Isaac - How to Grow Your Internet Business without doing it all yourself

How to grow your internet business without doing it all yourself

About the author

Paul Isaac is the founder of two digital marketing agencies and has marketed global brands the world over. When yesterdays digital marketing techniques stopped working, he and his company spent four years pioneering new ones which did.

Born in the UK, he currently lives in the Netherlands and is still a frequent visitor to the UK, as well as the USA and Sweden where he has family. He spends his days getting hands-on with marketing for his global clients and cycling enthusiastically across the flat Dutch countryside.

You can reach him at info@click-click-go.com

The easy way to read this book.

Youre a busy person. Ever since all our labour saving devices like computers and mobile phones were invented, we somehow have a lot more work.

Id love to think youre going to read every last word of this book - I nearly broke into a sweat writing some of it - but if you want to get up and running as fast as possible then, especially for you, Ive including a Wrap Up section at the end of each chapter to give you the key points from that chapter. You could read all of these Wrap Ups first, then go to the last chapter which is a quick How-To-Get-Started guide. Then youll be off and running, making so much money you can afford the time to come back and read the rest of it.

Before the internet bubble burst in 2001 there was a lot of talk about how traditional businesses didnt get the internet. We dont hear so much from those people any more. The bubble burst, they were proved wrong. The reason they were wrong was that they thought the new technology made the old basics obsolete.

Were going to be discussing a lot of very modern ways to do marketing in this book, but lets not get lost. People are still people and selling is still selling. In the end, the internet is just a channel, a new way for us to communicate with each other. It may be a major channel which has disrupted commerce in a way not seen before in our lifetimes, but its still a channel. And perspective matters.

To keep that perspective, Im going to be diving back into a work which was written in the fifth century B.C. : The Art of War by the Chinese general Sun Tz. I chose this book because its out of copyright so I wont have to pay royalties if I quote it. Ha, ha. No, not really. I chose it because its principles of strategy apply equally well to business as to war. These are the basics.

Marketing ideas come and go, gee, if I only had a dollar for every new book on the subject that comes out. But the basic principles endure. The Art of War was written from a military perspective, but its about strategy and those strategic principles apply to marketing in a big way.

Heres one of my favourite quotes from it to get you thinking:

Hence in the wise leaders plans, considerations of advantage and disadvantage will be blended together.

Ive seen an awful lot of companies violate this. For example, they make a sales budget based on new business they will gain. However, they never allowed that the competition would probably come in and take some of their existing business from somewhere, in other words, they did not allow for disadvantages. If they had, they would have realised that they needed to target a lot more new business to meet their sales goals.

Or, to give you another example, Ive seen companies go after new business by competing on price, and then be surprised when the competition lowered theirs in response. This all sounds like common sense, but it gets ignored more often than youd imagine.

Alright, thats all the warming up youre going to get. If youre ready for some controversial views, some strange humour and (hopefully) some genuine insights into doing business on the internets, lets get started.