My Top Three Online Marketing Innovations
When I started to market online well over ten years ago, things were much different. It was difficult to accept payment for my products, to keep updating my Website, and to follow up with all of my customers. At the time, it seemed almost overwhelming, but I found a way to make it all work (think 50+ hours every week).
Now a decade later, there are three tools that have literally changed the way I do business, and made my online marketing business much easier to run on a daily basis. With that in mind, these are my top 3 Internet marketing innovations:
PayPal
Before PayPal, if you wanted to accept payments online, you needed to apply for a costly merchant account. Then you had to hope to be approved. This made it extremely difficult to get any online business off the ground.
Now from Ebay to simple websites, marketers are making millions of dollars in profits that they otherwise never would have without PayPal.
Autoresponders
The lifeblood of any online business is email marketing. The ability to collect the email addresses of your target market and follow-up with new product updates, current sales and promotions, and keep your business fresh in the mind of your hottest prospects is extremely powerful. So powerful in fact, that the innovation of autoresponders is responsible for millions of dollars in online sales every single year.
Blogs
Before blogs, it was extremely difficult to keep your site updated and fresh. With the creation of blog software such as WordPress, you can now post your content to your website with the press of a button. You don’t even need to know HTML or how to even write code. If that wasn’t enough, the search engines love blogs and index their pages much faster and more efficiently than your standard static website.
Today, many people are profiting handsomely after creating popular blogs in niches such as politics, sports and celebrity lifestyles. In fact, an article on CNN just broke the news about several famous blogs run by stay at home moms being sponsored by none other than Wal-Mart.
That alone speaks to the far reaching power of blogging and the culture surrounding it.
While this list may be different for everyone, there is no doubt about the impact these three innovations have had on all Internet marketers.