There is no doubt that starting an online marketing business is tough. It’s not tough from the amount or narture of work that you need to do though. Get it right and you can rapidly scale to quite heady levels of income.

However, what is tough is knowing the right information and how to apply that information to actually start making money online.

I have heard it said that running an online business rerquires the same disciplines as running a “normal” business, whatever a normal business is? I do think this is true.

There is an awful lot of smoke and mirrors in the online business world. So called online marketing Gurus peddle lots of “how to” information products allegedly showing you how to make “push button” millions online. Now, if you think someone is going to tell you how to make a few secret point and clicks and all of a sudden thousands of dollars are going to roll out of your laptop – think again.

Firstly, no-one is going to give you the goose that lays the golden egg for, say, $47. You will either get only part of the story or some jumped up, “loophole” techniques.

Indeed, if they are these shady techniques they are likely something that is very short term and will be found out by say, Google or Facebook and the very short term and will cease to work very quickly.

If you want to start an online business you simply must apply proper techniques, skills and disciplines to your efforts.

Indeed, there are many mistakes you can make when starting an online business. Derek Armson knows, he’s made them all!

I was looking at his website and found this amazing article which explains the pain and failure he went through in finding the right online marketing mentor to finally get his online business up, running and profitable.

In this extensive piece on his own personal online marketing journey story, he talks in detail about some fo the mistakes he made that cost him huge amounts of lost time and money. “Learn from my mistakes”, he says.

In the final analysis he made the decision to find and get an online business mentor, and this is essentially the story of how his constant mistakes pushed him to that conclusion. He then describes the process he went through to find his favoured business mentor and what it has meant to his business to engage that mentor.

In the end he settled on Online Business Mastery from Paul O’Mahony and joined the Mastermind Group.

“It’s changed my business beyond all recogniotion”, he says. “Just having the right information and being shown how to apply it properly has transformed my online marketing business”.

I think the main problem is that there are so many techniques and tools you can use and implement when starting up online. It’s difficult to pick and chose the right ones to achieve your personal goals.

That;s why finding a mentor, who has done what you want to do and modelling them is the way to short circuit the learning. Yes it costs. It’s not cheap to take this mentor route. But, how much do you save in lost time and wasted effort?

And, it it gets you to where you want to go, what price is too high?

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There is no doubt the advent of Cloud Computing has changed many things in business. It;s opened up truly functional software to the SME market and it’s made many millionaires into the bargain.

It has also spawned many start ups as people jump on the Cloud bandwagon. And supplying people to the Pre-IPO and angel funded SaaS market ahs become a very specialised niche.

Harvey Thomas, based in Milton Keynes are an agency who focus solely in this unique market. All of their recruiters are authorities on all matters cloud computing.

Creating a Career in Business Development Arena in Cloud

And, one of the speciailst areas in this key market is the discipline of Pre-Sales in Saas which is starved of tipo candidates with both specialist and general skills

Job applicants these days, however, are in most cases expected to be aware of up to date sales strategies, and employees with exposure to the up-to-the-minute developments tend to be thin on the ground, meaning that organisations wanting to recruit skills for their sales procedures, efforts could have difficulties seeking the right hire.

Hiring experts hunting for such type of skill have to possess an in depth knowledge of the digital sales jobs business, all the diverse fields within it and the way that they work together.

Specialist Recruitment

Harvey Thomas is a specialised recruitment outfit for Business Development and its sales staff have a in-depth appreciation of vertical pre-sales in the Saas sources.

When founder Jon Eyers created Harvey Thomas in 2008 and concentrated Software Engineer Recruitment and Development work, nobody really knew what a great part the internet was going to play in the time to come for Software Engineering and pre sales.

Nowadays the agency is a model of reputable recruiting practise in the continuously shifting Cloud Development, Customer Success and pre-sales, having stayed up to date with all innovative advancement of information technology and the trending world.

Track Record

The recruitment organization has a real track record which includes over 10 years of fulfilling their customers’ employment requirements for competent, avid and educated new internet Sales personnel.

“In addition to having a sizable database of likely skilled potential employees that we have developed over the years, a large amount of our recruitment consultants have worked in the internet commerce or online marketing sphere, so have an impressive knowledge of the competence that a potential hire needs, and also where to come across the most excellent people,” says Harvey Thomas co creator Jon Eyers, who developed the corporation from the start with his business associate Tom Sturgess, remarks, “We keep a log of all Cloud, Customer Success job seekers we’ve placed in the past and keep in contact with them regularly, so we know if they’re ready to change jobs and then we can match them with acceptable customers’ specifications”.

“We are also extremely busy with software and channel sales recruitment at the moment. After all, what is any software ompany without sales and top sales people come at a real premium”.

“It’s taken plenty of years, but I can now assertively declare that we have a number of extremely big productive – and popular – people on our lists quite frequently looking for more skill.

On the other side of the scale, our customers comprise of new little technology companies who approached us because they heard how we have a flair with choosing superior trainees with digital marketing necessary skills.

More on recruitment in Digital Marketing

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When I look at the start of my working life (a lot further back than I care to remember), things seemed to be constant. There was a very set way of doing things.

I’m not sure when the pace of change started to ramp up, but somewhere in the mid to late 80s would be my guess. We witnessed and incredible technological revolution. Computing speeds raced exponentially ahead and the Internet reared its head. Change accelearted to an unbelievable pace.

Change In The 80s

As it happens I was working in recruitment at the time, IT to the City. And the first apparent change was email usurping the fax machine. When we received CVs by post or fax, there was a very limited amount of times a candidate could send out his or her CV. So, agencies tended to specialise and that was how they had a unique selling point to their clients.

However, email meant a candidate could suddenly send their CV to two hundred agents at the push of a button. Suddenly every agency had every CV. Uniqueness gone in an instant.

A Different Perspective

So, it was quite interesting to talk to Doug Bates at Intelligent People about the pace of change in Digital and Online Marketing. Having experienced this funamental change in the recruitment process I wanted to find out if similar changes have taken place since I walked away from the business.

“No, I don’t think so”, he says thoughtfully, “not in the recruitment process itself, wqe are still in that same footrace to present candidates but we try to differentiate in other ways”.

Go on, Doug.

“We are very diligent in the type and mnature of the business we take on. We have an outstanding market reputation and we won’t just take any role on. We will meet with a new client, understand him, his project or business domain, the client environment and then propose a solution to the problem the client has. We’ll normally only work on exclusive business. We are, I guess, more of a boutique agency”.

“Of course, we do this to achieve higher fees and to take the competition out. But, when we engage we have a 73% success rate, so our cliewnts come back for more and become very loyal to us. Often a client will come to us via a strong recommendation or after they have failed using traditional methods and / or agencies”.

“But, that is just our preferred modus operandi. The change we have seen since we started out in 2002 is within Digital Marketing itself”.

The Change In Digital Marketing

How has the market changed?

“Well, we have seen huge increases in the power and effectiveness of technology coupled with the move to cloud computing and SaaS applications.This had made technology, very powerful and highly functional technology available to a whole new raneg of businesses. But it’s also spurned a whole new raft of actual functions with Digital marketing. This coupled with general advances in the Digital space and companies learning how to make the best of the digital space. It’s made the market totally alive with change happening aty an incredible pace”.

Can you give me an example of that change.

Job Function Change

“How many would you like?”, he smiles and takesa a sip of coffee. “Let’s look at CRM, back in 2002, CRM systems were basic and morfe or less just databases for emailing at best. Now all sorts of analytics hang aropund the CRM, the customer journey is measured, customer engagement is measured and tracked and related products pushed. Location marketing springs from this as does online performance marketing and online trading. So, we see not just CRM jobs and vacancies but also all of these other highly demarked, deep niche if you like, job functions as well”.

So, in essence job functions have become much more specialised?

“Absolutely, ten years ago, we were not recruiting growth hacker jobs for example. Digital and Online marketing jobs were very linear and covered a broad remit. Nowadays, they are far more specialised and demand very deep and specialist skills in these critical new areas of online marketing”.

Last question then. What’s your buggest area of hiring.

“Product Manager Jobs, without doubt. We have a specialist team that deals withj all things Product Management and that is one of our most succesful areas. We have an enviable reputaion in this market, which is good because its very profitable”, he smils again.

Many thanks Doug for your time and knowledge it was a very interesting hour.

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