The 4Ps of Internet Marketing Writer: Rich B

4 Ps to describe the unique challenges of Internet marketing - Positioning, Permission, Partnership, and Performance

The Internet has given us a new way of looking at business. Mike Grehan came up with a new set of 4 Ps to describe the unique challenges of Internet marketing - Positioning, Permission, Partnership, and Performance.

The old saying in real estate is location, location, location. For websites, it's positioning, positioning, positioning. Whatever marketing method you decide to use, you need to make sure you're getting good positioning from it. If you're going to target the search term "Poker Cats", then focus on getting into the top 3 for those keywords. It is many times more effective to be number one for one keyword than number twenty for twenty keywords. If you're going to use CPC, make sure you're bidding high enough to get shown, otherwise, $100 will last you months because nobody will even see your advert. If you're going to buy banner ads or text links, make sure they are on relevant sites and visible and enticing to your target audience. If you don't have good positioning, you're not going to get any real benefit from the time you put into promoting your site. If this means you have to choose one thing, get good at it, then choose another, then so be it. You might have all your eggs in one basket, but that's a safer way to carry them than trying to juggle.

According to almost every big name in Internet marketing, the gold is in the list. The idea of this saying is that people who have given you permission to market to them are many times more valuable than people who you try to force your product on to. If you can run a newsletter for your visitors, that's a very good idea. Otherwise, the key idea here is to establish people's trust before you try and sell them stuff. Just throwing up links on your front page and expecting your visitors to follow them is a long shot (that said, it works if you're getting a large enough volume of cheap and free visitors). Show your visitors that you know what you are talking about, give them what they want, then they will be happy to sign up for the sites you suggest.


So there you have it, the 4 Ps of Internet marketing, yet another way of looking at how to run your business. I hope this article helped you. You might want to check out the Traditional 4Ps of Marketing or our Introduction to Online Marketing articles for more information on related topics.