:Online Marketing

The 5 C’s of Internet Marketing

The State Seal of the State of Arizona depicts the 5 C’s that were the backbone of the Arizona Economy back around 1912 when Arizona became a State and for decades later.

The five C’s were what made Arizona towns and communities grow.

School children in Arizona were taught that the five C’s: Copper, Cattle, Cotton, Citrus and Climate were the driving force behind Arizona’s economy.

Likewise, on the Internet there are 5 C’s that are the driving force behind the Internet economy. These 5 C’s define the most critical component of Internet Marketing and the most important factor in creating value and building community, wealth and power in the Internet economy.

Rather than being five distinct items, as is the case with Arizona’s five C’s, the five C’s of the Internet Economy is a simple phrase that completely defines the most important element of Internet Marketing and your key to success in building up your status on the Internet.

The 5 C’s of Internet Marketing are:

Continuous
Creation (of)
Clear
Compelling
Content

Or in active voice:

Continuously
Create
Clear
Compelling
Content

Each word is important.

Continuous means that you must be doing this all the time. You can no longer build a site, throw it out there and expect it to be well regarded and able to rank well on the search engines. Search engines like fresh material that has been updated recently so if you are not putting material on your site on a regular basis, you will not be achieving the true potential of your site.

Creation means that the material you put up on the Internet must be new and unique. It cannot simply be a copy of someone else’s material. It must be new enough that the search engines will not find dozens, hundreds or millions of copies of the same item while they are visiting other sites.

Clear means that the material needs to be well written, easy to understand, grammatically correct, spelled properly, translated by experts if necessary, and as concise and to-the-point as possible.

Compelling means that your material must be important enough, useful enough and understandable enough that people decide that they want to read it or see it, want to read or see all of it, and pass it on to others to read or see. Explosively successful viral marketing comes about as a result of compelling material, as visitors share it with friends, relatives, business associates, etc.

Content means that the material must have substance … a concept similar to the concepts of “mass” and “volume” used in physics. Words are content, text is content, some other kinds of media such as video, audio, and pictures are considered content by some people and will become more like content in the future but keep in mind the famous quote that sums up what is and is not loved by search engines.

“A picture is not worth 1000 words on the Internet.  The information is in the text.”
- Bill Austin

If you create clear compelling content on a continuous basis and you build an environment that makes it easy for people to link to your site and share your site with others, you will find that The 3 L’s of Internet Marketing begin to build and as that happens you will quickly find that the third important element of Internet Marketing begins to build and create the conditions that catapult your site to the top of the search engines.

Compiled into a single article here: Internet Marketing