When you hear the term “internet marketing“, what do you think of?

For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.

At its core, internet marketing is about these things:

* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads

Since there is insufficient space in this article to give all of these topics adequate attention, let’s focus on just one specific topic with the realm of internet marketing: Email Marketing.

My best payoff has always come by focusing on permission-based email marketing. Permission-based email marketing refers to the practice of collecting information (including email addresses) from website visitors and communicating with them via e-mail with their direct consent. The “permission” aspect of permission-based email marketing is what separates legitimate email marketers from the spammers that everyone despises.

My love of email marketing is strong for one reason: It works very well. Email marketing has been much like a never-ending goldmine: It enables us to produce income on demand simply by sending a good offer to our list. When you have thousands of loyal subscribers – as we do – and you put a strong and compatible offer in front of them, income becomes nearly automatic.

However, the key to successful email marketing is the development of a legitimate trust relationship with your subscribers. If you opt to send your subscribers a request for purchases every single day, they will likely tire of your badgering and cease reading your emails altogether.

Alternatively, if you take the time to provide good content to your readers on a regular and frequent basis, you’ll discover that your readers take all of your emails far more seriously, and as a result your emails will be opened, read and acted upon with greater frequency. Essentially, email marketing is really an exercise in trust.

While there are many more aspects to internet marketing than just permission-based email marketing, email has definitely been the cornerstone on which our business is built.

Companies need effective process, the focus of leadership and structure that can stretch to enable the company to grow safely as a massive 55% of businesses fail in their first five years of existence. The observers offer shallow explanations as to why this occurs. I consistently see three key reasons why this tragedy happens so often and to so many individuals with different backgrounds, qualifications and knowledge.

The primary reason is lack of market understanding.

No foresight. For example People dream up the idea, build the product and then sit back and wait for the market to come and purchase. In information age there is no excuse for lack of research prior to wasting any time and money on designing a product until you have solid confirmed there is a market.

The second reason is lack of understanding of fundamental facts about business.

The majority of folks starting a business know their trade, how to deliver a service or build a product, but not how to run a business.  Being able to understand and follow the balances in the Income statement or the balance sheet is a vital. The basic knowledge of accounting is not very often imparted well by the business books, internet resources and experts in the know such as CPAs and bookkeepers. The problem is worsened by greedy and short sighted technology companies such as Sage software misleading the market by providing only a portion of the functionality actually needed by small businesses.

Small business accounting software is only half of the solution.

Large enterprises way back figured out that all of their Information systems should be joined together to give them a total picture of the business and then along came ERP software solutions and packages. One technology business NetSuite had the vision to see the opening in the market and started offering its small business ERP software. NetSuite pricing has since increased and put their technology out of the economic reach of small companies.

The final reason businesses don’t survive is because of lack of process and procedures that provide the vital behaviours and consistency a business must have to work effectively.