The fabric of the Internet is going through some massive changes, not seen since the days of the Bubble Burst. Venture capital firms are hot for the newest type of website to hit the Internet in quite some time. They’re investing millions and millions of dollars into these sites because they represent the future of Internet technology and marketing. A future that’s moving away from the traditional method of filtered messages and content because they no longer work. A future where consumers are more educated and more savvy. More aware and more suspicious of traditional marketing messages. A future that’s not really the future anymore to those marketers who are
willing to understand the changes that are occurring and focus their efforts on them to reap the benefits and leave their competition in the dust. Welcome to the age of Web 2.0 It’s the new Wild, Wild West of Internet Marketing and you can quickly become the sheriff of your niche if you follow the instructions in this post.

The traditional marketing methods of filtered messages and content no longer work. Not offline in traditional advertising and marketing spaces and not online either. These days, people are more educated about their choices and the Internet has provided them with a lot of that knowledge. As a result, they are more skeptical of traditional marketing messages than ever before. Historically, marketing messages are filtered and “cleaned up” before being delivered to the customer (as shown in the image below). Although this image focuses on a corporate level, the same can be said of the Internet entrepreneur who skillfully crafts his article, blog post, review,press release, or viral report.

In both cases, the message is created with the intent of communicating a particular idea or message to elicit a desired response (clicking an AdSense ad, buying a product, or purchasing through an affiliate link). These messages are created to typically achieve a 1% – 5% response rate,
with anything north of 10% seen as a remarkable success. With shifting customer expectations and requirements, this strategy is doomed to failure for those marketers and entrepreneurs without deep pockets and loose purse strings due to their high cost of customer acquisition. Being successful using just these forms of marketing is difficult because they are constantly interruptive and provide no mechanism for relationship building and follow-up. In response to the problems with Interruption marketing, a new form of marketing was born. A form of  marketing that gave more control to the end user and allowed the marketer the opportunity to build trust and relationships through multiple contacts.

Permission marketing, also known as email or relationship marketing, involves asking the prospect whether or not they wish to receive communications from you. This form of marketing requires a prospect to “opt in” to receive the information or promotions that the marketer is sending. Permission marketing has its advantages over interruption marketing because it allows the marketer to contact the prospect multiple times to either attempt to make a sale of their own product or someone else’s. These repeated contacts allow the marketer to build a relationship with the prospect, leading to the establishment of the trust necessary to breakdown the prospects objections and ease them into a buying decision.

The first problem with permission marketing is getting people to agree to allow you to contact them by giving you their email address. They must have a strong and compelling reason to give you that permission, especially if they don’t know who are you in the first place. Normally, marketers overcome this reluctance by giving prospects a reason to give them their email address – namely access to free information that’s usually in the form of a PDF report, article, or newsletter. The second problem with permission marketing is getting the attention of your prospects in the first place; that is directing them to your sign-up page so they can see what you have to offer. The aim of permission marketing is to allow you to cut through all of the “noise” of traditional interruption marketing tactics, but in a lot of cases you’re forced to use those same interruption marketing techniques to get prospects to your site in the first place. This makes the entire process ineffective if the only way to get people to give you permission to market to them is to use the interruption marketing tactics that they’re already trained to filter out.