Thrive Learning Institute - Make Money Offline with Internet Marketing

by David Godot

There is a lot of discussion about how to make money online using internet marketing techniques, and there is most certainly a lot of money to be made. But many people fail to recognize the tremendous potential of internet marketing for making money offline as well. If you're not interested in being a full-time online marketer, and want to own your own brick-and-mortar business, you actually have a better chance of accomplishing your goals than people whose businesses are entirely internet-based.

I'll use myself as an example. Like many people these days, I have a personal web site that I use to communicate certain professional information about myself. I don't like to make the information there entirely professional, because the domain name is my name and I feel like it should represent me as a person, not just as a professional. I don't want to paint myself into the corner of presenting a professional persona at all time.

Many people make the mistake of trying to brand themselves as their business, and I think that this is a tremendous mistake. First of all, the business cannot outlast you, you can never sell it, or outsource all of your work. You are the work. Once you retire, your life's work is over.

Another problem with this marketing model has to do with the problem of branding your own personal home page as a professional home page as well: you paint yourself into a corner. You have presented yourself as the product, and so you get locked into always promoting that product. For example, it is my business to be a psychotherapist in Chicago. If I were to brand my business under my own name, as many therapists do, I would have to hide as much of my life from the world at large as I am expected to hide from my patients. With the internet increasingly playing a central role in the social lives of individuals, this could have an increasingly crippling effect on the therapist as a person.

But the main reason to learn internet marketing principles for the purposes of marketing your own offline business is that, depending on your field, most of your competitors probably are not. When I search for Chicago therapists,' I realize how important my internet marketing skill-set is really going to be in the development of my career. With people increasingly finding every type of product and service exclusively through the internet, a business owner can hardly afford not to learn the principles of internet marketing, even if they have no desire to make money online.

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Thrive Learning Institute is a great provider of high level, personal internet marketing coaching.