Crossing the Digital Divide

How to Guarantee Your Success on the Internet

Excerpted from Multiple Streams of Internet Income

Article 3 in an Internet Income Series

By Robert Allen
Best-selling Author and Co-founder of EWI

There is a phrase that I learned early in my career: “A confused mind always says no.”

Too often, people launch new products and then go searching for a market. You must reverse the process: Find a hungry market in search of a product. The most important marketing question is, “How can I identify a hungry group of people and then create a feeding frenzy?”

If you can answer this question, you will be miles ahead of those cashpoor, equity-rich Internet start-ups. You will sail across the digital divide on the wings of cash flow while your foolish competitors crash and burn.

Three Important Questions
My mentors reminded me that any marketing campaign-especially on the Net-must answer three questions:
1. Who is your target audience?
2. What do they want?
3. How can you motivate this target audience to act now?

Most beginning marketers spend 90 percent of their time creating the perfect product and 10 percent of their time finding a perfect audience. The secret is to reverse the ratio: Spend 90 percent of your time finding the right audience. I call this finding hungry fish. I prefer to find a school of fish in a feeding frenzy. If you drop your bait (advertising) into such a school of hungry fish, they will attack that bait (ad)~even if it’s written by an amateur.

Where do you find the schools of customers like this? You have two choices: (l) You can either drop your bait into someone else’s lake or (2) create your own lake and spawn your own fish.

If you are fishing in other people’s lakes, you have to pay them for the privilege. In other words, you have to pay to advertise in their magazines, newsletters, or on their radio or TV stations. Or you’ll have to pay a fee to rent names from their private mailing lists. This is the fastest way to find a group of hungry fish … but it is also the most expensive.

A slower method is to create your own lake and spawn your own fish. N this case, you also have control over your marketing project and at a much lower long-term cost.

Marketing is the science of encouraging interested people to buy. If you make a powerful offer in the right way to an interested audience, you should be able to motivate that audience to buy.

For sample email marketing messages, please refer to chapter 2 of Multiple Streams of Internet Marketing.