Arizona High Tech Talent Partnership

Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing and all of its most important elements can be completely summed up in ten letters.

3 L’s

5 C’s

T and A ( or T & A )

The 3 L’s of Internet Marketing

In the real estate business there are three things that everyone knows are the most important three things needed to ensure success in real estate investing.

These three things are known as “The Three L’s” and are as follows:

1. Location

2. Location

3. Location

We all know that there is more involved with real estate success than simply location but if you don’t have a good location, all the rest will not matter.

Internet Marketing has a similar list of three L’s that are just as important to your online success as the 3 L’s of Real Estate are to success in real estate. The three L’s of Internet Marketing are:

1. Links

2. Links

3. Links

Links from other web sites pointing to your site are one of the most important factors in good search engine rankings. Appropriate, natural links from relevant sites within the same topic area as your site will build the value of your site in the eyes of search engines as well as sending interested visitors from the site linking to yours.

Just as in real estate, the three L’s are not all that you need but if you do not have good incoming links from valuable sites, nothing else you do will fix that problem.

The 5 C’s of Internet Marketing

The State Seal of the State of Arizona depicts the 5 C’s that were the backbone of the Arizona Economy back around 1912 when Arizona became a State and for decades later.

The five C’s were what made Arizona towns and communities grow.

School children in Arizona were taught that the five C’s: Copper, Cattle, Cotton, Citrus and Climate were the driving force behind Arizona’s economy.

Likewise, on the Internet there are 5 C’s that are the driving force behind the Internet economy. These 5 C’s define the most critical component of Internet Marketing and the most important factor in creating value and building community, wealth and power in the Internet economy.

Rather than being five distinct items, as is the case with Arizona’s five C’s, the five C’s of the Internet Economy is a simple phrase that completely defines the most important element of Internet Marketing and your key to success in building up your status on the Internet.

The 5 C’s of Internet Marketing are:

Continuous
Creation (of)
Clear
Compelling
Content

Or in active voice:

Continuously
Create
Clear
Compelling
Content

Each word is important.

Continuous means that you must be doing this all the time. You can no longer build a site, throw it out there and expect it to be well regarded and able to rank well on the search engines. Search engines like fresh material that has been updated recently so if you are not putting material on your site on a regular basis, you will not be achieving the true potential of your site.

Creation means that the material you put up on the Internet must be new and unique. It cannot simply be a copy of someone else’s material. It must be new enough that the search engines will not find dozens, hundreds or millions of copies of the same item while they are visiting other sites.

Clear means that the material needs to be well written, easy to understand, grammatically correct, spelled properly, translated by experts if necessary, and as concise and to-the-point as possible.

Compelling means that your material must be important enough, useful enough and understandable enough that people decide that they want to read it or see it, want to read or see all of it, and pass it on to others to read or see. Explosively successful viral marketing comes about as a result of compelling material, as visitors share it with friends, relatives, business associates, etc.

Content means that the material must have substance … a concept similar to the concepts of “mass” and “volume” used in physics. Words are content, text is content, some other kinds of media such as video, audio, and pictures are considered content by some people and will become more like content in the future but keep in mind the famous quote that sums up what is and is not loved by search engines.

“A picture is not worth 1000 words on the Internet.  The information is in the text.”
- Bill Austin

If you create clear compelling content on a continuous basis and you build an environment that makes it easy for people to link to your site and share your site with others, you will find that The 3 L’s of Internet Marketing begin to build and as that happens you will quickly find that the third important element of Internet Marketing begins to build and create the conditions that catapult your site to the top of the search engines.

T & A of Internet Marketing

Everybody laughs.

It is an almost universal reaction when I stand in front of a large crowd and declare that T and A are the most important elements in Internet Marketing. I didn’t understand what was so funny about that until I went to Google and entered the search term:

define:”T & A”

… Although I guess that “a Tonsillectomy and a Adenoidectomy performed at the same time” might be amusing to some, I still don’t find that particularly funny.

In the context of Internet Marketing, the term T & A stands for the absolute most important factors in online success, search engine rankings, and converting traffic to results (sales, revenues, profits, brand awareness, etc.).

T and A in the Internet context are Trust and Authority.

In the real world, people want to do business with well-known, knowledgeable (authoritative) and trustworthy people. On the Internet, search engines want to provide results that are useful and worthwhile to searchers and they have injected the elements of trust and authority into that goal. The major search engines seek to generate an estimate of the trustworthiness and authoritativeness of particular pages and web sites.

Trust and Authority can be derived from a number of factors.

Trust can be derived from elements of site design, site structure, site content, age of the domain, Top-level Domain (TLD) of the domain, and from the existence or creation of relevant links from trustworthy sites.

Authority can be derived from the existence or creation of large volumes of authoritative content as well as from the existence or creation of relevant links from authoritative sites.

Both authority and trust can be influenced by the age of links, the age of content, the quantity of links, the quantity of content, the relevance of links, the relevance of content, the context of links, the context of content, the diversity of links and the diversity of content.  It is all about links and content driving trust and authority.

The three L’s of Internet Marketing and the Five C’s of Internet Marketing serve to drive trust and authority and trust and authority influence the major search engines’ ranking algorithms and the results that they serve to the searching public.

Reputation management should be a major part of your marketing efforts.

Both online and offline - your reputation is the key to leads, referrals, sales and profits. Generating real world trust and authority and online trust and authority for your name, your company, and your brands, will go a long way toward making every other part of running your business fall into place.