Are there real similarities between actual marketing and internet marketing?

In most cases Internet Marketing is a sub-category of Marketing itself, when you're looking at larger companies with entire marketing departments.
As for internet marketers, they have all their training and experiences from doing it online, as far as actual Marketing experience helps, I'm sure it does! Marketing helps you relate to people and their doubts/insights. Knowing how consumers function and the habits they tend to have could help you greatly in the online marketing sector.
It's all about relating with other people as best as you can.

So there! I can do it quite well myself.

I think the on/offline marketing mindset is starting to change. Most of us who are doing online marketing currently probably fell in to it, mainly because a lot of it it, eg SEO/SEM was deemed to be a bit technical, so there is an element of frontier mentality.

My missus runs marketing teams for a major organisation, and has a long history of marketing, degree, professional certs etc. But is very much traditional and what we now call offline marketing. I think larger organisations are now only properly appreciating digital marketing as a separate science, and separating out their on and offline marketing skillsets. There must be a lot of crossover, copy, presentation etc, but digital marketing must have it's own unique challenges, as does off line.

Maybe future marketeers will be expected to be fully conversant with on and offline, but thats a big ask. How far do you go? One minute you are doing copy for a offline brochure, then you are expected to do SEO for your corporate site or creating and updating a facebook page?

Will companies expect on and offline professional qualifications? Maybe Chartered Institute of Marketing, as well as Adwords Certified!

Interesting times ahead, and I wonder what will become of us self taught digital amateurs?

VirtualOffice4U right back at you.lol

I know you can do it on your own, but there are a lot of people out there taking advantage of IM newcomers. They teach them all the wrong things and these poor newcomer's don't stand a chance. (Seriously).

A newcomer with basic knowledge about marketing, or internet marketing is less likely to fall for that get rich quick trap most fall into. I'm not saying go get a masters degree in marketing just so you can work on the net, but there are a multitude of books out there that you can really learn from. (Just as many, if not more than those trying to take you for a ride).

Steve, I think that IM's like us should help point them in the right direction. We advertise ourselves whenever we advertise a product, and we can use that "influence" to teach others, and point them to the books, resources, etc. that really matter and will help them. We use our experience and knowledge to teach.

In regards to business, they still have to continue to study and research more in order to deliver and promote the services that the company have. Because as you do Both side of marketing strategy you are still in a business mind set status, sales, profit and customer satisfaction.

I think that there should be similarities in marketing and internet marketing because before you market any business online, you have to be able to understand the consumer, the market and many other factors that differ from company to company.

Many internet marketing companies I've come across simply build backlinks, run adwords campaigns or increase rankings without looking at what actually needs to be promoted and to whom!

I'm sure there are a lot of crooks out there that prey on these people. I think these should be stamped out wherever they rear their ugly heads. But it's a two-way street. People who are always attracted to get rich quick schemes will always fall for these scams, with or without marketing knowledge.

there is a huge hype around building backlinks, which is more about SEO, which is just a single component of the overall concept of internet 'marketing'

I think online marketing and offline marketing share the same fundamental idea - to help a product/service reach the right audience and maximise sales.

offline marketing such as print ads and tv ads are ways to get maximum exposure for a product/service.

the objective of online marketing is the same - to maximise exposure. search engines are a major source of exposure for any online business. they are capable of potentially channeling millions of potential customers to a particular business. in order to get traffic from search engines, a website must rank highly in search results, this is where backlinks come in and why there is so much hype around it.

However, it is just one form of online marketing. consider classified ads (craigslist, gumtree, targro), business platforms (alibaba, lacartes), online marketplace (amazon, ebay), online articles/press releases (ezine), online product reviews (blogs, yelp, lacartes) and more... and you get a better idea of online marketing as a whole.

Building backlinks is a rat race because while you are doing it, your competitors are doing the same so the net effect could be zero. but the other forms of online marketing: classifieds, business platform, marketplace can produce direct results since they connect the seller directly to buyers.

I hope you find this helpful and will feel better about online marketing.

They are two different market.Actual market specializes in local market .Internet market can be worldwide.Many people want to do acutal market ,which is more direct and visual .Internet market is more easy and it just needs search from internet.

A possible similarity is for those Internet Marketers who write content and distribute press releases and articles for their clients - (the good ones) often put a lot of thought in to writing articles and content which could be shared & distributed further because if it is good content, people will share it and this will obviously benefit their SEO. This concept is similar to real marketing, looking for new angles, etc. Thoughts?