An appealing aspect of internet marketing to lots of people is the way in which the whole business can be automated. To many, the real incentive to become involved in an online business venture is not just the money but the flexibility, the freedom and the enhanced lifestyle which it can give. For instance, there is no commuting to work every day of the week. If you are working from home you can begin your day’s work whenever you wish, perhaps while sitting at the breakfast table eating your cornflakes whilst the rest of the world sits in traffic jams, copes with road works or suffers an hour or so of discomfort standing shoehorned into an overcrowded train.
Internet marketers don’t think in terms of hours worked but in terms of projects done. The work has to be done and it is very important to structure your life in such a way as to ensure that the work really does get done within a planned timeframe. However, marketers are always in control of their own lives, there is no boss breathing down their neck, they control their own destiny; – they call the shots.
Ii is a sad fact that I have often heard parents of grown-up children bemoaning the fact that they missed out on a great deal of their children’s developing years because of the pressures of work. This is especially true in this day and age when both parents often have to work to support the family. Childminders, therefore, will often oversee much of a child’s early experiences outside school. The freedom which an internet business gives means that parents can really share in their offspring’s childhood. They can even attend school events in the working day by a simple process of juggling around their work times, something usually impossible for those working in a traditional workplace.
The automation possible in today’s internet marketing has made online business even more flexible than ever. Given that much of the business conducted on the internet is about the provision of information of one kind or another, there is rarely any significant hands-on aspect to the business. In my lifetime I have seen computers develop from massive machines the size of an office block (which took ten minutes to work out a weekly shopping bill) to handy little pocket-sized devices which can run a multinational company in a couple of seconds a day. Computers do much of our thinking for us in all walks of life. We are often not aware of the many situations where computers are at work in the background.
Computers are, of course, the essential workhorses of our online businesses. Combining the power of a modern computer with the software now available makes all sorts of things possible. The number of different processes which a computer can handle almost instantly gives us all kinds of opportunities to automate our online business. This is particularly true of digital products.
I have a website which sells an e-book I entitled “How to play the oboe in one easy lesson”. I created a simple website about 10 years ago to sell my product through Clickbank. I researched my keywords carefully and got the site to the number one spot on Google. Since then I have not touched the website. It just ploughs its own furrow making sales purely from a combination of its Google ranking and a carefully written sales letter. It doesn’t sell large numbers of copies because it is such a specialised field but sales have been ticking over steadily for all that time. It is still on the first page of Google (or it was the last time I looked) even though I have done no further work in that area since I first posted the website. That is the value and the power of passive income made possible by an automated sales system.
In addition to SEO which provides the traffic mainly generated by a series of articles I wrote on oboe playing and posted on article sites, I could have used pay-per-click promotion or other kinds of advertising of which there are several. The attraction of the free article marketing was that, at the time, I had little money available to invest.
If your product is in the form of CDs, DVDs or printed items, these can be outsourced to a fulfilment house where your items will be produced as required, packed and posted in response to orders that come in. This is another aspect of an automated system. They say of passive income that it is all about being paid many times for work you did once. That, of course, assumes that you did the work well in the first place.
The ultimate automation is provided by Autoresponders which can do so much for you in terms of list building as well as informing and following up on customers and visitors to your site. Once these have been programmed with messages, promotions, etc. they will run indefinitely and without any necessary input from the marketer except the occasional addition of new offers and special information. Autoresponders can be programmed to send out Newsletters at intervals too, another way to keep your list happy and enabling you to build a relationship.
So, to sum up, the attraction of internet marketing to many people is the quality of life it can give. The technology available can run your business on automatic pilot to a large degree enabling you to further enjoy the flexibility and freedom of running your own online business.