Okay, so obviously Internet Marketing does exist but are you an internet marketer or just a marketer?

In the real world, people don’t specify their job titles by the platform they use to perform it. For example, I have never met a ‘side-of-bus marketer.’ Yet everyone refers to others and themselves as an internet marketer because they use the web.

Lets just take a moment to think about marketing of the past. There have been great advancements in the places you can advertise. There’s been newspapers, radio, magazines, billboards, posters, television and now the internet. However, these are all just places where you can advertise and we know that marketing is more than just advertising.

Marketing utilises advertising as part of a larger strategy. As do you in your efforts to make money online. You are probably budgeting, analysing results, producing copy, maybe graphics, setting up sales funnels, offering support, researching trends, communicating with fellow ‘internet marketers’. There are a whole host of things you do, it just happens that a lot of them are on the internet.

How many real world jobs rely on the internet nowadays? A lot! However, we don’t put the word ‘internet’ before their job titles just because they use the internet.

So why do we call ourselves internet marketers?

It makes no sense especially if you apply the rules of the real world. From this moment on, no longer call yourself an internet marketer.

YOU ARE A MARKETER!

That’s great and we all feel very proud about it but how does that help?

Well, now that you are thinking like a marketer and NOT an internet marketer, a lot changes.

How you do your research, where you learn new strategies and techniques, what tasks you should be prioritising, what you need to improve on, resourcing your time… the list goes on!

For example, in real world marketing, copy is king. If you can’t write great copy, or know someone who can, campaigns will struggle. But how much time have you spent researching what makes great copy and trying desperately to improve your own skills?

The main benefit of the internet as a platform for marketing is the speed and cost you can produce advertising. You can copy and paste text into an article directory, create a PDF which you can upload to a document sharing site or set up an advert on Google AdWords. That is so much quicker and accessible than trying to get such a prominent advert in a magazine or a newspaper.

So the process of getting your message in front of people is quicker and cheaper but that shouldn’t mean that the skill and the science behind producing that message is forgotten. Whether you are writing an article for a traditional magazine or a blog post to promote your product, the same amount of work should go into producing the content. The same techniques are needed to get the result you want.