Online Marketing to Old Rules Won't Work

Let go of some of your old marketing ideas. Look around you, smell the coffee. This is the Internet and the format is not the same as offline.

In the past bludgeon-them-till-they-scream marketing may have worked. Out of one hundred telemarketing calls you may have caught someone on the right day and gotten them to sign up for your service. That won't work for email. It is too easy to delete it, unread and thus, unheard. Even auto deleted, untouched by human hand or eye.

Standard marketing will not work online because people online are being flooded with the stuff every day and in just about every way someone has thought up. The past several years of marketing online with constant onslaughts of spam have trained people how to not look at ads on websites. Think of the last site you were on. What ads did you look at, do you remember anything about them?

There are more ads and ad schemes online than on any other media. In one hour of time online looking at websites, checking email or using forums you will encounter easily double the amount of ads you would if you were watching TV, reading a magazine or listening to the radio. Read a book, that is one way to get away from ads (except for other books).

So the marketing plan online is ineffective and needs to be revamped. It may work on that thousand and first person to view your ad or be attacked by your marketing campaign to flood a social network. Meanwhile, what about that thousand people you just annoyed? There has to be a better way. Something more effective for your cost and your time and your energy.

I don't have the magic answer or the magic beans or the goose that lays golden eggs. But, I do know the old methods which are still being used are just turning the Internet into a wasteland. It's getting harder to find something to read versus something to ignore. Someone is going to come up with the marketing plan that works. Why can't it be you?

Instead of trying to get other bloggers to trade meaningless links with you and instead of trying to get everyone on a social network as your fake friend - come up with something new. The time it takes to find a better way will win you far more than clinging to the old ways. Be an entrepreneur instead of a follower.