Emulate
Everything you will ever need to know about internet marketing
is plainly available to you everywhere you go on the internet.
All you need to do is dissect, study, and emulate these methods
and you invariably will become just as successful as the people
who created them.
How do I know this? Because I use this exact pratice to make
money with my own online businesses and newsletters. Whenever I
have a problem, I look to other successful internet marketers
and see how they have overcome these same obstacles I am facing.
Some people will tell you must buy a certain ebook or internet
marketing course to become successful. This is not true.
Informational products do have their merits, but it is important
to understand that a lot of them become out-dated immediately
after publication.
The online marketplace changes very rapidly and the best, most
successful internet marketers change with it. A good
traffic-building tactic one day may be ineffective the next. If
you hinge your entire business plan around this single idea you
read in an ebook, and that idea ends up being outdated, then you
will fail.
I am not trying to say that informational products are not
useful. But I am saying you need to find a real time way of
analyzing and implementing the information you do have. You
cannot purchase internet business success, but you also cannot
have it for free. You must work for it.
If you blindly purchase information and then try to implement
it, you will not succeed.
Take list-based marketing for instance. Sending email to opt-in
subscribers used to be one of the most effective, inexpensive
ways to make quick sales. But in the wake of recent anti-spam
legislation, this same method has become drastically less
profitable. Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and other email client services
have clamped down on business emails in general, blacklisting
all email from some autoresponders and filtering out up to 70%
of legitimate business emails in some cases.
Of course, you wouldn't know any of this from reading 99% of the
marketing information available on the internet. Why? Because
these books became outdated the second congress passed the
CAN-SPAM ACT. These books will still tell you that simply
filling an autoresponder with messages and buying leads will
make you a fortune. This is no longer true.
You can still make just as much money from list marketing now as
you could before, but you just need to solve some marketing
problems first. You cannot continue to use outdated information
that could not possibly take into consideration the current
marketing world.
So how do you deal with these problems? The same way you need to
deal with all eBusiness marketing problems. You operate in REAL
TIME. You dissect, study, and emulate what successful
webmasters, listowners, and netrepreneurs are doing to make
money right now.
There are a number of different ways you can do this--but they
all involve the same three steps: dissect, study, and emulate.
In the remainder of this article, I will explain website reverse
engineering, which is one of the real time methods I use to
improve my marketing efforts.
You can start by taking a closer look at the websites you visit
most often. Rather than looking at them as a customer or as a
member, think about the process that went into making them. You
did not find that website by accident. You are not looking at
certain products for no reason. If the webmaster of this site is
a professional, then it was engineered to drive you there and
then to look at specific things. Undo this process to learn from
it:
Dissect. Study. Emulate.
Look at the layout of the pages. Check the site map. Look at how
things are arranaged. Are there popups? Is there a newsletter?
Do they have a lot of outgoing links to websites they do not
own? Is this website actually mini-site of another bigger site?
Figure out why this webmaster has things setup in the way you
see them.
How does the webmaster really make the majority of her revenue?
Does this webmaster get a lot traffic? If so, where does it come
from (hint: google and alexa have functions that allow you to
back-track links and traffic). Does this webmaster use certain
techniques to lure you in--and then close a sale? Does the
mainpage contain primarly free or purchasable items?
How is this webmaster's sales copy constructed? Would this
webmaster prefer you to purchase a product or sign up for a list?
Dissect. Study. Emulate.
Answer all of these questions. You can do it for free and you
will only get better the more you do it.
Now take some of the methods you understand best and are
technically capable of implementing and then emulate them on
your own website, personalizing them to fit in with your own
scheme, of course.
If you do this regularly--if you use REAL TIME as your standard
of evaluation--you cannot fail. I have personally used this
method dozens of times to fix my website, and just recently I
adjust my new internet income course, which now not only gets to
all of my subscribers, but also teaches them how to accomplish
the same thing with real time marketing.