Image via Wikipedia

As an independent professional service provider looking to succeed online you’re going to encounter one fundamental problem. You – your time, your skills, your personality, your charisma – are not scaleable.

No matter how well you market yourself, and how much business you bring in, you can only do so much of that work yourself. Once you’re fully booked, you’re fully booked – you can’t take on more work until you stop doing something else.

How to scale your online business

There is one absolutely vital thing that you do own, however, which is valuable and truly scaleable: that’s your knowledge. By packaging your expertise effectively, and turning it into a product rather than a professional service, you do two things:

1. You make access to your expertise more affordable to a much wider audience
2. After the initial investment of creating your knowledge product you’re free to sell it to as many people as you can without much additional demand on your time and resources.

But how do you go about developing a product based on your knowledge and expertise?

Dave Navarro, AKA “The Launch Coach”, has built a successful online business showing people just like you how to do exactly that!

I’ve been working through Dave’s excellent free online marketing workbooks in the LaunchCoach Library. The workbooks take you step-by-step through:

• 7 steps you can take to playing a much bigger online game
• 7 steps to networking yourself to A-Listers
• 7 simple income streams that you can actually create
• How to start making real money with your product in just 3 days

The thing I like most about Dave’s style is that he avoids the usual marketing hype of your typical online “gurus”, and gets straight to the meaty stuff that’s really valuable to people like you and me who are looking to turn our expertise into a scaleable online business.

I’m not a “guru.”  I’m just a guy who’s pretty darned
good at teaching people how to do things in a simple
step-by-step, you-can-do-this manner.

Dave Navarro – The Launch Coach

The free stuff that Dave offers is amazing – but if you’re looking to fast-track your online product creation and promotion skills, you should check out his latest offering

Two downloadable Workshops — 10 great training modules — that show you how he built his own online business, and that could be just the catalyst you need to kick start your online business.

I’m certainly going to check it out. You’ll find all the details on Creating Products that Sell & Building a Responsive List on Dave’s site.

Toyota teamed with comedy director Jody Hill to create this creative series of online videos featuring a couple of self-absorbed parents and their young family with the only vehicle that can match their awesomeness, the Toyota Sienna.

The ads seems to be resonating with parents and are generating a lot of buzz through this clever hip hop parody. Check out the full series of Swagger Wagon videos here… and watch for this one cropping up in 2010 online marketing awards later this year.

But as Chris Pirillo points out at LeWeb 2009, the tools are NOT the community – the community is the people using the tools, the connections between them.

My favourite quote from Chris’s presentation:

If you believe a community is a tool, then you yourself are a tool.

Communities aren’t about tools and they’re not about technology – communities are about people, and understanding people is far more valuable than understanding the underlying platforms and technology when it comes to being a part of and harnessing the potential of online communities.

Image by DavidErickson via Flickr

Time to breathe a bit of life back into this blog.

Between writing and promoting Understanding Digital Marketing, work with SOHO Solo, Career Moves and other editorial commitments things have been pretty hectic. Damian and I have also just signed publishing contracts with Kogan Page to do a follow up book. So, interesting times ahead.

Distilling the very best in online marketing for you

The new book, which is set for delivery to the publishers by 31 January 2010, and should hit the shelves the middle of next year, will focus on how organisations around the world are harnessing integrated online marketing to drive their business forward, improve their ROI and enrich their relationship with their customers.

We’re in the process of putting together an international panel of online marketing experts – acknowledged leaders in their respective fields – to help us select the very best examples of online marketing in the world today. Together we’ll deconstruct them and analyse the lessons that others can learn from these innovative campaigns.

Stay tuned for more updates, and regular online marketing content here and on the soon to be re-vamped “Understanding Digital” website.

The internet is a superb market research tool for your new or growing businesses. It can provide all sorts of useful insight into your industry, your competitors and, most importantly of all, your customers. In this article and the next in our series we take a look at twelve ways that the internet can make gathering marketing intelligence more productive and less costly for your fledgling business.

1. Read industry association websites: A quick search for industry related websites in your favourite search engine will unearth all sorts of valuable information: up-to-date news, white-papers, research and best practice guidelines, and more to inform the strategic direction you take with your new business. Decide to join, and you’ll probably get access to even more online resources, training and support….

2. Subscribe to analyst newsletters and report updates: one of the main sources of information for market research is reports from analyst firms like Forrester Research, Gartner Group and others. Stay ahead of the game by subscribing for e-mail updates on new analyst reports for your industry. You’ll get up-to-the minute summaries of the latest research direct to your inbox, and can invest in a full report or two if you feel it will help your business.

3. Use news aggregators to keep up-to-date: know what’s going on in your industry by searching for relevant keywords on news aggregation sites like Google News (news.google.com) and Yahoo! News (news.yahoo.com), both of which offer convenient, easily accessible window to global and local news stories, press releases and other material. You’ll have access to a much wider range of material that’s infinitely more useful than scanning through hundreds of print publications.

4. Read blogs: blogs (short for web-logs) are personal publishing platforms that allow people to post their thoughts on anything and everything to the web. A lot of them, naturally, won’t be relevant to your business, but dismissing blogs could be a serious mistake. The most popular bloggers on a particular subject can command huge audiences, and have massive influence on opinion in online communities. Reading these blogs can offer you valuable insight into what these key influencers in your field think. Remember, blogs are a two-way medium – so check out the comments to see what readers think, and perhaps even offer an opinion or two of your own.

5. Check out online forums: online forums can be great places to glean valuable information and advice for your business, and to identify the online influencers in your space. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in – a quick search is sure to unearth relevant interactive forums full of people passionate about your particular subject. Many of them are only too happy to share their experience, expertise and insight with newcomers. Just remember it’s a two-way-street, so be sure to engage in the conversation and help others out whenever you can.

6. Keep your finger on the online pulse with media submission sites: find out what’s flavour-of-the-moment with online consumers by checking out the top stories on online media submission sites like Digg.com (www.digg.com), StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com) and others. These sites allow people to recommend, vote on and discuss news articles, blog posts and web pages they’ve seen online. As well as more general sites, be sure to check out industry specific media submission sites (Sphinn.com, for example, is an online media submission site for search and internet marketers). More of these are emerging all of the time, and they can give you a very industry-centric indication of what’s hot and what’s not online.

Pursue more established online marketing strategies and ignore social media and your letting a golden opportunity slip by – but by equal measure, if you put all your efforts into social media and eschew more established online avenues you could be missing the lions share of online business.

Or as Damien puts it:

How many people have an email address, how many have a Facebook account?

Consider all your options

You absolutely can’t ignore the online "conversation"… but then neither should you neglect the more established elements of online marketing, like e-mail, SEO, PPC, affiliate programmes and even online display advertising if it dovetails with your particular audience. Also, its often worth considering how offline marketing can augment and complement your online campaigns.

Do your homework

Know what you want to achieve before you start, know your market and where they spend their time online, identify the key influencers. Then align your marketing strategy accordingly.

New marketing doesn’t kill old marketing

Marketing is evolving — but that evolution doesn’t eradicate what preceded it, it just adds more strings to the marketers bow, giving you a suite of new and exciting ways to engage with the people who really matter to your business.

You can see — or rather hear the proof of this in any outdoor market, anywhere in the world. From the street markets of London to the Souks of Marrakech to Asia and beyond,  you’ll find the very first marketing medium in history — the human voice — employed to hawk the merchants’ wares, as effective in the digital age as it ever was.

A more rounded future

I think we’ll see a much more holistic approach to marketing emerge over the next few years, and will gradually see the stark delineation between "traditional" and "online" marketing converge into a much more rounded whole. We’ll stop thinking in terms of “traditional” versus “digital”marketing… it will just be marketing, and we’ll employ a carefully tailored blend of techniques spanning a variety of media to engage effectively with our target market.

It’s going going to take time, of course… but it promises to be an intriguing transition.

We’re in the final furlong now. After six months of hard work the body of the book is written, and we’ll be getting the final bits and pieces (figures, diagrams, glossary, case studies, etc.) out to the publisher over the next week or so.

Phew! It’s been a marathon… but worth it.

Estimated publication date in the UK and Ireland is very early 2009 with international markets following later next year.

Very exciting stuff!

Why write this book?

Understanding Digital Marketing is a book for anyone who want’s to take their marketing to the next level by making the leap to digital as it moves into the mainstream. It’s for small business owners, traditional marketers, entrepreneurs and business executives who want a comprehensive overview of online marketing that will help them to hit the ground running to promote their business on the Internet.

It will:

• Help people with little knowledge of digital marketing to get up-to-speed quickly
• Deliver the the basic know-how people need to work effectively with online marketing professionals
• Provide a solid foundation for business owners and entrepreneurs looking to implement their own Internet marketing campaigns

More news on publication dates and availability nearer the time – meanwhile, subscribe to the Digital Marketing Success RSS Feed or check back regularly for extracts, insight and news from the online marketing world. And don’t forget to let us have your feedback in the post comments.

Calvin & Damian!