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    The 4Ps of Internet Marketing
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 / 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.

Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo! Search Marketing, formally known as Overture. This was the first large PPC network and is now second to only Google's Adwords.
Working together is a great way to get things done. It's been true since the first primitive animals started hunting in packs, and it will be true long into the future. However, partnership can also be a recipe for disaster. Almost everything you do on the Internet, from things as small as exchanging links to as large as a complete merger of two businesses is a partnership. Selecting who to partner with is an art rather than a science. The most important question I ask is “do I feel I can trust them?” if the trust is there, then it's a matter of working out how best to benefit each other. Partnership opportunities are everywhere on the Internet, from promoting someone's product in return for an affiliate commission, to using other people's newsletter lists, or running a freeroll poker tournament in conjunction with other portals, you're limited only by your imagination. The important thing to remember though is that no matter how tempting the offer, don't work with people you don't feel you can trust – it just isn't worth it.

Measuring your performance is important for just about any business. It's not just about the bottom line (although ultimately that is the most important thing), it's about knowing what works and what doesn't, about knowing where your visitors come from, what they do on your site, and where they go from it (hopefully to sign up for a partner's website), it's about knowing which of your partners and which banners are converting best for your traffic. Internet businesspeople are perhaps the only people more obsessed with statistics than baseball fans. Sure, you can run your business without statistics, but that's like saying you can drive a car with a blindfold on – I wouldn't want to try it.

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.