The following chapter is going to talk about how to create that content in the most efficient and effective way in order to drive traffic through your blog. However, there is one more important feature of the earlier diagram that we need to talk about before we can begin, and that is identifying your target market or target audience.
You can think of a target market as one or more defined groups of people who are interested in what you have to say or offer. This is an extremely important concept. While the Internet is a vast place with many millions of people online, inevitably, individuals or small groups of individuals are only interested in certain things at certain times.
Your job as a marketer is to determine which niche interest groups constitute your target market and go after only those people.
If you refer back to the earlier diagram, you will note that traffic arrows coming from the market into the search engines and social media sites only came from certain niches and not every niche. This is because I want to make it clear that, depending on the content of your blog or site, only certain niche groups will be interested.
So, before you even begin marketing to anyone, you need to make sure you understand the value of what you are offering, and who is likely to want that offering. When I refer to "value", I don't mean, necessarily, in physical dollar and cents terms. You might, for example, offer your opinion on politics or climate change. People may not have to pay to read that opinion, but if they are interested in what you have to say, it holds value for them.
The following diagram represents how to prepare for an Internet marketing campaign:
From this diagram, you can see that aside from understanding the value offering (knowing how and why people will derive value from what you offer), it is also important to first create business objectives that will ultimately be met by your marketing efforts combined with the blog or site.
In the Internet marketing sense, a business objective is a goal you want your blog to achieve. It could be generating revenue through advertising, it could be getting visitors to sign up to your newsletter, or anything else. When a visitor comes to your website and performs an action that fulfils one or more business objectives, that is called a conversion.
A conversion doesn't necessarily have to mean that some form of financial transaction takes place. However, it is important to understand that because marketing is labor intensive, and in some cases financially draining, you should generally frame your efforts within a financial context. That is to say, spend a bit of time working out how best to assign a monetary value to your conversions.
If one of your goals is to sign people up to a newsletter, then you should know how and where you can make money from this newsletter down the line. Perhaps you will market your products or provide links to special offers on your e-commerce site. However, after you monetize that newsletter, you can generally work out how much you expect to earn per sign up. Once the newsletter has been running for some time, you can then make exact calculations based on the number of people signed up and the revenue generated as a result.
For example, if you earn on average $30 in product sales for each new customer, and you gain one new customer for every 100 newsletter signups, then you could work out that $30/100 = 30 cents. This is the value of each newsletter sign up to you. Thinking about those 30 cents helps motivate you to get people signed up.
By ensuring that you properly monetize your blog, you should at least be able to pay for the high-end servers required when the marketing efforts pay off and you start getting millions of visitors. The term "monetize" refers to one or more methods used to generate revenue. This could be a result of advertising, affiliate revenue, e-commerce sales, or any number of other things.
Before we discuss the two pre-marketing preparation tasks in a bit more depth, you are now ready for a bird's-eye summary of Internet marketing in its entirety.
Note
Internet marketing is the process of creating content in order to drive targeted traffic to a blog or website and convert it to meet defined business objectives.
Once our pre-marketing preparation is complete, we are going to dive right in and begin creating content.