The Three Laws of Internet Marketing
During my Internet marketing experiences, I have developed a few laws of Internet marketing
that will help you maximize your success. Lets look at these laws now.
The First Law: Keep It Appropriate
You must be careful to provide/distribute information over the Internet only to those who
have expressed an interest in receiving such information. For example, anyone who takes the
time to find, join, and participate in a newsgroup on a particular topic is an excellent prospect
for selling products and services related to that same topic. If you make your product or
service known to the newsgroup subscribers (without breaking the rules of Netiquette), you
can increase your sales. However, you will alienate any newsgroup readers by posting
information that is not in keeping with the topic of the newsgroup.
You must also remember that what you think is appropriate and what the newsgroup as a
whole thinks is appropriate may be completely different. I will use the example of the
newsgroup devoted to the pop music satirist Weird Al Yankovic. One might think that posting
of files that related to similar music products by similar artists would be totally appropriate,
but the newsgroup subscribers may only want to deal with Weird Al records and lyrics here.
In that case, you might alienate the Weird Al fans (many of whom might be interested in your
products), simply because they see you as inappropriately interfering with their
communications with irrelevant information. Stay exactly on target with your Internet
marketing efforts. Give them the information they want, and tie that to your product.
The Second Law: Use All the Internet Services You Can
To get the maximum bang for your Internet marketing buck, see that your marketing message
is distributed in as many ways as possible, to as many interested Internet users as possible, as
often as possible.
At present you might start with FTP and Gopher. However, the World Wide Web is the
fastest-growing method of transport. We dont know exactly what that means in terms of
numbers because WWW is newer than the other Internet distribution methods. We can,
however, tell you that as of this writing, some sites on the World Wide Web were getting over
100,000 hits (visits by browsers) per day. Some were getting into the millions of hits over a
period of a few days. One place announced they got 1 million hits per day! If the numbers
continue to increase, as they most probably will, you can see why the World Wide Web and
the Internet are already getting so much publicity. It is my prediction that sometime in 1995,
the numbers of people visiting a few of the most popular sites on the Internet will exceed most
prime-time TV shows viewer reach on a daily basis.
At present many people still use Gopher, FTP, or BBS gateways or the online services.
Therefore, you must hedge your bet and reach the largest possible number of Internauts by
providing them with their favorite method of getting your information, whatever method that
may be. Each area of the Internet reaches large numbers of people. You ignore any of them at
your own peril.
The Third Law: Keep Your Contributions Full of Real Information
The information you distribute online (sometimes called your postings, articles, etc.) to
market your products can be as short as one or two sentences or as long as a multimedia
presentation. As long as it contains real information of value to the readership, not just
promotion of your product or service, you will be generally accepted everywhere on the
Internet. If someone objects, you can always come back with, Hey, its the information
superhighway! Im merely providing information for the Internet users. Anyone with any sense
would have to accept that statement if true. You have to use your own judgment as to
whether or not this rule is true in each instance. Use your imagination, but keep it relevant.
If you want to market effectively on the Internet, you will have to produce as many
contributions as you can. Then, you also need to help people find them. Most important, your
articles must contain some information that is useful to somebody. If you are simply and
blatantly marketing your products without offering any other information of value, your
contributions will not be read by enough people to get you any real market exposure.
The way to put some information content into your articles is to think creatively. You
could create a weather report for the nation and plug your company as the sponsor at the
bottom, the way they do it on TV. A sports report would do the same thing. If too many of us
are producing weather reports or sports reports, they will all begin to compete with one
another and dilute each ones effectiveness. Therefore, you will have to think up new ways of
giving information to the reader so that your information will be accepted and read by a large
number of people. This gives you the exposure that you need. Be original.
An example might be to create a comic strip that relates to life in the 1990s or a TV critic
cartoon that pokes fun at the TV shows. These are two examples of general consumer
information. Many times, however, you will want to appeal to a specific target audience who
are your customers. Stock quotes are a good example of this specific information approach.
Even though most people do not dabble in the stock market, perhaps your target audience
does. If you are a stockbroker or have any financial service to sell, this might work best for
you. If you are a car dealer, you might reproduce (with permission) a consumer report about
models of cars in your class, if its favorable to your car. If not, you might produce something
that compares the mileage statistics of all popular carsagain, if its favorable to your car.
The reason you need information in your promotional pieces is that Internet viewers have
a remote control device in front of them all the timethe mouse (or the trackball or some other
pointing device). The instant they determine there is nothing in it for them, they will use this
device to quickly discard your contribution and will move on to other points of interest on the
Internet. Time is critical to most Internauts because they are paying an average of $5 per
hour.
The reason we know this is because of what we know happens when pictures are
presented on the World Wide Web. If the picture is too large and detailed, the file size makes
the picture transfer across the phone lines at a pace that may take as long as two minutes.
Nobody is going to sit there waiting for your picture to transfer across the phone lines. What
people do is cancel the view and move on to somebody elses information. This is shown by
countless studies and statistics on the Internet and is the one major rule we can count on. We
will refer to this fact of life by telling you throughout this book how to avoid problems with
files that are too large and take too long to get to the viewer.
I only mention it here to explain why your contribution has to contain useful information. If
it does not, people will skip over it, and the effectiveness of the contribution is lost. Another
factor to consider is that many people on the Net are charged by the amount of time they
spend there. Therefore, they may actually get angry with you for thrusting your presence in
front of them and costing them money. This can backfire on you. However, if you have real
information, even though they may not need that information or care about that information,
users are forgiving enough to realize that this is part of the information superhighway, and with
this approach you will not receive too much negative energy.
