One of the problems with “marketing”, and the reason for so many definitions is that different people mean different things by it. The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”, which being an offline marketer in my previous life I agree with.

Typically marketers break down “marketing” into the elements of the marketing (or tactical) mix, often known as the 4Ps:

Product
Price
Place (Distribution channel – in info marketing this is the website)
Promotion (Marcoms)
- Advertising (PPC, SEO, sales pages)
- PR (pre-selling, press releases, article marketing etc)
- Sales (telemarketing, field sales etc)
- Word of mouth (viral marketing)

In service industries there are 3 more Ps that are often used (the extended marketing mix):

People (any person involved in the process, including customers)
Process (the process involved in buying a product from the customer’s point of view)
Physical evidence (branding, packaging, web design etc)

What many people mean by the term “marketing” is promotion, or marketing communications (marcoms). This is the process of actually getting the marketing message to the target market segments through advertising, PR and sales.

However, the main thing is to follow the right process, which is to identify a specific want or need; how to satisfy that want or need; identify and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the competition; and identify what you can do better or different.

Although I’ve never been to the System Seminar I have been meaning to for a few years, but feel pretty disinclined these days as it would mean a flight to London and all the security hassle that involves followed by a flight to Chicago and all the security and immigration hassle there too. In short, I just can’t be bothered with the stress.

However, Ken does put out a load of great content prior to the seminar every year in the form of interview podcasts with the faculty and this year is no exception. He’s posted an his first interview with Robert Middleton which you can download from Ken’s blog.

Always great to listen to at the gym.

Technorati Tags: Ken McCarthy, System Seminar, internet marketing

When I left my job and left England I didn’t really know what I was going to do next, but I did have a website that I played with and I toyed with the idea about starting an internet business, but didn’t really know how to go about it.

The last salary cheque I ever received was in June 2001, 6 weeks or so before I moved to Barcelona. I’d been working for a few years in marketing for telco/internet service providers and involved with the launch of ADSL in the UK for one of the main players at the time. However it wasn’t until I received a phone call out of the blue at the beginning of 2002 that the ball began to roll.

The call was from the sales director of a company selling a product online, and he wanted me to feature his product on my website , for which he would pay me a commission for every sale.

To be honest I didn’t think I’d sell a thing, but in the first month I made 4 sales for a whopping £50 commission. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it did show me that people apart from me would buy things online and that I could profit from it after all. After that start I pretty much managed to increase sales month on month until at one point I was earning around £3000/month for that one product.

Now that isn’t the only product I have been involved with selling and if you start to look for affiliate programs you’ll find them all over the place. But that isn’t the place to start – I was lucky in being contacted by someone who wanted me to sell their product AND that people actually wanted the product.

So what you need to do if you are thinking of starting an internet business of your own is to think about markets first, not products. By all means use products as ideas for indentifying markets, but you need to find out what do people want to buy? And then look at the competition, what do people want to buy and there aren’t many competing pages?

The huge advantage of affiliate marketing is that there is little risk for you – if you can get traffic and direct a good percentage of that traffic towards the sales page of the company you’re an affiliate for then it’s all down to how good their sales process is. And you don’t need to hold stock, or ship goods or deal with customers directly either.

There are plenty of places to find information on the internet about starting off in internet marketing, but one of the best places to start is the Thirty Day Challenge, run by Ed Dale and Dan Raine, which is completely FREE.

If you have more experience and want to reach the next rung of the internet marketing ladder then I’d suggest you look at Immediate Edge. It does cost, but the amount of info in there is amazing.

But the key thing about starting an internet business is that unlike me you can start your business while you have a job – it probably makes more sense for you to do this than do what I did and quit my job. With the right foundations and just a few hours a week you can start to live off the internet and work towards saying goodbye to your boss.