ABC's of Internet Marketing
By Laura Lake, About.com
http://marketing.about.com/od/internetmarketing/a/internetsuccess.htm
There are many options when it comes to using the internet to market your service or products. This can often leave marketers confused and wondering where to start.
The marketing vehicles that we can chose from include:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Paid Search
- Affiliate Marketing
- Email marketing
- Blog Marketing
Where will you get the most bang for your buck? I wish I could give you a concrete answer or a plan that would get you started and on the path to success guaranteed, but truth is every merchant differs. I can however equip you with the basic strategy that I've followed.
With that said in my 11 years of interactive marketing there is a formula that I suggest and a reason for it; let me explain. I have taken the below from my own experience, both in marketing my own companies as well as those of my clients.
Search engine optimization using organic listing within search engines to get your products seen by those who are searching for specific keyword terms tends to have fantastic results. The downside is this method can take up to 3 to 6 months to begin seeing results. Can you wait 3 to 6 months? If you are like most businesses the answer will be resounding no.
There is an option to organic search engine optimization and that is paid search. This is where you use companies such as Google Adwords or Overture to set a budget and pay per click for listing that are at the top of the search page on specific key terms. I would not suggest depending solely on pay per click advertising. This can become costly and if not managed well can be a drain financially. Often companies will outsource their paid search campaigns, not because they can not learn to do it or can not manage it on their own but because they want someone with a great deal of experience to make sure they are getting the most for their money.
Affiliate marketing or often what is referred to as strategic partnerships is the opportunity to present your products or services to experience online marketers and you pay them a commission for the sales that they drive. The great benefit to this marketing option is that it costs you nothing unless they in fact send your sales. The downside is at times its difficult to find the great affiliate marketers unless you have connections within the industry or your hire a company that knows how to go about recruiting effective marketers. I would make one key suggestion be sure to test your landing page for conversion purposes. If you find great strategic partners and your landing page doesn't convert you will lose them quicker than you can imagine. Test your landing page with a paid search campaign in order to make tweaks, changes, or just increase your conversion rates based on your findings with the paid search campaign.
Email marketing is not dead, but let's just say it's a little harder to grab attention with email. We have been bombarded for so long with spam and messages that are not pertinent or of urgency that we tend to be quick to hit the delete key. I'm not saying that email marketing can't work with a permission-based subscriber list, but your message will need to catch their attention within the first thirty seconds and have a very strong call to action in order to get your viewer to move on your offer.
Blog marketing exploded in 2006. Search engines love blogs and readers love to read them in their own leisure time. We pull in the feeds that are important to us and we can view them when we want to. A blog will help your viewers stay on top of your current offers, specials and important news. If you don't have a blog, my question to you is what are you waiting for?
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