Scottish Internet marketer David Bain has just released his new ebook, The Four Phases of Internet Marketing. It’s a free download (although you have to register on his website to get it), and its release coincides with David’s announcement of the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan. No details on this yet, although as I write this there’s a countdown timer on the website that tells me to wait another nine days.

I have to admit I’m a sucker for free stuff, and that’s usually enough to get my interest. I duly registered and within minutes had the ebook downloaded and printed.

Here are the links:

The Four Phases of Internet Marketing

The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan

Is the ebook worth this effort? Does it provide new or fresh insight? Or is it yet another “Butterfly Marketing” teaser designed to sign us into David’s 26 Week Plan?

Why You Would Get the Ebook

David’s four phases make a lot of sense. I’ll detail these shortly, but for now he illustrates each of the phases with one element essential to that phase. And there’s a good amount of details to go with it as well. I don’t pretend to know everything about Internet marketing, and there are some concepts / links/ advice within the ebook’s 61 pages that I hadn’t seen before.

Why You Wouldn’t Get the Ebook

It’s short on big-picture information. Each of the four phases gets a page of overview text, and the rest of each section is dedicated to that one essential element. It would have been good to know what the other elements of each phase were, even if they were just bullet-listed, but I assume that information will be part of David’s 26 Week Plan.

What’s Inside

David’s four phases are:

• Website Structure
• Automation and Launch
• Broaden Your Base
• Broaden Your Horizon

To go with each of these, David details one essential element of each phase. I have to assume there are more elements to come, but it’s not clear from the ebook this is the case. Here are the elements (in the same order as above):

• Site Architecture
• Blogging
• Article Marketing
• Video Marketing

I actually really like David’s choice of these elements. They are pretty much aligned with the work we do here at Stratify (although we haven’t yet delved into the wonders of video production) so we know that not only are they important, they also work.

Phase 1 - Website Structure

This phase is basically all the prelaunch work that needs to be done – getting the navigation correct, proper page tagging/ titles/ headers, and external style sheets. There’s no mention at this stage of blogging, in fact it seems to be targeted at static HTML websites rather than blogs. Nonetheless it’s solid information that applies to any website, whatever platform is used.

Phase 2 - Automation and Launch

David posits that a blog is an essential component of any good commercial website, and I agree. The Stratify website has been through a few iterations now, and none have been as successful as the one you are now seeing – based, of course, on the WordPress platform.

David goes into a good amount of detail about WordPress, although if (like me) you are a member of Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind program, there’s no new information here for you. If not (Yaro’s program is not taking new members, but register your interest here or via the advert in the sidebar), it’s a detailed and persuasive introduction to the benefits and techniques of blogging.

However I can’t let this phase pass without one comment that’s just crying out to be said. David asserts that a blog will ensure a “flood of visitors” when you launch your new website. OK. Having now launched dozens of blogs for clients, I can attest to the fact that there ain’t no such thing as a flood of visitors. Regardless of the platform, getting traffic to a website (especially a new website) is plain bloody hard work, and sometimes it just never clicks.

Phase 3 - Broaden Your Base

I like this concept, which is basically don’t depend on one source of traffic for your website. Some of us are overly dependent on search engine traffic; others rely on referrals, and then there’s the social networking sites (StumbleUpon, for example, works great for the Stratify website).

Here David covers article marketing, which has been around for a few years now but continues to pay good, rather than spectacular, dividends. A good article can drive traffic for years but unfortunately they are rare. Most articles, in my experience, sink without a trace.

Even so article marketing (or bum marketing, it’s the same thing) is a worthwhile activity and David goes into detail about how to do it right.

Phase 4 - Broaden Your Horizon

In this final phase David talks about the newer forms of content dissemination. He goes into detail about video marketing, but only mentions social networking in the introduction. Audio podcasts don’t even rate a mention (we’ve found them to be effective in our client work).

I don’t know what to make of this phase. We haven’t yet done any video marketing here at Stratify so I really can’t comment. But the content appears sound and provides a broad introduction to the process of producing and uploading video to a raft of video websites.

Final Thoughts

Register and grab this ebook. It’s likely you’ll learn something new, but don’t expect a full, complete, concise plan for your Internet Marketing activities.

I regard the ebook as a teaser for the 26 Week program, and I wonder how many emails I will receive over the next weeks to encourage me to sign up for 26 Weeks.

To be fair to David, though, I have been on his email list for a few months now and he doesn’t fill my inbox with worthless offers. It could be that 26 Weeks is just as respectful of my time and attention.

Here are the links again:

The Four Phases of Internet Marketing

The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan