Excerpt

Introduction

Marketing Your Way to e-Riches

This book is about attracting more customers online so that you can

make more money. It covers what you can do, how to do it, and, more

importantly, what you should be doing to find your own e-riches.

Whether your business is Web-based or brick-and-mortar, and

whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, a partner in a small company, or

working in marketing for a multinational corporation, there are new

tools online that can help you do your job better, sell more product,

and make more money.

If you read my first book, Internet Riches, or subscribe to my free

E-Commerce Success email newsletters at ScottFox.com, you know

that I’m a successful online entrepreneur myself. So my focus in this

book is on teaching you how to grow your audience using free and

low-cost techniques. These include social networking on Facebook,

MySpace, and LinkedIn, blogs, e-mail publishing, viral video promotions,

and updates to traditional techniques like word-of-mouth

marketing and public relations, plus more technical disciplines like

RSS, autoresponders, microblogs like Twitter, podcasting through

iTunes, and more.

If you read e-Riches 2.0, you’ll learn the basics of building your

audience using all of these new marketing tools plus smart tips on

search engine keyword advertising and affiliate programs, too.

(These last two are actually paid advertising strategies, but they are

so cost-effective and different from traditional marketing techniques

that I want to introduce you to them, too.)

This material is not just me talking, nor is it full of vague theories.

e-Riches 2.0 is full of practical details from my personal experience,

plus dozens of profiles, case studies, interviews, references, and studies

from other real-world experts and real people who are using these

new tools successfully. Their success is not just theory but actual

(profitable) fact that I want to share with you.

Reading e-Riches 2.0 will make you a smarter, more modern marketer.

This includes becoming clever enough with Web 2.0 online

marketing tools to:

Successfully “do it yourself” in the new world of online

marketing

Save a lot of money by learning many of the complex-sounding

techniques that high-priced consultants will try to charge you for

Impress your techie friends, colleagues, and boss

Become a better manager of marketing campaigns and

employees

Learn to be a smarter client if you choose to hire consultants

Advance your career by leading the most successful new marketing

campaigns for your company’s products

All of these will help both your career and your wallet.

The Online Opportunity for You

I know you want practical guidance. I wrote my book Internet Riches

because I was fed up with best sellers that offer only vague strategies

for “attracting abundance” as substitutes for a real action plan.

Internet Riches taught people how to start their own e-businesses

based on their personal expertise and interests.

Now I’m back with e-Riches 2.0. This book takes the same practical,

detailed approach. I’ve again researched, evaluated, tested,

studied, and analyzed all the new marketing tools that I could find

online for you. In the space we have available here, I’m going to give

you information on the best strategies I have found, plus tools you

can use to evaluate and prioritize them depending on your needs

and business interests. (And the education continues online at Scott

Fox.com, where updates to this book and a worldwide community of

fellow marketers and entrepreneurs is available to you 24/7.)

Despite constant media coverage of bad economic news, the

Internet Gold Rush is still happening today. Never before in history

have you been able to reach so many people so quickly, so easily, and

so cost-effectively. So, my question for you is:

What are you doing to profit from the Internet Gold Rush?

There are now more than 1.5 billion people online. That means

that no matter how obscure your product or how targeted your

pitch, it’s likely that there are people on theWeb right now who want

your product.

The trick is for you to reach them cost-effectively. You need to let

these potential customers know that your product is the solution to their

problems. That’s the purpose of marketing and your job as a marketer.

All the new tools available online may sound overwhelming, especially

if you are new to the online world, but thesemarketing techniques

are known and knowable. I have detailed in this book a set of specific, tactical

steps for attracting the recurring traffic that your business deserves.

I’ve even summarized my recommended online marketing

philosophies into 9 Commandments for e-Riches Marketing Success

and also created a Top 10 List of Online Marketing Success Tips to

help you (see Chapter 1). If you follow these steps, you will increase

your marketing reach online and learn to make more money.

For additional coverage and updates to these topics, please visit

ScottFox.com. Your purchase of this book entitles you to a free trial

membership in my online coaching community. (See the front of the

book for more details on this Special Offer.)

The Four Audiences for e-Riches 2.0

A key factor for success is a desire to be outstanding at Marketing. It does not

matter how great your entrepreneurial idea is, you have to be able to convert

it to sales. That’s why marketing is such a vital skill.

—Chris Cardell, Cardell Media

You should read this book if you are:

1. A corporate marketer or agency employee. Your employer needs

your expertise in order to compete. If your marketing campaigns are

not attracting new customers daily, you will soon lose your job to

someone who “gets it” better than you do.

2. A small business owner or partner. For the first time in history,

small businesses like yours can compete with the “big boys” worldwide.

But being good at marketing is a key entrepreneurial success

factor that entrepreneurs often overlook. It’s naïve to think that

just having good ideas and working hard to produce great products

will lead to sales success. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that

you can find success with a product or service without being committed

to spending a significant amount of your time promoting

it. Who else is going to do it?

The huge Internet audience offers tremendous upside if your

business can get your product marketing messages out to the right

people. This book teaches you how to use inexpensive online marketing

tools to do that.

3. E-business curious. You may not be a marketer, but you are smart

to be curious about the opportunities and challenges offered by the

Web 2.0 world.Maybe this is because you want to help your colleagues

in other parts of the company (or maybe it’s because you have one

foot out the door of your current job and you want some advice on

how to grow your after-hours hobby into a business online!).

Either way, this book will introduce you to online marketing in

plain English, plus give you a strategic framework that will allow

you to better analyze and understand the importance of new media

marketing techniques, both to your own life as a consumer and to

your career.

4. Worried about your financial future. Globalization, uncertain

financial markets, technology, and our friend the Internet are combining

to restructure the economy to eliminate the long-term security

formerly offered by corporate jobs. If you are unemployed,

under-employed, unhappily fully employed, or simply looking to

upgrade your professional skills, this book can help you retrain yourself

for the opportunities of today’s “information age” economy.

Internet Marketing Is Your Future

If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

— General Eric Shinseki, Secretary of Veterans Affairs,

former Chief of Staff, U.S. Army

You need to learn to love the Internet!Why? Because it’s cheaper and

has wider reach than ever before, and because everyone—yes, everyone—

is coming online.

Even if you don’t see it at the moment, the Web and e-mail are

extending further into your life all the time. Mobile browsers bring

Google into people’s pockets; BlackBerries bring e-mail into the

middle of dinner. Tools like RSS feeds and Twitter bring constant

updates from people you may barely know.

Just think ten or even five years forward: The screens in your living

room will continue to grow, as will those on your desk. In fact,

you’ll probably have two or more screens soon. Your gadgets will

get faster and more powerful so that they combine phone, e-mail,

Web browsing, iPod, camera, full streaming video capabilities, and

so on all the time everywhere. Soon all this will arrive in your car, on

long-haul plane flights, and in your kids’ classrooms and pockets, too.

This means opportunity for smart marketers who embrace

the new platforms and the unique ways in which they can extend

brands and messages into people’s lives.

The increasingly targeted marketing messages of today are better

than ever at anticipating customers’ interests. And tomorrow’s will be

better still. Haven’t you been surprised when Amazon.com suggests

a book that you already own and love? Imagine that targeted marketing

on steroids and working to promote your business online!

The tremendous, worldwide reach of the Web has also changed

the ways in which customers expect to be able to interact with you

and your products. You have the opportunity to take advantage of

this increase in customer interaction and two-way feedback to

enhance your relationships with your audience, differentiate your

brand from competitors, and sell a lot more product.

Excerpted from e-Riches: Next-Generation Marketing Strategies for Making Millions Online by Scott Fox. Copyright © 2009 Scott Fedewa. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.

All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.