SisyMoney – figuring out the What, When & How of Online Marketing by following the Who’s Who

My background is in print and “traditional” marketing and my career path within these fields has been SALES - traditional door-knocking, cold-calling, rejection after rejection after rejection selling. It all began here: one year after entering university Netscape came out with their web browser; for two years before that the internet was text only, available to higher education institutions and WWW did not exist. My studies focused on traditional print and media marketing. No one yet knew what the future of the internet holds and so the only subject that was added on was web site creation using Adobe Page Mill.

Today, I am at the point where, I think, typesetters must have beet at a few years after Apple introduced the first Mac in mid eighties – either join and move forward into the future or cling on to the old and die. After working hard for the past ten years, with great success, selling print to mid and large organizations, specializing in traditional direct marketing, publishing and editing a newspaper and selling advertising to fill the pages and pay the bills, all the while observing with great interest the evolution of online marketing and opportunities it brings, I’ve decided it is finally time that I choose the former and boldly head into the future. Sure I still have my print business running - my customers not only depend on but crave the “best” service in town that my company provides. Yes, I will still run a traditional newspaper…  because I love it and because there are still millions and millions of 45+ people for whom the idea of sitting in front of a computer screen to read pages of information is nonsense. I also have a long-time theory, which Malcolm Gladwell also mentioned in one of his books, that direct marketing in the form of door-knocking sales people will come back with a great force and will generate great fortunes for some who will be able to take advantage of the solitary generation of ipoders who are only used to Facebook type social interaction and will say ‘yes’ to anyone who appears as a live person in front of them; I am ready for it.

However, now I want to be where the action is - ONLINE. How will I get there? A tried method: if you want to truly learn something do it with the idea of teaching others. I am a mevin by nature so I want to share information with others naturally; imitate the best but add my own spin on it; ‘kaizen’.

This blog is going to be:

• my journey into the inner workings of Online Marketing and Sales;
• adding new Selling and Persuasion skill sets to my large bag of traditional techniques;
  
• identifying potential areas for improvement by applying traditional sales/persuasion techniques;
• sharing sales and persuasion methods with young and old bloggers who would like to sell their own ads in local communities (I believe this is an untapped potential which is just starting to take off - say goodbye to printed yellowpages - slowly but surely)
• about having fun while trying to possibly make some money.
  

Some, probably those people comparable to the typesetters who chose to stick with lead typesetting machines, will say that I am at a disadvantage because there are big fish in the pond but I consider myself having a great advantage: I have great knowledge and experience of the old ways of selling and marketing which I know I can apply to the new because no matter what the new is it always holds the old in itself; the pond is really an ocean or better yet it is a universe that is constantly expanding (hence also the reference to Sisyphean in the name see the first post); many big fish get comfortable with their ways and either don’t evolve or they do it at a much slower pace - there are always opportunities to jump in and steal the thunder.

I plan to dig deep and research the topic of online marketing not only as if it was my PhD thesis but with the goal to make that six figure cheque. The journey, I will note here on this blog in simple straight forward English. Join me, help me and stick with me and I guarantee the reward will be worth it.

In the next post I will explain what I mean by Online Marketing just so that we are on the same page.

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