This is something I’ve been thinking about recently – for a while, actually. And I’m in an interesting position to have witnessed first-hand what I’m about to share with you. I’ve been marketing online since 1995, so I’ll mix a bit of my story in with this overview of the evolution of internet marketing.

In the beginning, there was . . . SPAM

Of course, back then it wasn’t called SPAM and unfortunately it’s still around. But I remember when I first discovered internet marketing. It was 1995 and my girlfriend at the time had AOL. Every day her inbox was filled with all these really cool offers from different companies. Today we know this as SPAM and it’s not so cool, but back then the whole thing was so novel that I used to read the messages out of curiosity and sometimes I’d even call the companies and to find out more. I even bought an advertising package from one of these companies and launched my first web business via “direct email marketing” – and it worked! Pretty shortly thereafter, people (including myself) got sick of all these emails and SPAM-ing became of frowned upon practice.

Next came long web copy

The next stage of evolution was the use of long copy sales letters. This had been used in direct mail marketing for year and now found it’s way onto the web. There’s a basic formula for writing a sales letter that almost all of them follow (and I’ll go over it in a future articles). So I studied every one I could find and launched my second web business, which was just a long sales letter that sold a 30-day training course (delivered by email) on how to do business online. When I launched it, though, I didn’t have a list or really any way to promote it so I contacted the biggest players I could get in touch with and offered them a cut to send a message out about my product. This is known as affiliate marketing and was just taking offer back then. Through all these affiliate promotions I built up my own list of customers and subscribers to my newsletter. Then I launched a few more small info businesses, built in some viral marketing aspects and added a software as a service business, which I started with partners and later bought out. And over the next couple years I built up a pretty sizable mailing list…

Email marketing – the easy way

At this time in internet marketing history, email marketing was about the easiest way to make money you’ve ever seen. I’m not kidding when I tell you that I could send out an email that simply said “Go buy this product…” and my subscribers would go buy it and I’d get paid. It was like being able to print money on demand. I think a lot of this was owed to the fact that internet marketing was really brand new and people were hungry for information, which (in this industry) was not free. Plus there wasn’t a lot of competition back then so if you had a list, then you could sell products. The interesting thing is that because it was so easy I got lazy and took about 5 years off. I traveled and played and had fun . . . and in the mean time, the game changed…

Email marketing gradually became less and less “easy” for several reasons. First, it became difficult just to get email delivered to your subscribers these days. People, ISP’s and email programs filtered out a huge portion of legitimate commercial email. So getting your message to your subscribers was the first challenge. Secondly, people got so sick of marketing messages in their inbox that you couldn’t simply say “go buy this” anymore. Things had to be built up first, which brings us to…

Product Launches

The next phase of internet marketing was the advent of the product launch. It seems like a couple years ago there was a new launch every week (sometimes more than one a week). The phenomena of the product launch was so exciting that it worked like magic. People got so hyped up with anticipation that $2,000, $3,000 and even $10,000 courses were selling out in a week or less (sometimes in just a few hours).

The build up was just a week or two of talking about how great the product is and how much you’re going to benefit from it, but somehow it worked . . . for a while. Then people got hip to this kind of hype, too. Product launches are still strong today, but they have evolved in the own right, which brings me to what works today and what’s going to continue to work in the future…

Content!

It’s unanimous, search engines and humans love content – go figure. People are too smart today to go for hype or pushy sales tactics. What’s going to sell today is . . . free! That’s right, free sells. Look at the most popular sites online today – they’re all free. Look at one of the most successful web companies in the world – Google – almost everything it offers is free. That’s what sells and that’s what’s going to continue to sell in the future.

Even look at how product launches have changed. The pre-launch now includes tons of great free content, which gives you enough information to actually be of value. Successful pre-launches are not focused on hyping up the product. They provide usable content and training that the product expands upon. So anyone who finds the pre-launch material valuable will naturally want to buy the product – they don’t have to be sold.

How do you make money with free?

Simple. You provide as much value as you possibly can, and you do it for free. You build trust and goodwill by doing this. You build a relationship with the people you’re providing free content to and you become an “authority” on the subject you’re providing content on. Then when you find, build or create something of value that’s actually worth paying for, your subscribers (your online friends) will be happy to buy from you . . . because they like you and they trust you.

But you do all this without worrying about how you’re going to make money, because you trust that when you provide real value you will receive compensation for it. Maybe not immediately and maybe not in the way you expect, but it will come back to you. This is a fundamental law of the Universe and you need to trust it.

OK, how do you provide value?

Well, that’s the catch. You can’t fake it. You have to have something of value to offer. the process is simple but creating good content is not. We’ll talk more about how to create value in a future article, and I do have a solution for you. For now, I just wanted to share this with you so you have a basic understand of the history of internet marketing and where things stand today.

Notes:

1. I’m not saying email marketing doesn’t work – it does. I’m just saying it’s different than it used to be and the focus of your business needs to be on building value.
2. We’re not talking about advertising or traffic generation here. That’s a whole other ball of wax, and we will be talking about that in future articles.
3. There’s nothing for you to do or buy to get the most out of this article. This is just for fun and education. And to lay the groundwork for your expectations of what it takes to build a successful business online today.