Articles on Internet Marketing

Reading articles on Internet marketing is a valuable learning exercise. One of the first places to look is the customer feedback section on the sites of your competitors and on online industry discussion groups and forums - what are people saying about the goods and services of your competitors? Where have they gone wrong? Don't repeat their mistakes.

The trick to a good Internet marketing case study analysis is to be able to apply what you have learned to your own business. When the vehicle company Ford was looking to boost sales of a transit van Connect in recent years, they found out that search engines were letting them down. The word 'transit', even though it was a term that technically only described their own vans, had fallen into the common vernacular, and so their site wasn't coming out on top when Internet users typed 'transit' into a search engine. A campaign that focussed on search engine optimization soon helped them up the rankings.

Wool merchant Awesome Ewe is another interesting case. It traded online by selling wool to its customers, and the company supplemented their first tentative steps into e-commerce with heavy direct e-mailouts and special offers to their customers. The company's products doubled year on year from 1999 to 2004 as it did this and also addressed the needs, questions and concerns from their customers.

Online bookseller Amazon.com is a good example of how establishing a strategic partnership - often with a 'real life' commercial venture - can help your product. In 2000 and 2001 reports showed that Amazon.com had lost around 80 per cent of its share value since its launch. Its share value recovered when news broke that it was Tips a strategic partnership with Wal-Mart. a chain big enough for shareholders to regain confidence in the company. This is a case study to learn from: are their any companies you can team up with that could help your cause, or open your product up to a wider audience, that doesn't count itself as a competitor?

Finally: putting appropriate key words into a search engine will give you an insight into someone else's experience. Try to find out - where did they spend their money? What worked for them and why? What didn't work and why? The American Marketing Association - www.marketing power.com - is also a useful source of industry information.