Internet Marketing – Asia’s Biggest Opportunity Or Curse?

Never been to Asia? Well you might be missing the biggest opportunity of your life. As someone who operates business in Singapore, I know how the online marketing approaches in Asia have worked for and against me, and you should know about this too.

Internet Marketing Asia – if I can call it that – is a rapidly growing industry. The fact is, dozens of speakers fly over to Singapore and other parts of Asia simply to profit from the new emerging market here in Asia. However, the truth of the matter is Asians tend to be both more skeptical and more easily hurt.

Internet Marketing Asia paints the face of a new customer – one that demands constant support, hand-holding and the need to be socially intimate with them. Without this, your efforts in marketing to Asia will fail. In fact, many speakers at recent conferences went home without a single dime in back end sales. The reason for this is simple – every individual here has been worried about the fear of backend sales not being delivered. No matter how experienced you are in your industry, Internet Marketing Asia doesn’t know YOU.

The most dangerous thing to do is to equate your success worldwide with the same success in Asia. The face of internet marketing in Asia has changed to a skeptical, inquiring and seemingly risk adverse group of people. This is the reason why the growth of internet marketing in Asia and in Singapore has been too rapid for its own good.

Three tips to succeed in Asia:

#1 – Spend focused time. Don’t run away after a one or two day event. Cultivate their interest, teach them to consume their learnings, and be willing to take the time to build business ventures locally to consolidate your position.

#2 – Promote long term support – face to face. It’s tough to deal with the skepticism already. You need to build a face-to-face relationship. After all, in Asia, we’re talking about relationships and interdependence. Culturally, people from the West have failed to make headway without penetrating the market in a suitable fashion

#3 – Join a local forum. Here’s where I blow my own horn. You need a local partner to help bring your “brand” to the next level. Join the Internet Marketing Singapore forums and build credibility and believability where I probably have the largest community of active internet marketers in Asia.