3 learning points from online marketing

As I continue to explore the 'underbelly' of the Internet, looking at both real and scam-like affiliate programmes, I realise these learning points are interesting (to me at least) and I want to share them here.

Demand driven
One of the traits of a great online marketer is a total focus on demand. When they talk about generating niche ideas or new affiliate products, they will scan and research on demand indicators like Amazon Best Seller, Ebay Pulse, Google Keywords and Trends, Yahoo Buzz etc. They want to create something that solves someone's pain. Compared that to most geeky 2.0 launches that are more on the cool factor, rather than genuinely solving the market's pain points.

The downside of such demand driven focus is of course foregoing the ability to create Twitter like success. Using the above demand indicators, it is virtually impossible to even imagine such a service from a demand point of view.

There is a market for digital products
There is a common belief that it is difficult to sell digital product online as most people will not pay for content. I even wrote about it a few times on this blog, contrasting that to how mobile enables content to be paid. However, looking at places like Clickbank, you can see that more than 1billion digital products have already been sold. Why the contrasting views?

The main reason I think boils downs to the act of selling. If you pop over to most popular content sites, you can see the selling process is acutally not there. There is no strong reason or value proposition of why you should folk out money and pay for the content. Compared to that to this sales letter, which is putting the value proposition front and center of the users. I do not endorse that product but I am learning from the way sales are done. I think in moving online, a lot of us have lost the art of selling. We focus on building products but forgot about communicating the value proposition clearly and attractively to the people who would benefit from the product

Innovations in copyright
Umair Haque talks about copyright innovations being key to discovering new strategies for digital media. We haven't seen much of that in main stream media but in Internet marketing, they have created all lots of new copyrights. Just google for master copyright or PLR and you will see what I mean. These guys understand that the key to profiting in the Web world is not by restricting your content. Rather, it is to enable other people to spread it for you by building incentives for them to do so, while at the same, embedding your own revenue streams within each copy.