At times, internet marketing can be frustrating.

Things that worked yesterday stop working today, often for unfathomable reasons that are related to how computers “think” and how the search engines try to out-wit the spammers who are trying to out-wit the search engines.

There’s been a long post recently on the Warrior Forum from someone called Steven Wagenheim about how he was relying totally on article marketing, back when EzineArticles drove much more traffic than it currently does. Then as their traffic reduced, his clicks and his sales dried up.

That kind of thing happens in every market.

A while ago, I read a book called the Innovator’s Dilemma that went into this in a lot of detail.

Part of its focus is on what it calls disruptive innovations.

The internet itself is a disruptive innovation because it’s taken over lots of functions:

• Advertisers no longer ask you to call a toll free number to hear their message (sales pitch), they direct you to their website and you can get access to your free report instantly.
• Customer service is often handled on the web – web chat, Tweets, Facebook pages, downloadable manuals, troubleshooting guides, ordering things.
• Adverts can be targeted in ways that were previously either impossible or incredibly expensive. Some of Dan Kennedy’s books talk about buying several mail order lists but only mailing the handful of people who were on all of them, throwing away the rest. That would have cost $thousands if it was possible at all in your industry. Now you can drill down and reach them on Facebook for a handful of dollars and then stalk them with retargeting ads.
• Facebook’s adverts are targetable in a way that Google’s ads aren’t. Google is worried about that but isn’t really sure how it will adjust.
• Facebook and other open or closed groups together with forums have taken over from Usenet groups which took over from bulletin boards.
• Six degrees of separation is probably an absolute maximum – if you and your target are on LinkedIn it’s probably 3 or 4; if they’re on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter it’s likely even less.
• Banner ads have gone from being almost the only advertising method to almost totally useless and are now precision targeted and therefore both effective and affordable.
• Letters are getting less and less common. Hand written ones even more so.
• More photos are being taken than ever before but few of them are ever printed.
• Books are still popular but tend to be “printed” with electrons rather than ink on dead trees.
• Amazon now controls 65% of all electronic book sales. And it’s progress in other retail areas is equally relentless (one of the original ideas for their company name apparently) – this article goes into a lot more depth. As early as 2008 It outsold all other US bookstores combined. Publishers – & doubtless other suppliers – can buy their way into the Amazon search result positions although these aren’t flagged as paid adverts in the search results you and I see, so we don’t know whether or not an individual item is there because it deserves its position or because it’s paying to be there.
• Emails are getting less reliable and less read.
• Fax machines are almost extinct.
• CDs and DVDs have been pushed out of the way by MP3s and streaming videos.
• The line between editorial items and adverts has become so blurred that it’s often impossible to determine whether something you’re reading or watching is as independent as it suggests it is.
• Even the adult entertainment industry – normally very good at monetising anything and everything – has taken a hit on revenue.

If you don’t keep on top of what’s happening, things stop happening.

Sometimes even if you do keep on top of things. But that’s less common.

All of this means that you need to monitor.

You can’t keep doing things because that’s what you’ve always done.

And you can’t assume that whatever you’re doing now will still work next week or next year.

Scary stuff.

What it all means is that you need to sit down every now and then and examine what you’re doing.

I’d suggest maybe every 3 months – put yourself a diary note in your phone to remind you. Much less than that and you run the risk of not doing it at all, much more often and it becomes a chore that you put off until “tomorrow”.

Don’t spend ages on the task.

Maybe monitor what you’re mainly spending your time on for a couple of days and then spend maybe 15 or 30 minutes checking some stats to see whether the results roughly line up with what you’re spending your time on.

There will never be a perfect match – this is definitely a case of “good enough is good enough”.

So if you’re spending roughly 80% of your time on, say, YouTube videos and they’re bringing in over half your online income, that’s fine. But if they’re only bringing in maybe 20% of your income then you need to adjust.

Your results will vary over time.

Fluctuations are normal – you’re looking for a trend.

So if you’ve been spending most of your time creating videos or writing content or whatever else you’re doing to grow your business and your income from that is growing, that’s great news and you should be doing more of the same.

But if your income from that avenue is shrinking, it’s time to re-evaluate while you’ve still got time to do that.

Which brings me on to the other thing you need to keep on top of:

Pricing

I mentioned earlier that the adult industry has experienced a large drop in income – one UK star says his income has dropped 90% in 2 years and he’s likely to be typical. Other areas of the industry are still making money but it’s shifted a lot.

Like it or not, internet marketing tends to follow the adult industry, which has been responsible for innovations such as online credit card payments and streaming videos.

Most markets split in two directions:

• Low price
• High price

There’s little, if any, room in the middle.

Look at soft drinks: in the cola market there’s Coca Cola and Pepsi at the high end, supermarket own brands at the low end and little, if anything, between.

Most other industries are the same.

As one of the UK’s biggest supermarket chains (Tesco) is finding out to its cost.

It’s facing a squeeze at the top end of the market from Waitrose, which is running a selective price match campaign against it, discounting certain products in that range by 10% and offering a better loyalty card scheme with selective bigger discounts, free newspapers and free coffee.

And at the other end of the market it’s being squeezed by the discount chains Aldi and Lidl.

The result has been described as a slow motion car crash.

Given that in the internet marketing industry the low end of the market means free, it figures that the only way to go is up market.

Because monetising “free” is difficult at best.

It’s not impossible to monetise free but you need hefty amounts of traffic which you can then monetise with adverts – almost certainly retargeting ones.

But if you’ve got less traffic then you need to find ways to monetise them.

Reports are still one way – specific chunks of information, often micro-targeted, for anwhere from a few dollars up to a hundred or so.

Bigger reports are another option but you usually have to build up trust with your target audience first. This is the traditional internet marketing funnel where you gain people’s trust with a free or cheap report, then trade some of those up to the next level and so on. That can still work but you have to be very good at it. Including maximising your sales before people’s interest falls off and they chase the next pot of gold at the end of the next rainbow.

Individual coaching can work. It’s trading time for money, so you need to be careful how you offer it and how you price it. Briefly going back to the adult industry that’s where most of their income is now being generated – online, without meeting their clients in real life, trading time for money with little more than a camera phone and an internet connection.

If you can position yourself as someone who has an opinion that’s worth paying for, that could be an excellent direction to go in.

And you could mix that with free by offering free top end reports similar to ones that others are charging tens or even hundreds of dollars for – and use that as your funnel.

To an extent, that’s a direction I’m exploring with longer posts on my website acting as the equivalent of a free report – for instance, this page could probably turn into around a 10 – 20 page report if I wanted to go that direction and depending on the font size I used.

It’s experiments like the one I’ve just described that should be done in the 20% of your time that you’re not spending on your main income source.

If you spend an hour or so a day on your internet marketing that would mean that – working Monday to Friday – 4 hours a week were spent in your main promotional area and the other hour a week was spent on the fringe, testing new ideas rather than just reading about them or watching them and thinking “that’s a good idea” but not following through.

Do that for a few months and you’ll have a very good base to decide whether your current time mix is right or whether your new experimental area justifies taking up more of your time.

But whatever direction you choose, you need to keep on top of it.

Otherwise you’ll end up somewhere unpleasant, wondering how you can dig yourself out of the hole.

Or missing a market altogether like Coca Cola and Pepsi did in the energy drinks market where they both should have been high up in the sales ranks rather than relinquishing sales and profits to Red Bull and Monster.

Feel free to add your comments below: