Internet Marketing Blueprints – Emerson Says They Cause “Trouble”

Internet marketing blueprints. The much searched-for golden egg of making money on the Internet. We are all searching for that one effective, sure-fire, guaranteed step-by-step guide to riches. Preferably, it should be “secret” and “never-before-revealed”. We are all ready to make the sacrifices of time and effort. And we are even ready to learn a few skills (HTML, how to use FTP, CPanel etc.) All we need is someone to give us the exact steps. The formula. “Just tell me everything I need to DO!” Here is what Ralph Waldo Emerson has to say about this:

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

An Internet Marketing blueprint is, in essence, a “method”. So we could paraphrase and get:

“As to Internet Marketing blueprints there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully create his own Internet Marketing blueprints. The man who tries Internet Marketing blueprints, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Time and again, I read sales material about some way to make money on the Internet, and a key “benefit” of the product is that it is 100% Practical – No Theory!In Emerson’s terms, that means “100% Method – no Principles”. And in Emerson’s view – and mine – that is a recipe for failure. But people love the idea of “100% Practical” because it means (they assume) that they don’t have to think! They don’t mind working hard and perhaps learning a few skills, but thinking? – no thanks!

Here’s a specific example from my own experience. I recently signed up to follow a blueprint about Social Marketing. It is probably one of the best and most comprehensive step-by-step guides to building traffic using social networks and blogging. But I have to say…. “phew”! To be fair, the people who put it together make it clear that it’s hard work, and they don’t pretend there’s no thinking involved. But the amount of detail is massive. To follow it through requires a huge amount of dedication (which they make clear from the outset). And few people actually manage it all.

I quickly realized that I was never going to be able to follow all the steps, and for a lot of the time, I had no idea why many of the steps were there, nor what many of the terms meant. So I stopped following the steps and decided to try and extract the Principles.

What I’ve ended up with is a Mind Map containing the concepts, the principles and the resources organized in a convenient form. And now, I can develop my own blueprint – my own step-by-step guide – that fits in with my own needs and time availability.

The guys who put this system together are honest, respected people who know their field inside out and back to front, and they’ve put a huge amount of effort into making their system easily accessible and easy to use. But it could be so much better. They are no different from 99% of other people providing guidance in the Internet Marketing world (and many other worlds as well). Knowing a subject well is not a qualification for being able to organize and structure it so that others can learn it.

The way people learn, the mix of theory and practice, the different types of expertise, and how they are acquired and developed, the forms of practical support needed for different types of task and different stages of learning – these are all deep and complex issues that are not considered by people creating learning and guidance systems. These are – dare I say it – knowledge management issues!

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Be More Transparent Through Social Media

It is true that many companies nowadays are spending money with a kind of amounts they want, if may either be expensive or not just to get transparent through social marketing. They are willing to spend anything for developing programs to reach out and join the online communities because in our generation now, old print advertising is slowly shifting in social media marketing online.

Moreover, internet users can participate, comment and suggest when they join a certain group unlike an old story of having newspapers, magazines, radio and etc. social media allows and assured you that you’re getting your message across to a wider scope of audience since it is available via feeds.

As we know the main goal of social media marketing is to distribute your web content to the large scope of internet users. With the large population of social sites, you have a lot of options to choose what’s the best for you where you can get a good audience and customers. For further enhancing your marketing techniques, you can watch a video clips that will teach you regarding your online marketing needs and after learning something from it, you can share and do a video clip by yourself that will reveal a methods on how you can re-brand your videos to include your URL and have people directed to your website when they view this video.

You can even post it to as many video sharing sites as much as you want. Remember that visibility is the most essential thing you must do in social marketing because you can gain a lot of benefits when you recognized online. Moreover, you gain the power to influence people if you are properly guided. You will be able to learn a lot of strategies such as building more sites, generating leads, and ranking better in search engines.

Social media marketing can even continuously create pages with your back links to your site to increase traffic and link popularity. Make your self seen online and spread your influence through writing blogs, participating in forums and online communities. If you have good influence on your target market, it will not be difficult for you to gain customers and sell. Remember that people will only avail products or services from the people they trust, so start building a good name now.