Internet Marketing Pakistan

Understanding the Internet Business Value Chain is about understanding the big picture. How is an internet business different from an offline business? How is it similar to an offline business? What works in keyword research, market research, affiliate and service marketing, blog development, search marketing, social media campaign, conversion rates, sales funnels and analytics tracking?

Sounds overwhelming? It did to me, and that is why I went about developing a model that would encompass the big picture of internet business so we could all talk about the same things in the same language.

So, the Internet Business Value Chain is:

the planning, development and implementation of Market Identification, Conversion Model Development, Landing Page Development, Traffic Generation, Conversation Management and Analytics Tracking activities to generate revenue online.

I will now take the individual value links and discuss them in detail:

Market Identification

Keyword Research is the basis of all internet business. Mastering Keyword Research takes a lot of experimentation and practice, but it yields results. I use Keyword Research as the jump start phase for all of my courses and projects. Researching an online market for your product or service requires knowledge of some tools, basic understanding of demographics and buying behavior, and the will to understand and dissect a market into primary and secondary niche markets. I am a big picture person myself. In order to understand and dominate a market, I like to understand how the market has been laid out with Keyword Research.

Other sources of Market Identification are offline resources like magazines or online resources like Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo Buzz and Google Insight for Search.

Conversion Model Development

Conversion is the completion of any planned action for a target market. It can be a simple click somewhere on a web page or it can be the purchase of a product. In Conversion Model Development internet businesses can choose to be affiliate marketers for someone else’s products or develop their own affiliate network to boast sales of their own products. Internet businesses tend to be less fickle about the number of visitors to a landing page than they are worried about the number of visitors which actually completed a desired action. It makes sense too, as the greater the conversions the more the profit.

Conversion Model Development is also about developing categories of visitors. Some visitors will be browsers and sufers and others will be buyers. It is the buying visitor that is more interesting to an internet business because technology helps to mark and track these visitors so they can be put in a sales funnel. There are many techniques that help raise the conversion rate and I will discuss those in a later post.

Landing Page Development

A landing page can be any web page, blog, affiliate page, social media profile page, and free hosted page that is targeted to the needs of a target audience and offers a solution to their problem. A collection of such landing pages may be used to address the same need in different ways. A good example would be a site with an offer page, a frequently asked questions page and a conversion page. Usability and accessibility concepts are heavily used in building effective landing pages which have a high conversion rate.

Traffic Generation

If you build it, they will not come. Traffic generation steals the limelight when discussing the internet business value chain because SEO (search engine optimization), Search Marketing, Pay Per Click Advertisement, Pay per Acquisition Advertisement are the current buzz words. Successful internet businesses spend a lot of time and money on growing natural traffic to their money making landing pages by ranking high on search engine result pages. Traffic should be relevant, and targeted.

Conversation Management

Web 2.0 has changed the nature of communication on the internet and it is still changing to a newer model as you read this. I have seen Google search result pages return more and more results from Social Media Properties like Facebook, Orkut, Youtube, Blip and Social Bookmarking Properties like Propellor, Delicious and Digg. This means that there are lesser spots on the first page of Google search results to compete on than ever before. Internet businesses are implementing innovative social media strategies to become part of the conversation on the internet.

Analytics Tracking

What separates offline businesses from online business is the latter’s unprecedented ability to track every part of its value chain. Internet businesses use complex analytics software like Google Analytics to track every visitor and click on their landing pages. They can tell where the buyers are coming from, what campaign is working and where are they wasting important advertising dollars.