How to Avoid the Short Term Profits Trap for Internet Marketing Success

Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 3:11 pm

In today’s online market place there are a growing number of new internet marketing businesses that are sacrificing consistent, passive long term profits for short term gains. However, in order to be successful, one of the distinctive aspects of internet marketing is that every strategy requires some level of specialization.

Marketing for short term success is not a bad strategy if done correctly, but it should be used in combination with a long term strategy. Otherwise, you will likely always be chasing the next sale instead leveraging power for the long term. Let’s examine some of the potential trade offs that are often made.

Pay Per Click vs. Search Engine Optimization

PPC has, for a long time, been used as a short term tactic, and when used properly can be very successful. The key to a successful PPC campaign is a combination of bid management, effective ad creation, and conversions. It can become very expensive if not monitored frequently. All of these skills require some level of specialization and time.

For the long term, SEO has proven to be one of the most effective ways to guarantee that your website has long term visibility. This method also requires your constant attention especially in the early stages of your marketing. Plus, all of the work that you do builds upon itself, which over time it will provide you with a large number of valuable assets that can be leveraged to promote new websites that you may release in the future.

The primary trade off between PPC and SEO is twofold. The first is time. With only a limited amount of time and resources, emphasizing one almost necessitates focusing less on the other. While PPC marketing can generate short term profits, you will need to be constantly monitoring and tweaking your strategy. Then because PPC ads continue to cost money and you make the decision to discontinue them your traffic will stop.

On the other hand, you can stop doing SEO tactics, but will still be able to generate traffic based upon your previous efforts. It is not uncommon for people to have set up small websites and once they have become efficient enough, they were left to generate passive income. With effective SEO, these websites can continue to generate profits for years after they are left alone.

What are the Solutions?

Although a trade off exists, there are easy ways to include both PPC and SEO into your short and long term marketing strategies. In regards to PPC, you need to make sure that your landing page is focused on generating opt-ins to your mailing list or e-newsletter rather than trying to sell a product directly. This will allow you to use PPC to feed your long term traffic strategies.

Additionally, if you are currently only using PPC, then take some amount of your net profits and use them to start building your SEO efforts. This way, you will still be generating short term profits from PPC, but will also be investing time and money into creating and executing a long-term SEO strategy.

If you start making some profit with PPC it can be tempting to give up long term passive income generation for the short term profits. Your business plan should center on the end-goal. That goal should be on long term profits and reducing the amount of work that goes into reaching that goal. It is possible to sustain a high level of short term profits from PPC ads, and at the same time increase your commitment to SEO tactics. This is the key to Internet marketing success.