Digital Marketing Resources

Digital marketing is a billionaire industry going on strongly for a quarter century. The variety of niches and career paths is enormous due to a simple fact: there are as many products and services as there are customer needs.

You know that human beings are complex, each person is a world. If we put together the needs of all persons the list becomes virtually endless.

Digital marketing works to target the customer needs in a way that is:

• Focused on the niche
• User-oriented
• Centered on the customer’s need

A problem of Digital Marketing: Fake Gurus

With an industry that keeps on growing and rewarding those who work in it with increasing profits there’s bound to be stampedes of new entrants.

With crowds of new entrants, the signal to noise ratio in the digital marketing community gets distorted. This global, industrial chaos is a breeding ground for a particular type of scammer: the fake guru.

Fake gurus are alleged digital marketers that succeeded in the DM industry. They offer coaching, training and courses directed to novices. Problem is, a great percentage of the ones that search engines and platforms like YouTube promote are fake.

Some of them sell outdated, incomplete or otherwise useless knowledge.

Others will downright steal your hard-earned dollars with some kind of confidence man sleight of hand. Meaning that you won’t even get outdated/useless content.

To scam people is evil. When they scam someone, they put the unwitting person that trusted in them in a situation of undeserved stress and possibly let them at an economic disadvantage.

The resources you’ll find here are cross-checked all over the web for veracity. You won’t find a link to a fake guru on these pages, I guarantee you that.

Affiliate Marketing

The king of marketing for the 21st century.

Affiliate marketing is a godsend for those marketers that want to work selling stuff but don’t have the means or the will to carry an inventory of physical or digital products.

There are many ways to work as an affiliate marketer. In the same way, there are a lot of different types of content used to reach your target customers promoting the products of others.

By promoting stuff to visitors and providing links to the merchant website you are selling, but in an indirect way. This, for regular affiliate marketing.

Then there is white label affiliate marketing. In white label affiliate marketing the merchant furnishes the publisher with a stock of products and authorizes the publisher to sell the products in her or his own website without the need to send the customer outside of it.

• Sales letter
• Squeeze page
• Affiliate network
• Affiliate program
• Affiliate product

Affiliate marketing is with us since the end of the last century. It is a commercial method to sell products and services that was designed with digital marketing in mind.

There are three main participants in an affiliate program.

The Affiliate Network

An affiliate network is a platform through which the affiliate sales get recorded. A few features of affiliate networks:

• Catalog: a means to managing, displaying and selling products or services
• Ecommerce system: manages the selling of products and payments to the merchants
• Affiliate Program: manages the linking of products and payments to the publishers

Some of the most famous affiliate networks are Amazon, Ebay and Etsy. There are others that are more geared to affiliate marketing only, like:

• ShareASale
• Clickbank
• Commission Junction
• Shopify
• Flex Offers
• Linkshare

The Merchant

The merchant is the owner or a reseller of the physical or digital goods. For instance, when you're selling products avaliable on Amazon the merchant is the company or business listing its products on the website.

The Publisher

Affiliate marketers are called publishers in the the affiliate marketing community. An AM doesn’t sell anything, she or he just promotes the products that are of interest for his or her visitors.

The publisher is the promoter of the goods. The publisher finds an audience with a need for a certain product or service. He creates content that promotes  the product or service that the said audience needs. When someone interested in the product promoted by the content the publisher created, reaches to page, the content persuades him to buy the product or service. 

Clicking the affiliate link takes her or him to the  merchant's website. If the person makes a purchase in the merchant's site, then it's a called a conversion and the publisher gets a commission.

Affiliate program

There are a great variety of affiliate marketing programs. The most common ones are the ones run by megaportals like Amazon and eBay.

Other portals, specifically designed for affiliate marketing, like Clickbank are similar to the two I named. They have a marketplace and you can choose any product that you like to promote.

In some of these programs, you need to ask the merchant for permission to market they products, but these are the exception not the rule.

Affiliate product

In some phrases of the content that promotes the product or service the publisher inserts links to a product. When someone interested in the product clicks on the link he or she is taken to the merchant’s website or the the affiliate network site.

If the customer that followed said link ends up purchasing a product or service on the merchant’s website, then the publisher gets a commission.

Search Engine Marketing

The customer-targeting chief for the 21st century. Let’s be honest here. You’re not going to go very far as a digital marketer if your website is not easy to find using a search engine.

A search engine marketing strategy includes many elements, among which we can count:

• SEO strategy
• SEM strategy
• Content strategy
• Content marketing
• Pay-Per-Click campaign

Social Media Marketing

The internet inside the internet, the king of customer relationships for the 21st century.

Since not long ago, when social media sites exploded demographically, the brands of the world have been working hard to leverage those channels.

The contemporary commercial models are a far-cry from what they were before. Today, brands generate a space where they can engage customers with:

• Interaction
• Brand-to-customer nurturing
• Customer support
• Customer participation

Some examples of copy that needs to be in place when you’re pursuing a social media presence:

• Social media marketing jobs descriptions
• Social media marketing agencies profiles
• Social media marketing plan
• Impressum