The 4 Ps - Product, Price, Place, Promotion - have been standard in pretty much every university marketing course for the last 40 years. Even if you tended to turn up to Marketing101 hungover because it was on Friday mornings, you probably still remember the 4Ps. I know I do. They are simply that central to studying marketing.
But do they really apply today? The Internet was supposed to usher in a new age of commerce where we can throw out all the old rules, right? Well, yes it was, and many things have changed in the last decade. Unfortunately, as the dot-bombs of the late 90s discovered, you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Good business is still good business.
So, let's look at the original 4 Ps and how they apply to your online business.
Product is the service you are offering to your customer. Traditional product decisions include function, appearance, packaging, and extra benefits. In terms of your website, we've done most of the work on functionality and appearance (although you can and should fine tune it for your visitors). The big thing is the benefits your site offers its visitors. The more benefits (especially content) you can offer, the better your product is.
Price is less directly applicable to an affiliate website although the central ideas of maximising revenue is still very important. Most affiliate programs run on a tiered system (and many affiliate managers will be willing to bump you to a special promotional rate for a month or two).
Place is perhaps the least relevant to an affiliate website. Basically the idea of Place decisions in traditional management is to ensure your product is available to as many potential customers as possible. We've invested in reliable high speed servers to take care of the technical end of site availability. In terms of Place, you are looking to make sure that any content you add is accessible, that your outbound links work correctly, and that you have adequate bandwidth allocated to your account for the traffic you will be bringing.
Promotion is what most people think of when they consider marketing. It's what most of the rest of this marketing guide is about. For traditional products, Promotion is the icing on the cake. Although it is (a lot) more important for affiliate websites than traditional products, it is not quite the be all and end all. Promotion for your website can be divided in many different ways, but the most obvious way is to distinguish between online marketing and offline marketing.
Hopefully this article gave you a bit of a different look at your affiliate business. The 4 Ps of Online Marketing provide another interesting perspective on online business.
