Who Im I?
Hi. My name is Dimi “The Dino” and I welcome you to my blog.
Basically, I am an entrepreneur. I’ve always been an entrepreneur. From day one on my professional life. As an entrepreneur, I’ve had a few major career shifts. This is to say, for the last 35 years I’ve run several businesses. Some successfully, some not so. And during this time I’ve gained a significant experience. Experience that took me lots of time, efforts and nerves. Experience, which I would like to pass to you.
Why “The Dino”? Well, answer is simple. I am ancient. I come from the time of the dinosaurs. Time, where there was no AI, no smartphones and no computers. There was even no Internet. Can you imagine that? 😊 I am so ancient. Perhaps, I am going to write a short article about this in the blog section. If you are interested in more details of my background, I am putting all of this information in this page.
What are you going to find on this blog
This blog is all about doing business and making money. But not just any business. We are going to talk about doing business the smart way and making money the smart way.
See, doing business is actually a science. There are clear rules and best practices which is if you follow, you get a much higher chance of success.
In business, just like in life, there are street smart people who do everything following their intuition and they thrive. For most of us, however, this is not the case. We need to study, get courses and trainings, follow coach programs. And nothing comes easy.
In this blog I am writing mostly for that second type of people.
So, in very brief, on my blog, I am going to show you different proven ways of doing business that you could easily adopt.
Who is this blog for?
This is for anyone who is interested in doing business the smart way.
I’ll start it from the very beginning, so people with literally no experience and no knowledge could find the necessary information, so they could start their business journey.
I’ll make sure, as well, that even seasoned professionals could find here something new.
So, in brief, this is a place, where anyone passionate for the business could find something useful.
How digital marketing has changed the way of doing business
Today, the digital marketing is the smartest and easiest way to do business. This is the fastest and the easiest way to make money. And it is the most cost effective way to do business and to make money. Nowadays, it takes only a fraction of the capital that it took back in the dinosaur era to start a business or to validate a business idea.
Digital marketing has totally changed the way of doing business. It is now much easier, than it was some 40 years ago.
You can find more details in this article.
How digital marketing has changed the way of doing business
Today, the digital marketing is the smartest and easiest way to do business. This is the fastest and the easiest way to make money. And it is the most cost effective way to do business and to make money. Nowadays, it takes only a fraction of the capital that it took back in the dinosaur era to start a business or to validate a business idea.
Digital marketing has totally changed the way of doing business. It is now much easier, than it was some 40 years ago.
To start, digital marketing has made one of the Porter’s 4 Ps lose meaning
Michael Porter is one of the best business scientists ever. He started his career as an industrial marketer. Someone, working on the frontline of business. Where your advice must sell, otherwise you get fired. ALL of his business advice works as a charm.
Porter’s 4 Ps is one of the most used marketing and business strategy frameworks. It comes from the down of marketing. It summarizes the 4 most important factors in marketing (Later they added more Ps, but originally, there were only 4). These are Price, Product, Position and Promotion. Basically, it means that in order to get a good, successful business, you need to have the right Product, which to sell at the right Price using the right Promotion selling it at the right spot (Position).
Internet has done the “Position” P in that framework obsolete. Today, with the help of the Internet, you can reach any point of the world and sell whatever goods or service you want. You can do this from the comfort of your couch. Literally.
Digital marketing offers marketing automation
Additionally, the automation, provided by the modern business systems has brought the analytics to extremely high levels. But most importantly, it has dropped the cost of doing business really, really low.
Nowadays, it has become extremely easy to do business. Did I say that already? 😊
One thing that I am absolutely sure is that with digital marketing business has become extremely easy. Back in the time I started, it used to take months, sometimes years just to start something and months or years to validate an idea. Nowadays, in the electronic environment, that could be done for days.
Digital marketing has brought the business Risk and Capital necessary to unseen levels
Money necessary to open a business has dropped dramatically. Respectively, the risk of losing this capital has become insignificant. Not because the risk has become lower, but because of that small amount on the line. It is so insignificant, that losing it or not practically doesn’t matter.
In digital marketing everything happens fast. I’ve been providing advice in that area for a few years now and I’ve been having tremendous fun all this time. It is now possible to test any of your business ideas for just a few dollars and would take you no longer than a couple of days.
We live in magic times, where everything seems to be possible.
In conclusion about digital marketing
To sum up – digital marketing and digital business are total game changers on the fields of doing business and making money. They have cardinally reshaped the field of the business. They have created completely new businesses and business models and they have erased whole industries. It is now unthinkable to have any business, even a brick and mortar one without having a serious Internet presence.
It is not a surprise then, that the main things we are going to talk about here would be different e-commerce businesses, digital marketing, web design, marketing automation, email marketing, SEO optimization, social media marketing, organic and paid ways of improving your social media presence.
In particular, we are going to discuss WordPress and its environment, first, because this is the most popular platform for web design and second, because it is free. We are going to talk about hosting sites, making e-commerce stores, setting up payment methods, setting tracking codes on our sites, analyzing customers, building personas and many other extremely interesting parts of digital marketing. You will see, that indeed, making money online is extremely easy now. You just need to know how and I am going to tell you that.
Business theory
I know, nobody likes theory. But it is important to know business basics, because doing business without knowing the business fundamentals leads almost certainly to failure. There are statistics, for example, that about 98% of the companies in the world don’t have a business strategy.
Not having a strategy in business is a certain road to failure. Strategy gives you the meaning of existing of your company. It gives you a goal to follow and it gives you (and all of you employees) a reason to go to work every day. Without a goal you just float around.
Marketing provides you plenty of frameworks that help you achieving your business goals. Classic marketing is an extremely interesting science, with some of the greatest minds in the world contributed to its knowledge base. It gives you proven ways of solving complex tasks, of analyzing your market and ultimately, solving your problems and making money.
For example, one of my favorite business consepts that I try to implement whenever I can is the theory of the Blue Oceans, developed by Renée Mauborgne, W. Chan Kim from the INSEAD business school. We’ll talk about that later, there are so many implications of this theory. This is yet another way of doing business the smart way.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, gives you the same tools classic marketing gives you, but powered exponentially by the means of modern technologies. For example, one of the most fascinating ways of selling goods and services are the sales funnels. I have been selling things since I was 14, but I have never seen such a wonderful way of selling. I learnt about funnels recently, and for the last few years I have been using them everywhere. Absolutely in love with the concept.
Behind the funnels, there is a lot of theory – from marketing, from business strategy, from social psychology. But any bit of this theory works perfectly well in practice. Sales funnels is something that brings real result. 100 % sure.
My 5 favorite digital marketing concepts
Here I am going to give you my 5 favorite concepts of the digital marketing. I believe all of these concepts lay in the core of the smart way of doing business today. In the blog, we are going to discuss in details any of these 5 concepts.
1. E-commerce
E-commerce is the new face of the business. What does e-commerce mean?
Basically, this is doing business in the electronic universe. You can sell absolutely everything.
The concept of selling goods from your bedroom to all over the world is absolutely amazing. It’s easy, and it would take you next to nothing to do that – as time, capital and skills.
You also don’t need any special tech skills. This is something extremely important. 20 years ago, one needed to know HTPL, PHP, WEB server knowledge, coding skills etc., etc. Nowadays, all of the techy stuff is hidden behind easy to use, user friendly interface. Interface you can use intuitively, you can do everything by yourself.
How does it work?
You need to by a web hosting. It’s going to cost you less than $50 for the first year. Then you need a couple of free plugins and the WooCommerce plugin (free again) on top and finally, you need to setup a payment method (free again). There are thousands of methods to that and certainly, you could buy some premium plugins later on, but this is really everything you need to get started. Half a day later, theoretically, you can sell whatever your product is to any country you want.
Of course, in order to make sure your business would sell well, you need to do a bunch of more things. But it would never take you more than a week to complete all of them. Compare it with the year that took me to open my first bakery back in the ‘90s in the last century and see the difference.
To sum up – Opening an e-commerce business is easy and cheap and it only takes a couple of days to do that.
2. Digital marketing
Digital marketing is the magic that moves all of the e-commerce businesses. It’s like the classic marketing, but on steroids.
Marketing, by itself, is a fascinating science. It makes possible researching and selling different products, using different marketing tools. Digital marketing, on the other side, add more sophisticated tools to the marketer toolset and makes marketing much more powerful, cheap and fast. What took us weeks and months to do with marketing 20-30 years ago, it now takes days and hours.
Digital marketing has several pillars which I am discussing in more details in this article. The important thing to remember here is that it is absolutely not possible to achieve any results in the e-commerce business without knowing in details digital marketing.
The following three points are actually part of the digital marketing. However, they are important for any business, that I decided to give them credit as a specific part of the modern smart way of doing business.
3. Wordpress
WordPress is a CMS. CMS stands for Content Management System, which means exactly that – a system for management of your content. There are many CMSs, but WordPress is the biggest and the oldest one.
Worpress started some 20 years ago as a system for blogging. It was a simple and robust system, which was free in its core and which you could use for managing your blog.
With time, things have changed. WordPress now is still a wonderful blogging software. However, in addition to the blog, now it provides tons and tons of different other solution. In fact, I believe that with this system you can now create almost any possible site.
Perhaps the most important advantage is that WordPress is easy to work with. You don’t need some special skills to work with it. Anyone could design and publish a site with it. Literally anyone. No coding skill needed, no marketing skills, no web design skills. It’s like a Word editor. You need some time to get the basics and then you just start working.
Wordpesss works on a modular principle. There is the blog core, to which you can add different plugins which add different functionalities to your site.
For example, with adding the WooCommerce plugin you can turn your site to ae-commerce shop.
With adding some galleries plugins, you can make a wonderful demo site for your art. You can make different reservation and booking systems, all together with the necessary payment systems, so you can sell your services. You can add LMS (Learning Management Systems) plugins and turn your site in a spot where you can sell your courses. And it would take you juts a couple of days.
But perhaps, the most amazing part is that almost all of this comes for free. Of course, there are many paid plugins that you can buy in order to add style and functionalities to your site. The base, however, is free.
In addition, WordPress is an open source software, which means that there are tons and tons of professionals who are working nonstop for its security. Any vulnerability is covered within hours after its discovery.
I really love WordPress. I’ve been working with it for many years now and I think with any new year my love is growing stronger.
4. SEO - how to get rid of the "Position" marketing mix "P"
When I started my business path some 40 years ago, the main problem was the lack of information. In order to succeed, one needed information. The most informed used to win.
Now, there is an abundance of information. There is plenty of data – this is unstructured information. By definition, information is structured data – structured for your exact needs.
However, even the structured data is quite a lot, nowadays. And the only way to make this information useful is to use filtering systems.
When you use a search engine, you are doing exactly that. The business model of any search engine is to provide the best information to any user for free and to charge businesses that want to advertise their products or services on its platform. However, the one thing any search engine would never compromise is the quality of the information it provides to its customers.
SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is the activity that uses a set of good practices that aim to improve the visibility of your site in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Search engines use special algorithms to sort the information and to provide the most useful pieces to their customers. No one knows exactly the structure of these algorithms, but there is a lot of information about how they work and the good practices that could be used to make your site more visible than the others.
Applying that set of good practices can dramatically improve your site visibility, hence, the traffic to your site. Higher traffic, from its side, means more customers and ultimately, more money. For free, because the SEO is the free way of attract more customers to your site.
I really love improving my SEO positions. If you follow some very simple rules, it is really easy to get higher positions in SERP. I’ll show you how.
5. Sales funnels - the secret weapon for the small companies to compete with the big ones
Even though I have been dealing with business my whole life, I have discovered the concept of sales funnels recently. And I fell in love immediately with it.
Marketing funnels have been on the field for quite a long time. Sales funnels, on the other hand, have appeared relatively recently. The reason is that they need some special technologies to work properly and these technologies have developed enough during the last 20 years.
What are the sales funnels? Unlike the marketing funnels, sales funnels are pure physical. You can “touch” them. Per se, they are a bunch of webpages (the funnel itself) that use hooks in the form of social media ads to attract customers. Once the customer lands on your landing page, they you make sure that exact customer travels your funnel long enough to buy most of the goods or services you offer her.
Sales funnels are the tool that allow small companies to compete with huge retailers. I’ll explain you how in the blog.
As I said, sales funnels have been around for more than 20 years. Nevertheless, the person who organized the theory around them is Russell Brunson in his trilogy Dotcom secrets, Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets. Any of these books is a pure gold for anyone who is working in the e-commerce business. I highly recommend getting and reading all of these books.
The concept of the sales funnels is so amazing! I am having a great fun designing, building and testing funnels. There is a lot of social psychology involved in any sales funnel and perhaps this is the reason this is something that actually works!
We’ll discuss extensively both the theory and the practice of the sales funnels in blogpost articles. I am going to show you many different ways to design and build a funnel, along with their advantages and disadvantages.
Brief sum up
These are just some of the things we are going to talk about here. There are so many other interesting ideas and business tools that could help you make money in a way, that you are going to enjoy.
Let’s move up to the essence!
So, how to make money using digital marketing?
The answer to this question is quite simple, actually. You can make money by selling products, goods, or services. You can participate in affiliate programs. You can get in dropshipping. You can create content and sell products through it. You can sell advertisements.
There are so many answers to the questions “How to make money through Digital Marketing”.
List is literally endless.