  you have quite a few choices.

So far I have used Aweber extensively for managing email lists and I’m very happy with them. Aweber has a lot of free training and instruction and they are adding improvements on a regular basis.

Aweber Email List Management