The Book
The concept for Web Marketing Method is to develop an online book which evolves over time. It’s all about web marketing and focuses on strategy and best practice methods.
The gap in web marketing sites
A search on the term “web marketing” will return well over 100 million pages, spanning hundreds of thousands of sites. So before we’ve even considered print publications it would already seem like the world doesn’t really need another resource dedicated to the subject. Of course I can’t say I’m familiar with everything out there, but of the sites, magazines and books I have seen dedicated to web marketing, web design, web development, SEO, SEM, social media, online advertising and anything else web marketing related, I still think there is a gap…
It’s way too difficult to find a good resource which takes a step back to explain the big picture.
Most of sites now run a blog and many of them are great – check out our web marketing Twitter list for some of the best that I follow. The problem is that blog posts and magazine articles in particular provide you with only a tiny piece of the big picture. Think of each blog post or article as a brick of information, and once you have one brick you’ll naturally want to start collecting more. While many of them are of exceptional quality a brick is only useful when put together with more bricks in a structured way. You’ll also find some bricks are not quite the right size, and this means the information is actually not relevant to what you’re doing.
Over time when you have a collection of bricks you’d most likely want to use them to build something, but what? A barbecue, a fence, a house, a pub? Who knows? The critical problem here is that each brick of information has no instructions of what you’re supposed to build, or how you’re supposed to build it. Even the best information out there expects you to put the knowledge together yourself.
On a more positive note there are increasingly more university degrees and training courses dedicated to web marketing, and to compliment this the industry is creating more and better career opportunities daily. So if you have the opportunity this is a great path to take, however the aim of Web Marketing Method is simply to provide a short cut.
With the site I’m planning to describe the processes required to build effective sites and web marketing campaigns regardless of what the purpose is. While it’s taken a long time to build up this information and get some kind of structure around it – I started university and a career in the mid-late 1990′s – I don’t actually think it’s that difficult. In hindsight I would have really appreciated a resource like this over the years so hopefully you’ll find it useful.
Web Marketing Method is for anyone involved in web marketing
This issue I’ve described above is essentially why many web marketing efforts fall over, and often well short of their full potential. The people behind the effort, despite having the best of intentions, were just not clear on what they were building in the first place. A lot of time can be spent on chasing the latest buzz words without knowing if they’ll help the cause – or even worse, focusing on activities which will have minimal impact through fear of experimenting with something new.
Lack of direction can be a problem for the best web developers, the most analog marketing professionals and everyone in between. In such a fast moving industry maintaining direction is critical.
Web Marketing Method plans to solve this problem by giving you the blueprint. The book will tell you everything you need to know so that you can decide which tools will work best in your web marketing strategy. You can then use all the bricks of knowledge to make the most grand barbecue, house, pub or even skyscraper in town!
And of course there’s a blog as well
To compliment the book we’ll also be running the Web Marketing Method blog. The idea is that the information in the book will not need to change too frequently as the base principles of web marketing will always remain the same, just like those for traditional marketing. The blog will add detail to the information in the book, and will also feature the latest from other great blogs.
Always remember if it’s not making sense you can ask me a question any time and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.