By Dave Ingalls
Digital Marketing Consultant
November 20, 2010
Link to main Digital Marketing Tutorial Web page
Am I really going to provide 999 Digital Marketing Tips? I don’t really know if there are that many, but I thought I’d give it a go!
What I’ll try to do is to start with the really big Digital Marketing ideas and try to give you an actionable item for each one. And I’ll keep “drilling down” ’til I get to Digital Marketing Tip #999 – at least I’ll try!
So let’s get started.
Digital Marketing Tip #1: Start your Digital Marketing effort with a specific end goal in mind.
Why? Because knowing your end goal will help focus your Digital Marketing effort on those Digital Marketing items that are most important to achieving that specific goal.
There are a thousand different reasons that folks start some type of online endeavor. You might want to become the world’s most prolific blogger on model trains or you might want to create a way to sell your sister’s one-off wood carvings online, or…you get the idea.
It doesn’t really matter what your Internet/Web concept is, it’s just important that you stop and think it thru to the point where you can assign a specific end goal or set of end goals to that concept.
For example, let’s take selling one-off wood carvings online. If the specific goal associated with that endeavor is to sell wood carvings that get produced at the rate of about 1 per month and sell for $100 or less, then you probably should direct your Digital Marketing efforts at becoming an expert at selling unique wood carvings on eBay.
Why focus on eBay? Because with such a small number of products to sell and at a very reasonable price, it does not make sense for you to spend hours and hours (or alternatively, hundreds and hundreds of dollars) learning how to set-up and run your own online store.
It makes much more sense to focus your Digital Marketing efforts on eBay because it has both a HUGE community of potential buyers already shopping for unique items like one-off wood carvings, and a very easy-to-use method of selling items like that online. You will pay eBay a percentage of each sale, but the trade-off is that you can then focus your Digital Marketing effort on finding and attracting the most likely eBay buyers for your specific product to your location on eBay.
So, close your Web browser, open a new document in your word processing application, title it “Online Endeavor” or words to that effect, define that endeavor as best you can at this point, and then assign a specific set of end goals to that endeavor. Six months from now when you’re waist deep in your Digital Marketing effort, you’ll be glad you did!