7 Online Marketing Principles To Live By

If you don’t know, Tim O’Reilly is a pioneer in Internet marketing. But he’s more than your run-of-the-mill Internet marketer. He’s really a high technology maven, a man who first made his mark on the impression of the Internet before he started using it as a marketing tool – before anyone really started using it as a marketing tool.

In 2002, he wrote an outstanding piece of literature about online piracy and other thoughts on publishing on the Internet. It’s a great read for anyone who is a creative person and is thinking of using the Internet for marketing and publishing. But there are lessons in the article as well for small business owners who just want to make the most of this new publishing platform called the Internet. You can read Mr. O’Reilly’s article here.

As a service, I’d like to distill the article into 7 marketing principles for small business owners. Here are the 7 principles (taken verbatim from Tim O’Reilly).

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Piracy is progressive taxation.
Customers want to do the right thing if they can.
Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
File sharing networks don’t threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
“Free” is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
There’s more than one way to do it.

So what are the lessons for small business owners who have no need for file sharing services, don’t produce creative products like CDs, e-books, and other digital media, and who just want to do business with the folks in their own neighborhood?

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to focus on the last two principles – “Free” leads to a higher-quality paid service and “there’s more than one way to do it.”

Let’s talk about “Free”

One thing that many small business owners have not got a handle on yet is that by offering something of value for free they can often gain new customers over the long haul. If you own a dress shop, for instance, and you want to get new shoppers into your store, what can you give away for free to encourage them to visit you? Here are 5 suggestions for you.

In exchange for an e-mail address and/or a mailing address, offer a free dress pattern, which you will mail or e-mail to your website visitor once you’ve received their contact information. What does this do? It gives you the open door to send marketing information to that person in the future in hopes that they will visit your store to buy something. Granted, this will only work on people who like to sew their own dresses, but the value of the contact information you receive in exchange for that free dress pattern is golden.
Provide a discount coupon on store merchandise in exchange for the same contact information as in No. 1 above. Again, you get to send marketing material to this person in the future, but you get them into your store right now by encouraging a purchase with your discount coupon. You can e-mail the coupon, which the website visitor can print, or present the coupon on a secure web page that can be printed.
Establish a relationship with a complimentary service, such as a fashion magazine, and get that service to offer a discount or freebie in exchange for access to your mailing list.
Hold an event in your store and give out goodies to people who participate. You could offer cupcakes and coffee, for instance, to anyone who shows up at your store on a given day at the specified time. This gets people to your store for a no-obligation shopping opportunity and your investment in the “goodies” is a marketing expense that has the potential to lead to a net positive payoff.
Sponsor a contest. It could be anything from a free gift to the person who is the 100th customer to respond to an offer to purchase something in your store to a discount on merchandise to anyone who purchases a certain amount during a limited period of time. Use your creativity. You can encourage shopping at your dress shop by offering incentives.

Notice that by offering something for free you encourage people to buy from you. It’s ethical, it’s legal, and it works.

There’s More Than One Way To Do It

There isn’t just one way to market yourself online. There are a lot of ways to present your message and encourage people to do business with you. The Internet has presented small business owners like you with unlimited possibilities for business if you’ll just open your mind up to those possibilities. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of using your imagination and finding a partner to collaborate with.

I’m confident that you can turn your small business into an online marketing powerhouse – even on a local level – if you just focus on nuts and bolts principles rather than vaguely defined ideals. It’s a small world in which we live, but the big ideas are the ones that win when implemented craftily.