Advertising

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, defines advertising as a "form of communication whose purpose is to inform potential customers about products and services and how to obtain and use them." Read the Wikipedia article and follow the links.

You can also go to any library or text book or the web and learn tons of stuff about it.

We all need to communicate and promote our businesses but we don't necessarily have to do advertising. Print advertising has diminished in importance as our society has changed and web-based adveritising expenditures has begun to outstrip them. Internet advertising is either way ahead of print advertising or soon will be. Advertising on social media sites has moved up as well. Facebook is or was the 5th largest country in the world or will be.

I think of advertising as different from other forms of communication in that the business pays for specific messages. For example it pays a media outlet $X for N number of spots. If that same business stages a rock concert and pastes its corporate name all over everything it's something else, public relations probably.

If the business hosts a dinner at which a prominent person has paid to give a pitch for his business, the dinner is probably part of a public relations campaign, but the speaker is advertising. A thin line, but you get the point.

Be very careful what kind of promotion you do. You should have a tight business plan and sound monetization strategy. Then watch your expenses, be pretty confident it's going to get results, then make sure you get good advertising that doesn't break you and measure, measure measure. Any good advertising plan will have an evaluation strategy. If it's not paying off after X number of months or years, you rethink your approach and make appropriate adjustments.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is a must for entrepreneurs to know about. It's the way things are done. Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, has a great article on internet marketing, so I'll just quote it verbatim below, editing out nonessential info. But if you think you know everything there is to know, you don't. The field is so complex, so wide, so deep, and evolving so fast, it has changed since the last seminar you went to, even if that seminar was last week.

Internet marketing, also referred to as online marketing, Internet advertising, or eMarketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet...Internet marketing is commonly referred to as Web advertising (also Webvertising) and Web marketing.The Internet has brought many unique benefits to marketing, one of which being lower costs for the distribution of information and media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing, both in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to have a broader scope because it refers to digital media such as the Internet, e-mail, and wireless media; however, Internet marketing also includes management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems.

Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including design, development, advertising, and sales. Internet marketing does not simply entail building or promoting a website, nor does it mean placing a banner ad on another website. Effective Internet marketing requires a comprehensive strategy that synergizes a given company's business model and sales goals with its website function and appearance, focusing on its target market through proper choice of advertising type, media, and design.

Internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. In 2008 The New York Times working with comScore published an initial estimate to quantify the user data collected by large Internet-based companies. Counting four types of interactions with company websites in addition to the hits from advertisements served from advertising networks, the authors found the potential for collecting upward of 2,500 pieces of data on average per user per month.Here's a hint though.

Go read the whole Wikipedia article and follow the references. And google other stuff, also. There's a lot out there.

Everything I do is entrepreneurial. If you liked what I say here, post a comment. For real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for writing go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com. You can read the book on-line, print it out, or order a copy directly from the blog.