12/11/08
When most people are asked “What do you do?” they often respond with a job title or a simple description of their line of work. As an internet marketer, my response is more of a chuckle followed by a deep breath…after all, my official title at work is Manager of Marketing Technology. Whether that sounds impressive or insanely boring to you I’m sure you’re wondering what in the world it means. Well, I’ve put together what I call the internet marketing mindmap to provide an overview of what an internet marketer does.
The internet marketing mindmap has a foundation of “increase website traffic”. While many would say that “making money” is the primary goal, it’s actually the traffic that leads to success. Also, “making money” may not always be the ultimate goal. It could be to win a contest or election, increase awareness to a cause, build a community of like-minded people, etc. Whatever the “goal” is, there is always the foundational requirement to increase website traffic. So, with that said, let me break down what you’re about to see.
First, there is a foundation of “Increase Website Traffic”. Under that are three keystone methods for doing that:
- Search engine optimization
- Direct traffic
- Referral traffic
That is the simplest breakdown of internet marketing and what I do to increase traffic to a website. From there, I created the mindmap below to expand on the various methods I use to do each of the three steps above. I’ve tried to keep the map as general as possible so that it can be utilized with any website marketing strategy. Feel free to print out the map and use it for your own sites. Hopefully this provides a sense of method to the madness and can help your projects or even help you communicate to others exactly what you do for a living.
Right-click and choose “Save Link As” on the image below to save it, print it, post it, etc. You can also click it to preview.
As a side-note, I used ConceptDraw’s MINDMAP software for the Mac to create this.
If you have methods that you’d like to add, please share them in the comments section below!
Shane Eubanks
January 19th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
That’s a pretty great mindmap. I need to formalize my “strategy” (if you could call it that…) a bit more. At the minute, I mostly just use the services that I find fun and don’t think too much about promotion.
I know that it’s definitely possible to have fun and self-promote at the same time though, without overdoing the self-promotion. Going to try that out a bit more! (Though I doubt I’ll ever get around to participating in *all* those sites! xD )
January 19th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I have to admit that I don’t use everything on this list for all of my projects, but it definitely helps me visualize the “options” if that makes sense. Some sites/techniques in the list work better for one project more than another (video is a good example). So I just created this to give an overview of the marketing options each project has.
Glad you like it!
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:37 pm
I would have to agree that it is a great mindmap… but I think you are missing one major node off from your SEO section “Analytics.” You even mentioned using analytics in this post:
http://www.shaneeubanks.com/internet-marketing/how-to-increase-your-adsense-revenue/
I would also have to disagree that the “increasing of website traffic” is the main role of an internet marketer.
Say you have an ecommerce site which gets 3000 visitors a day with a 10% conversion rate, so that 300 people convert. If you market completely out of scope and on for an increase in traffic I believe you are heading the wrong way.
Say the traffic to this site doubles however th conversion rate drops to 2% instead of 10% because those visitors may no longer be ones who fit your demographic or need your products / services.
Analytics are a great tool and necessity in my opinion. From web analytics, site search, customer emails, etc. are great ways to find what people are saying, searching, and wanting.
Nice post though overall.
March 2nd, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Thanks for the comments, Kristopher, and I absolutely agree that conversion rate is extremely important in a successful website. I should clarify that I base the “foundation” of a successful website off of traffic simply because (and this is an exaggeration) if a site has 0 traffic, then conversion rate is pointless. Therefore, a site requires traffic before conversion rates can be determined. This is the reason I call it the “foundation”. Make sense?
Once a site starts establishing traffic, we can begin to see fairly accurate conversion rates and then start tweaking various aspects of a site or page to increase the conversions just as you saw in the other article you pointed out.
And yes…I need to work in a section on analytics. Thank you for pointing that out!
Some people’s eyes may glaze over when they think about this stuff, but I think the challenge of it is fun. Call me crazy…but it’s pretty cool.
January 12th, 2010 at 1:44 am
Hallo Shane,
very nice post and mindmap. It really helped me communicating the big picture of internet marketing.