The Last Chapter - “Maintenance Phase”.
Anything that will give sustained growth of sales.
I won’t waste your time with the same old dross about the existing Internet Marketing techniques. Many books have been written about these various tactics. Some of them work very well. Some not at all. None of them if you don’t do things properly.
One thing is for sure and that’s that personally I haven’t seen the promised results from a lot of the paid advertising media on the net. I’ve generally stuck with super-powerful free advertising methods and those have always given me the best results.
Google ad words might be the very best form of paid advertising on the net right now, but even that requires a tremendous amount of discipline, testing, and patience. If you are willing to put that kind of effort into your advertising, go for it. There are a great number of excellent resources on these topics and I whole-heartedly recommend you read them.
However, I personally haven’t spent much time using those techniques and prefer to focus on high-impact partnerships that render the most positive results fast.
When I first started doing this back in the days of ROIbot, I didn’t have a name for it. Since then I’ve started using the term Integration Marketing.
Don’t let the term scare you. It’s really pretty simple.
Integration Marketing occurs any time you integrate a process that benefits you in to another process that you don’t own.
Here’s a simple example…
Let’s say you watch an infomercial selling a video called “How to Hold a Toad Race for Fun and Profit”. You call up the toll-free number to order the video and then right after the close of the sale they ask you if you would also like to order some Toad Food. Of course! How are you going to hold a Toad Race without Toad food, silly?
The person taking your order advises you that the Toad Food and the video will be shipped separately.
Why?
Well, it turns out that the Toad Food is not sold by the company that took your order. It’s being sold by someone else all together…
How the heck did that happen?
Well the Toad Food sellers are smart Integration Marketers, that’s what happened.
They saw that XYZ company was selling that Toad Race video and they though to themselves, hmmm I bet their customers would be interested in our Toad Food.
Darn skippy.
Now, there are many ways that the video company could have sold the Toad Food. They could have sold the Toad Food company their customer list. They could have mailed out a direct mail promotion to their customers themselves about the Toad Food and let the Toad Food sellers take the orders directly, record the results, and share in the profit
There are a lot of ways it could be done.
Integration, however, is perhaps the most direct and most powerful. See, when a customer is directly involved in a process it means they are already smack dab in the middle of doing something. That doing something is just about the hardest thing to get anyone to do. While they’re up off their butt and doing that something, why not get them to do something else?
It’s 100 times easier to get someone to do a second thing right after they do one thing (and the momentum is still there), than it is to get them to do one thing, wait………, and then get them to do something else.
Further, if you Integrate in to the right process, you don’t just have a customer off his ass, you also have one who is off his ass and asking where you are!
Here’s another very common example that has gained popularity on the Internet over the last couple years: “co-registration”.
A co-reg is very simple. You find someone who has a subscription box for an email newsletter on their site.
You approach them, and in return for some incentive or consideration, ask them to give their subscribers the option to sign up for your newsletter as well.
This can be done on the front end (“check this box to also subscribe to…”) or on the backend (“thanks for subscribing! Here’s another newsletter you may also enjoy”).
Do you see how you have “integrated” the process that benefits you (the sign up of your newsletter) to another process that belongs to someone else (the sign up of someone else’s newsletter)?
Read on...
Integration Marketing Primer
Like most of the great tactics on the net, they are really just analogues of good old direct marketing tactics.
My company may have been the first to employ it many many years ago on the Internet (then again, the net is so big, one can never know – I don’t know of any earlier examples, but people credit me with being the first), but I really shouldn’t take credit.
The real people who deserve the credit are the old school direct marketers who developed the early versions of this tactic. As with many of my tactics I simply looked at something that was happening offline and applied it metaphorically or structurally to the Internet.
At any rate, the first time I used this method was for a product called ROIbot many years ago.
ROIbot was the first remotely-hosted ad tracking service on the Internet. We very quickly gained immense popularity because at the time we were the only game in town.
There was a huge need we were filling and for a very short time we were the only ones filling that need.
I made some terrific blunders with that company (in its marketing and management), but I also had some terrific success as well – especially in the way we marketed it.
I knew that every new subscriber to the ROIbot service (who paid a nominal $17 per month fee) would end up meaning a lot more money to me over time.
That is, if the subscriber could pay again and again, he doesn’t mean $17 to me – he ultimately means $17 x however many months he stays on.
About the Author:
Mark Joyner is the legendary Internet Marketing Millionaire. Muhammad Shariq is the President of SecretsoftheMillionDollarMan.com. Get Mark's mind-blowing ebook for FREE at the website above.
7 Integration Marketing Tactics from an Internet Marketing Millionaire
