Everyone is an expert at something. Businesses succeed when they know the one thing that they do better than anyone else. Naturally, there are many factors that effect whether or not a business will succeed. But if you feel that you have an expertise that you would love to share with others and could make money doing so, this article will outline some of the advantages of taking your expertise and converting it to Digital Media Products like CDs or DVDs.
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"Google It" has become the new phrase for getting questions answered. When most people want a question answered, they no longer go to the library or encyclopedias. They head to the nearest computer and use the World Wide Web to answer their question. Google is becoming the new well-spring of information. It has also become a great way to teach others, if you find yourself to be an expert in a subject that people are also interested. Many people are able to sell e-books with that exact same purpose: to inform others. However, now that eBay has banned digital products, those people are now struggling with their businesses and their attempts to inform others are being thwarted.
You can however bypass this ban by selling Digital Media Products like CDs or DVDs instead of e-books. Many people have turned to using CD or DVDs instead of e-books because it caters to people who are still more comfortable using a CD or DVD player to learn than using their computer. Someone might be more willing to listen to an audio book on their long commute to work than to sit at their computer reading an e-book. Thus by giving your customers a choice of how they would like to absorb your expertise, you are giving yourself a better chance of become successful on the Internet.
Another benefit to selling Digital Media products is that you are dealing with physical materials that will help prevent fraudulent behavior on the customer's part. In the case of selling e-books, a customer can simply deny that you never sent them a downloadable link. However, if shipping hard materials like CDs or DVDs, you can have shipping confirmation as evidence. Therefore, you will be able to protect yourself from a sneaky customer.
This is only a brief outline of the advantages of selling digital media products. This is your chance to make money on the Internet by sharing your expertise. The trick is taking your expertise and transforming it into a form that customers are interested in like CDs and DVDs. Learning that is a step towards making real progress as a business.
Corporate marketing groups - especially bandwidth-challenged small-to-mid-sized departments - can be so focused on tactics and fire fighting that they jeopardize their marketing investment. There is a tendency to overreact to events, to tackle symptoms rather than underlying fundamental problems and to jump at the opportunity to please the boss. Many times, this kind of tactical knee jerking may be fatal.
Without great marketing, companies won't flourish, especially those in highly
competitive markets. Yet the chaotic nature of emerging or dynamic growth
companies and the tendency to place the marketing burden on too few individuals is
a setup for failure. Promising companies may be left in the dust, or at least
handicapped at the starting gate.
Marketing Operations is emerging as an important discipline for improving
performance and measuring ROI in admired technology companies (like Intel, IBM
and Amazon) who have refined and fine-tuned their marketing organization with an Baidu SEI & SEM
operational focus. Given the demands that these organizations face today, an
innovative approach is central to solving critical issues like results measurement,
bandwidth constraints and creativity limitations, and building value-added
outsourced supplier relationships and effectively managing budget. Many of the
best practices, efficient processes and systems approach from large company
Marketing Operations can and should be applied by emerging companies that are
serious about their marketing investment. Here's why:
PROBLEM #1
Ill-defined metrics
Today, more than ever, corporate marketing departments need to justify their
existence. The need to measure results is unavoidable. However, the instincts and
skills that make an outbound marketing practitioner great-action-orientation,
verbal and written acuity, persuasiveness, the ability to build strong relationships-
often don't translate into an ability or willingness to scientifically and objectively
evaluate success. Add in broken systems and the organization's unwillingness to
pay for marketing evaluation, and it's no surprise that many marketing departments
are unable to define meaningful success metrics.
SOLUTION
Marketing Operations ensures that the right processes are in place to establish
meaningful metrics at the front-end of marketing process, enabling the
measurement of success at key intervals, and as each program concludes.
PROBLEM #2
Slammed resources
The prevailing attitude of "doing more with less" can leave key people discouraged,
overwhelmed, near burnout, and eventually, circulating their
resumes. The consequences for organizations are costly mistakes, high turnover,
and collapsed programs when key people leave, and missed opportunities to
leverage the "ugly-stepsister-Cinderella-in-waiting" programs that never get off the
ground because of a lack of ownership.
SOLUTION
Marketing Operations addresses these resource limitations by ensuring workload is
effectively allocated, roles are clearly defined, interdependencies are understood,
team members feel satisfied with their jobs and the programs and additional
resources, whether through additional headcount or outsourcing, can be
successfully justified to executive management.
PROBLEM #3
Sketchy institutional memory
Marketing is dependent on accurate information, a historical view into past
successes and failures, and the ability to recognize patterns that link seemingly
unrelated data points. Unfortunately, knowledge in many marketing organizations is
scattered all over the company. It's in the heads of individual workers, on shelves,
on people's hard drives, in long forgotten filing systems. When people leave, a big
piece of organizational knowledge goes with them. Information loss is a huge
productivity killer for marketing teams. Lost insight that must be regained or
reacquired wastes previous marketing investments.
SOLUTION
Marketing Operations facilitates knowledge sharing, an enduring repository of
information and greater decision-making based on fact, as opposed to hunch.
PROBLEM #4
Constrained creativity
The best creativity comes from many brains working together in collaboration. A
consequence of the age of the "individual contributor" director is constrained
creativity. When the entire creative burden falls mostly on one outbound marketing
person, the ability to think out of the box can be severely impacted. Creative
synergy results from many minds thinking as one.
SOLUTION
Marketing Operations enables the creative process to benefit from the synergy of
team.
PROBLEM #5
Failed supplier relationships
Most successful companies can point to strong, long-term marketing supplier
relationships as integral to their success. Likewise, a pattern of failed supplier
relationships is often an indicator of marketing department failure, rather than poor
vendor performance. Unfortunately, companies that have had consistently bad
relationships with outsource suppliers often react by seizing control and bringing
everything in house. While this strategy may provides the illusion of control, it lets
marketing managers deflect blame for failures, rather than teaching them how to
manage their outsource suppliers by taking responsibility for the results. In
addition, this strategy won't scale with the growth of the organization.
SOLUTION
Marketing Operations helps set realistic expectations and mutual accountability
between suppliers and the organization, increasing the effectiveness of outsource
partners by empowering them to act as an extension of the internal team.
PROBLEM #6
Lost discretionary budgets
Use it or lose it. Misuse it and lose it anyway. Many corporate marketing
departments are leaving discretionary budget on the table or allocating it to
the wrong initiatives. This discretionary marketing budget "Catch 22" occurs
because:
o It's very time consuming to manage the budget effectively, especially in companies
with broken financial systems
o Each marketing spend-decision creates more work for the one-person or small-
team
marketing department in terms of project management, measurement, supplier
management, etc.
o Doubt persists about the ability to successfully justify the expenditure to
management
o Focus is instinctively on high-visibility marketing activities and C-level executive
"requests" over fiscal management (marketing people are more inclined toward
marketing than finance)
SOLUTION
Marketing Operations facilitates implementing the system support infrastructure
and financial management discipline needed to protect precious marketing budgets.
PROBLEM #7
Narrow marketing mix
Many companies align their fate with the success of too few marketing programs.
Whether it's lead generation, public relations, trade shows or advertising, the over-
reliance on any one particular program can derail a company-especially if a key
program unexpectedly loses momentum. In the meantime, programs that could
have had strong leverage never get a chance to prove their mettle and are forever
relegated to the "B" list.
SOLUTION
Marketing Operations puts the means in place to launch potentially high-value
marketing programs that would never otherwise get out of the starting gate.
The Bottom Line
In a nutshell, Marketing Operations is an organization's best bet to:
o Ensure that success can be measured and replicated
o Leverage systems and processes to enable consistently excellent performance
o Encourage great marketing departments to stay together
o Allow the marketing organization to flourish, despite the unexpected, but often
inevitable, loss of a key employee.