Practical Internet Marketing by Michelle Gartner

When Chris asked me to write a weekly article on internet marketing for his awesome blog Chris Bloczynski dot com I was thrilled. After though, the doubts set in; who am I to talk about internet marketing and what are my qualifications, after all- I certainly am not an expert in marketing? Perhaps I should tell you a little about myself and how I came to know anything about internet marketing.

I started attending college in 1996 with the intent of getting a degree in geriatric psychology. I had my whole program mapped out; including all the colleges I would go to on the way to my goal. First I obtained most of my general studies credits at Front Range Community College in Westminster, Colorado. From there I moved my family to Wisconsin in order to attend Concordia University Mequon. Once there and fully immersed in the psychology program, I discovered two things. The first was that I didn’t like how psychology often used generalizations- that didn’t seem to apply to the diversity of people and their thought processes. The second thing I discovered was that the elderly did not need me to tell them what to do or how to live.

From there I dropped out of Concordia and started taking online classes at Lakeland College. I moved all my credits into their accounting program- hoping to find myself in the business world. In 2002 I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Lakeland College with a major in Accounting and a minor in Psychology. Shortly thereafter in June of 2003, my husband Jerry and I started our own web development business; Gartner Web Development LLC.

In our day to day business Jerry does web development, services computers, and even trains clients on software applications. In the early days, I pretty much kept my involvement to doing the daily bookkeeping and taking phone calls. Then I knew nothing about marketing our small business and even less about internet marketing- which was ironic, since we were running a web development company.

Interestingly enough, no one ever asked us, “How do I market my new website?”

The perception then and even now from small business owners was that once their website was uploaded to the internet; thousands if not millions of people would visit the site and this would instantaneously translate in to increased sales. On the same hand, I tend to believe that many new bloggers believe that they too will see high volume traffic right away without any marketing work. However, when the explosive traffic never showed up- the initial reaction was to blame the web developer. In the course of five years I have heard it all including the biggest misconception- that obviously we (the web development company) did not put the right key words into the site.

“Did you put keywords into the website? My brother in law says you didn’t put the right key words in my site and his site is on the first page of Google.”

As you might imagine not really knowing how internet marketing worked then, I didn’t have much of a rebuttal to statements like this. I wondered myself what had gone wrong, since we had in fact embedded keywords in the Meta tags. Not wanting to appear ignorant of the business processes I was involved in, I found myself forced to educate myself about marketing. To educate myself , one of the first resources I turned to was from Microsoft. I started reading the materials we received as Microsoft Partners. I also signed up and listened to Microsoft web-casts on marketing. After viewing just one web-cast; it was like a “marketing” light bulb went on. Listening to the web-casts, taking notes, and then being able to properly articulate our own marketing goals and how to implement them was liberating.

Once a person learns the terminology and the processes behind marketing, and then actually follows through with their marketing plan, the traffic will come. No one should expect that their website will have lots of traffic without doing any marketing work.

Early on, I found out the hard way, that a lot of experts in marketing assumed that their audience was already up to speed on the basics of marketing. In the small business world and particularly with individual owners or webmasters and bloggers this is not the case. It can be frustrating to learn internet marketing techniques if those doing the educating assumes the novice knows more then they actually do. With a little bit of careful research and education, internet marketing will no longer be a big mystery. I hope in the future I can help paint a clearer picture of what internet marketing is and how it works.

I will leave you with these two key points I have learned about marketing over the years.

1) Marketing is a cumulative effort. Many marketing campaigns and even businesses have failed because the marketing efforts were cut short. This happens because the majority of our early marketing efforts do not seem fruitful, when in fact they are. These early marketing campaigns are where bloggers and webmasters or business owners are laying down a good solid base of marketing which includes establishing a brand and creating brand name recognition.

2) What works for one website probably won’t work for someone else. It’s acceptable to implement someone else’s marketing plan, but realize that you will have to fine tune and adjust the marketing to suit your website

In the end, you are your biggest fan and cheerleader. If you don’t talk about your company or website through a carefully thought out marketing plan, no one else will. We all have the ability to create a positive buzz about our website or businesses endeavors; unfortunately it is harder for some of us then others to promote ourselves. With education and practice it becomes easier and less stressful to promote ourselves, our businesses and websites through our marketing efforts.