If you have a product or services for sale, you've probably tried all the traditional forms of marketing -- brochures, flyers, business cards, ads, public speaking appearances -- and you've probably had less than stunning results.
Lets say you've written an ebook. I've written numerous ones and am also a coach, so I set out in my town to promote these services and products. I spent hours researching and ended up getting myself a book presentation at a local bookstore. Then I spent horus emailing with their marketing rep getting everything set up, providing her with a bio for their newsletter, which she edited down to a short paragraph. Then I got on the phone and called people to invite them, and prepared several of my own ezines to promote the speaking engagament. Are you adding up the hours here?
Then lets get into the real dollars. I ran off attractive color brochures which cost me a trip to Kinkos and $35, got my business cards and brochures ready, bought a new jacket, took the pants to the dry cleaners.
Then I bought some pens with my URL on them, but of course you can't just buy 25, so there went another $50.
Then to prepare the talk - new material, new audience (this happened to be a group of MENSA members), giving the talk a couple of times to myself, and then, yes a trip to the store to meet with the marketing manager.
Then came the night of the presentation. I left the house at 6 and got home at 9:30 p.m. I drove 40 minutes each way in driving rain, fought for a parking place in a crowded mall, and dragged a bunch of heavy papers with me.
The results -- one of their better turnouts, I got one coaching client who stayed with me one month for $500, and I got one order for an ebook. I would say realistically it easily took me 40 hours to accomplish all this.
Marketing on the Internet is much, much more effective. I'm a fast writer with years of experience and a wide range of topics, but even if you're just starting out, most ebooks are how-tos, and less than 60 pages. You can do one in a week if you really conentrate on it. Then you get it up on your website and start writing articles to promote it.
And these articles you write at your home and/or office in your sweats, in between coaching calls or whatever you do, while you're likely on the Internet anyway. No car, no gas, no wasted travel time, no clothing expenses of concerns.
How do you start? Write one article - why not make it an excerpt from your ebook, and then submit it to article submission sites. Hundreds of web publishers come to these sites looking for material, and then put them in their ezines which can reads thousands of people. And this lasts for a long time. This is no one-hour presentation exposure we're talking about!
Your article, with its byline containing your promotional information, stays on the site indefinitely. I haven't heard of a site that bumps you. Then any given article a web publisher uses can last indefinitely. One of my marketing articles has been featured on the front page of an insurance company's site for 11 months now. It's evidently a permanent feature, and people write me from there all the time ordering ebooks or inquiring about coaching.
And the reach? I had a friend email me from another state saying she'd seen my article in a hardcopy newsletter in a doctor's office.
It takes me less than an hour to write an article, which you can achieve with practice. Maybe another hour to submit it to various sites, and then IT does the work for me. It gets the clients coming to me. I've become so proficient at it, I now offer this service to clients who can also reap the benefits.
What can you write on? Look around sites such as www.ideamarketers.com and see what type of articles are being written. Start thinking about what you know and start typing away. With practice it will come to you. Everyone's an expert on something. You have your unique voice and message and people are waiting to hear from you.
Why don't you give Internet marketing a try? It's exponentially more effective.