My Virtual Neighborhood: A Book About Digital Marketing and How to Build Businesses Online

By Fariss Ryan and Kaylee Hernandez

Are you daydreaming about making money online?

Not sure how to supplement your income with a digital side hustle, effectively bring your business online or start up your own?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fariss Ryan Designs
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781685646639

Book preview

Part 1

What Happened to the Internet?

1

Before the Internet

Where were you before the internet started? I remember the invention of the internet. At least it’s what I like to tell people, with my tongue in cheek. More accurately, I can recall the initial widespread use of the internet. My mother remembers when computers were the size of entire rooms.

I remember when you couldn’t be on the internet and on the phone at the same time. This was before cellphones were a widely consumable item. You clicked internet explorer on the prehistoric windows 95 monitor and it took about ten minutes to connect while making a pretty ugly noise. Now we’d call the computer a dinosaur.

For many of us it’s hard to remember when exactly the internet became so widely used. It’s hard to remember when we only used cell phones to call people, to text or to play Tetris. But the internet changed everything. The world now operates in a very different manner.

At one point in time, people driving by your house just showed up at your front door. People didn’t share pictures of what they were eating for dinner. You developed your film after a summer vacation to see your photographs. Instead of texting a photo or posting it on social media, you called a friend to tell them about your trip. Instead of using social media to look for the person you had a crush on, you would actually talk to their friends in person to see if they were dating or interested in someone. Oh, yes, dating apps didn’t exist in the 90s.

Before the invention of the internet I remember door to door salesmen and women. I remember them coming to our house and trying to sell us Tupperware and vacuums. The neighbors probably remember my sister and I trying to sell them chocolate and magazine subscriptions so we could go on our school trips.

Advertisements came in the form of cable television commercials, newspapers, junk-mail, billboards and radio commercials. You could easily escape from screens and phones.

Before cell phones, we used maps, road signs, compasses and random locals to find our way to a destination. Oh, how the times have changed. When was the last time you got out of your car to ask someone for directions? Before our wireless society, we used checks and paper money to pay for things. Now so many of us run our lives and our businesses wirelessly and without any paper.

If you’re anything like me (meaning you lack some extroverted tendencies,) when you realize a map app has brought you to the wrong street address, you open up another map app to see if it knows where you are going. We rarely use road atlases anymore.

We used to ask our friends for advice. Now we ask computers questions and they reply back to us in our language. In this way alone, you can see our social climate has changed. Daily access to the internet is a luxury and it means you have a certain amount of privilege and money. To have access to the internet means you probably have some money to spend, which opens an entirely new can of worms.

2

After the Internet

After the internet became common and affordable to use, marketing and sales changed dramatically. If you’ve never lived without the internet or cell phones, this might be difficult to understand. Let me paint a picture to illustrate the changes.

Imagine a new cell phone company making a phone without apps. This new company wants to sell their phones to people who want to simplify and disconnect from the constant noise and peer pressure online. How do they do it?

Does the company send salespeople:

A) Door to door in your neighborhood?

B) Door to door at businesses downtown?

C) Into another business?

D) Onto social media?

E) To their storefront because they do not have an online presence?

The further down the list, the more accurate your answer probably is.

After the widespread use of the internet, brick and mortar businesses began declining.  Jobs began changing and disappearing completely. As much as people tried to protest the internet taking away IRL jobs, the internet actually also created new IVR jobs for people who knew how to use electronics.

Businesses began becoming a hybrid of IRL and IVR. This trend has only increased. The number of businesses operating from the cloud leapt during 2020. Covid-19 crippled brick and mortar businesses. People could not be near one another physically, but the internet allowed us to live, operate and connect with one another at a distance.

It’s true, brick and mortar businesses will probably never go away. People have an intrinsic need to be with each other and gather. As the famed Michael Scott says, People matter more than numbers and technology. People, Ryan. And people will never go out of business.

What this famous businessman didn’t say is people will live, connect and build neighborhoods online. It’s the trajectory we’ve been on for decades now. This is the world we live in, or should I say, the virtual world we live in. In this virtual world, we have countries, networks, neighborhoods, politics, rules (spoken and unspoken,) taboos and so much more. In short, because we invented a new virtual reality, we have also created cyber cultures online.

This means the U.N.’s job description just got a whole lot bigger. According to Our World in Data, every hour there are 27,000+ new users on the internet. Since the use of the internet is growing at such a rapid rate, its villages are becoming neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are becoming cities. Cities are becoming metropolises and many people have had a hard time adapting to and understanding the change.

There’s a gap in understanding around how to use the internet efficiently for things like business. This is especially true for people born before 1985.

In this book, my goal is to help bridge the gap. I want you to understand the internet and the current foundational terminology for business online. I will map out your virtual neighborhood and strategize how to leverage the internet for your fiscal advantage. I want you to learn enough to start an online business.

This book is not about the proper execution of social media strategies on certain platforms. This information changes from platform to platform and goes out of date as the algorithm changes. What doesn’t change however, is the marketing strategies themselves, which is what I will focus on.

If you are looking for how to grow your account following on a certain platform, then there are supplemental worksheets and trainings for each social media platform on thevirtualneighborhood.com

My goal is the strategies in this book would last for years while the application of those strategies changes. Here we will find a foundational understanding of virtual neighborhoods, how to build communities, market products or services and ultimately make sales.

This book will shed a light on how people and businesses function and relate to one another online and the cultures we have created.

3

Is a Good Idea Good Enough?

SEGA! the TV blared. I woke up early one day wanting to play video games. Everyone was asleep, so I made my way down the stairs, quietly picked out a game, put the tv on channel three and then I woke everyone up. I forgot to turn the volume down on the TV from the night before.

Sega Genesis. So many of these video games started with the iconic name being yelled or sung. As a kid, I never thought, How did a Japanese toy company find a way to get their products inside my house, into my living room and on my parents’ nerves?

Let’s talk about the toy industry for a second. I’ll give you a really unique toy idea and tell you why the idea ends up in the good category, but not great. Let’s say I make a really cool toy boat. It floats and can shoot water at other toy boats or ducks through a tiny cannon. I had ducks as a kid and the idea of squirting one with a remote control squirt gun sounds fun to me. I think it’s an awesome idea. We shall call it Quack Shot.

Let’s say Quack Shot was made of good quality material, had a great price point and was not made of plastic. It was also made without slave labor, making it a socially responsible product.  These are all good things, but there’s one big thing missing- conversions, sales.

Marketing, advertisement and sales are important for businesses' ideas to succeed. Why? The answer is because just having a good idea won’t cut it. It never has.

Without targeting your market, there’s no way you’re going to find the 1/100 kids willing to buy this toy. A toy business without toy sales isn’t much of a business at all. It’s more of a non-profit. Fair enough? I think so.

If you wish to thrive at building communities for businesses, then you must understand why branding and marketing are so important. On a basic level, branding and marketing helps us understand the industry, market, niche interest group and sub-niche of exactly who a business is selling to.

Branding and marketing help us discover how many kids live near duck ponds. The process helps us find out how many of those kids have five dollar allowances per week and how many four to seven year olds watch cartoons on Saturday mornings.

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Illustration 1: A graphic to illustrate Kids who live near duck ponds, kids with a $5 allowance and 4-7 year olds who watch Saturday cartoons.

This is huge! Now that we have narrowed down the population to our target audience, we have a much better chance of finding 1/100 kids to buy the product. Not only that, we have even uncovered an advertising strategy. CARTOONS!

Did you know cartoons are a marketing tool toy companies have used for years to move their product? Here is why. Cartoons are stories. Story leaves a deep emotional connection between an audience and the person telling the story and the characters in the story.

Storytelling has been used by cultures since before people learned to speak the same language. Ever seen hieroglyphics? Some of these early illustrations put modern day designers to shame. Even babies seem to communicate and tell each other stories before they learn to talk. Silent movies exist because stories can be told through visuals. Visual storytelling is a powerful medium and cartoons are just that. Streaming cartoons is actually a way of virtually getting into someone’s neighborhood. But what do cartoons and advertising have in common?

If a toy company creates a cartoon series for $25 million dollars, they could make $100s of millions of dollars through the cartoon. If you don’t believe me, just watch the Netflix series The Toys that Made Us. 

So, we’ve begun our targeted marketing strategy for Quack Shot. We have an industry, market, niche and sub-niche. We know what physical and virtual neighborhoods our customers live in. We have an advertising strategy (cartoons) to be able to tell our customers how a friendly crew of personified toy boats rid the world’s ponds of annoying little ducks by squirting them with water. Now we can make millions of dollars selling our awesome product online, right?

In theory, yes, but practically, no. There are many more marketing strategy hurdles to get through before any of these ideas would work at scale.

Here are a few reasons why this idea is good and not great:

1. Kids don’t really have money because they don’t have jobs (we’re really selling to parents.)

2. Not all kids have access to cartoons, or are allowed to watch them.

3. Little kids can’t have social media accounts.

4. Kids don’t have cars, drivers licenses or the ability to buy gasoline to drive to the local toy store.

5. Not everyone agrees marketing to kids is ethical.

There are probably a lot more challenges with this business idea, but I’ll stop there to save paper. It’s a joke, by the way. So many of you are reading this digitally or listening to the audio book. I love that! Look at us, saving trees.

We need more than a good idea to make a business run. Businesses run on good ideas and quality execution of those ideas, which requires more good ideas and cultivating good ideas takes experience.

Good marketing and advertising have to be a part of a business’s formula for success or there will be very few sales. Without the marketing, no one will know about the product or have an emotional connection to the product or service.

4

Advertising vs Marketing

So what is marketing and advertising anyway? I used to think they were one in the same. Did you know there is a difference between the two?

Several years ago, I stepped into the board meeting of a very well known non-profit and asked the same question to the twelve board members seated in front of me. They all looked at me blankly and shook their heads. 

This is probably because many non-profits don’t understand the power of marketing and advertising to help promote awareness of their initiatives. To be fair, most CPAs classify marketing and advertising as one place in the budget. Now, I’m no financial advisor, but typically there’s not a glaring difference between the two when it comes to taxes. However, there is a difference when it comes to the application of marketing strategy in the form of advertisements.

In order to understand what a market is, we must first understand what an industry is.

An industry is a giant group of people or an institution who offers similar types of products or services. Take the music industry for example, which has labels and bands who provide you with many different types of music.

Every industry is made up of markets. Markets are audiences. For the sake of analogy, let’s point out there is a drastically different audience for Jazz than Metal music. The music industry has a market who likes Metal and a market who likes Traditional Jazz. Different audiences go to different concerts and support different genres. Markets, because they are people groups, overlap and evolve over time with cultural shifts.

Which leads us to the definition of marketing. Marketing is the process of picking and choosing a market or several markets where you want to sell or make known your product or service.

If our fedora wearing Jazz singer, Sinatra, was still around today, he would be marketing to a group of people who like Jazz. More specifically, he would be marketing to older women. Now, before people break out their social soapboxes to argue with me, consider this thought. All statistics are stereotypical. Stereotypical means a widely held and typically oversimplified image of a particular type of person or thing.

Quality marketing is based on stereotypical statistics, data, research, and strategy. If Sinatra spent his marketing dollars on marketing to younger men, then he would probably lose a lot of money. Choosing the right market is important. It is so cost effective people often hire agencies, advisors and brand developers to consult on their market strategy.

Have you ever been on a long road-trip and seen a series of billboard signs saying, 100 miles to the next gas station, 50 miles until you can stretch your legs, or