Hey guys, I think this is a pretty common misconception about internet marketing and entrepreneurship. In my opinion, one is not the other. Just because you do affiliate marketing, you don't own a business. (Is it possible that affiliate marketing is a business, well.. yeah totally. But is all AM entrepreneurship? I don't think so.) Your opinion may be different. That's awesome, that's why I want to talk about it here (and I'm going to open this discussion on a couple other forums too.) So here's my question: Is there a difference? Where do you draw the line? If you're interested in my opinion, here it is: I wrote a whole blog post about it too, check it out: http://ryanlucht.com/the-90-of-im-products-part-3-a-broader-view-of-im-products-as-a-business/
In my opinion, Entrepreneurship is more of a mindset really. They are innovators, they create, and come through struggles. Internet marketing is all in the title. We are just marketing what we have on the Internet. You can come up with different ways to do this, and that's when our Entrepreneur kicks in. The creating, and thinking part. That's my two cents at least.
Hm, I like your point there. Internet marketers have the mindset of "make money", whereas Entrepreneurs have the mindset of "build a business". Cool. Any other opinions?
Why do you say that, sir? In my opinion Internet Marketing is marketing something on the Internet, no? In which case, if you are marketing someone else's product, you are still marketing it on the internet. I probably am not seeing something you see though. Please explain.
Because promotting a product is not the same as selling a product. There's more money in Internet Marketing than Affiliate Marketing for one, the only job an Affiliate Marketer has is to get as much quality traffic to pass through his referral link as possible and hope to God that some of it converts. You have no control over the conversion process once you've passed a visitor through your link that's it your job is done.
Internet marketing is focusing on selling while entrepreneurship consist of the entire operation of business from A to Z. In some way, they both have lots in common but being an entrepreneur means that you need to handle more things and carry more burden.
I agree, internet marketing can be entrepreneurship, but it is not always. You can make money on the internet and never actually start your own business.
The economic definition of an entrepreneur is someone who links together the other factors of production i.e. land, labor and capital. Affiliate marketing is about finding buyers and matching them to products.
I guess it depends on your method of promoting an affiliate product is. You're right when you say, throwing a link out there randomly isn't marketing on the internet. But if you write articles, create videos, etc. You are technically marketing a product on the internet which would qualify as IM. Do you agree?
If you are an Internet Marketer, you can be an Entrepreneur (if you work for your own account). Being an Entrepreneur doesn't mean you are an IM; that is there is no equivalence between both of them.
The selling of the product happens only on the merchant page because they're never going to make an action to buy unless there on that page. Off the sales page with articles and videos and landing pages is just a warming up process to get them to the final stage. The sales page is the most important page out of the whole process, because it's that page that closes down the sale. The other pages were just to create enough buzz to get the customer to the final stage so the conversion can take place.