So What Is It That We Market Anyway?

If you're marketing online, staying focused is super important.

As always the reason for this blog post is to inform you of marketing tips and marketing techniques that I am learning on my online marketing journey.

So what do we market? What are you trying to master? What do you struggle with on a daily basis?

These are some of the questions I ponder as I work to come up with content for my blog.

What are your struggles?

It's simple. They're the same as mine. The only difference is that I've found solutions to some of them, and hopefully I can share some of those with you.

It's the tips, tools, and tasks necessary to master the mundane.

So let's start with what we market. I believe it can be divided into 3 areas.

1. YOU
2. Your product/s or primary opportunity
3. Your system and tools

Pretty simple on the surface, but deeply complex in reality. Why do I say that? Because I've been wading through it for over a decade.

Let's go back a little while. Windows 95. It was supposed to come out in 1995, but as is often the case with Microsoft it was a little late. During that same time frame I began getting on the "internet". Back then you would come across a web page, that was simply a page of text with a few hyperlinks that would take you to another page of text giving more information about that particular word.

Like I was bitten by the network marketing bug back in college, I was infected with the internet.

One thing has become crystal clear. It's all about eyeballs. That is the number of eyeballs that see your marketing efforts. The higher the number the higher your level of success. That being said, for us to become really successful in our business efforts we have to work hard to embrace our uniqueness and be who we are.

Why is that important?

Because we're looking to sell products to people that we may partner with for a long time. If we don't make sure we're up front with them at first, then somewhere along the way we'll let the cat out of the bag, and poof, everything we've done up to that point will disappear.

So let's dissect what we're marketing a little more.

How do you market you?

First of all you have to decide what you want to be when you grow up. What is your passion. You've heard that said a hundred or a thousand times. Find something you can be passionate about and you'll never work another day in your life.

I've kicked around my blog here for a number of years and changed the focus a few times trying to find my passion. I've found it. I love turning over the rocks and looking for the systems and the tricks and the little things that successful marketers use to achieve that success.

TIP: Don't write your posts to get ranked in the search engines. Write your posts from the heart and the head to connect with your readers or listeners or viewers depending upon the medium.

For example, the title to this post. Not very keyword friendly, but it's what I want to talk about. Then....use the skills you're learning to get the word out.

I read a post today...I'll have to go back and try and find it...about creating a fan base of 1,000. If you had that many people following you and listening and learning from you, and buying from you, what would that mean. A lot.

So first find your passion. Guess what, you may not have it now, but get started anyway. There's hundreds of ways to be successful, but if your chosen path is to do it online, it's almost a necessity to have a blog.

So step one, purchase a domain (preferably your name) and then get ready to set up a blog. The industry standard is WordPress. That's what I have here, and I've been very pleased.

What next?

If you don't have it already you should have the basic Web 2.0 social network accounts so you can begin connecting with people.

• Facebook - mine is facebook/tonylogue
• Twitter - twitter/tonylogue
• YouTube - youtube/user/tonystubesite (tonylogue) is taken by a guy with one video uploaded like 3 years ago, or maybe that was MySpace....lol

You can add more, and usually if I hear of a new social network I'll sign up and get my name just so I have it, but my theory is get really good with the main three and then branch out from there. If you get really good, you won't have time. LOL

So what's the purpose of all this? To establish who you are as a person. Write about your passion. Talk and blog about what trips your trigger. What makes you happy. What pisses you off. What you like and don't like.

You're not looking to change the world, just simply connect with your army of a thousand.

Check out my blog....my Facebook site....my Twitter feed....my YouTube channel. You should see into who I am. If not, I'm not being effective.

The greatest lesson I've learned over the past 18 months that is bringing me online success is to stop being a parrot. Find my own voice. And that's what you have to focus on as well.

Over time I'll be going into greater detail on all of these so for now let's move on.

Your Product or Opportunity

Now here is where there is a lot of debate in the industry. One school of thought is to keep this a big secret so that people will still work with you and buy products from you, like training and such, but don't want to risk being proselytized.

The other school of thought is full transparency. Of course I subscribe to the second. There's a difference though about being transparent and blatant. If I'm talking to you about how to create a blog, that's the focus. Not what opportunity I'm promoting. That's also the beauty of recognizing that there's great benefit in marketing the tools along the way.

Everyone needs tools to be successful. Blogs, autoresponders, keyword research tools, article marketing ideas, a video camera, the right computer, and the list goes on and on. The key is to position yourself in front of the buying market and provide value.

So....back to marketing your opportunity. My approach is utilizing capture sites that bring prospects into the sales funnel. Ultimately this leads to the company or product sale site. Articles, blog posts, tweets, Facebook status updates, videos, all lead to your capture site. This creates a list of "suspects". Not really a prospect yet, but someone you can begin the process of truly marketing to. If there's a connection there, then ultimately it can become a sale.

Your System and Tools

If you're not marketing tools and a system you're missing the boat. The whole point of being in business for yourself is to make money. It's not about being married to a company, it's about marketing products and services that you personally are passionate about. Now some will say, and I totally agree that's it's virtually impossible to market more than one MLM or network marketing company. Affiliate programs and tools are a different story. Those sales are more event based as opposed to being part of a culture.

So what are the tools I market and use?

That's for another post. This one is already approaching 1,200 words and I'm sure you're bored to tears.

So to summarize. What is it that we market?

Ourselves....our opportunity...and the systems and tools we use to do that.

Here's to Mastering the Mundane.

Tagged As: ad-tracking, link-tracking, Marketing, mlm, network marketing, Web Design, wordpress