Rosalind Henshell
7 Ways To Use The Internet For Marketing
Trying to determine the best way to market your business online can be overwhelming. It seems there are countless different ways to attract peoples’ attention, but unless you know how to execute any of them properly then standing out online can be virtually impossible. In this blog I’ll show you seven ways you can break down your Internet marketing so that you can try and determine more clearly which avenues may suit you the best.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
If you have your own products but aren’t great at sales, affiliate marketing is a great way to get other people to do your selling for you without employing a single person. Take a look at sites such as Click Bank, Commission Junction and Epic Advertising to see what other people are selling as affiliate products, and get a sense of if there is a good market for your product.
This works the other way too – so if you’re desperate to get selling online but don’t have anything to sell you can sign up as an affiliate for other brands and receive a commission for everything you sell.
Pay Per Click
Pay per click (PPC), is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay when the ad is clicked.
PPC is an excellent way to get your advert seen by people, and because you only pay for those who actually click your link it means that you can be reasonably sure that you are only paying for people who are interested in what you have. Tools such as Google Adwords allow you to research relevant keywords to make sure that you are choosing terms that people are searching. A good rule of thumb is that longer keyword phrases allow better targeting and therefore cheaper clicks.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the Deliberate Organization of your website so it shows up in the search engine results.
There are a lot of so –called SEO experts around who will promise to get your business to the top of the search engines. Whilst SEO does make this possible, there is usually a lot more to it and if you want your business to rank for a highly competitive term it’s unlikely that you will find yourself in the number one position overnight. Search Engines employ some of the smartest computer scientists in the world and they don’t want to be tricked! For this reason it’s far better to take a quality approach to SEO.
Create content that is relevant to keywords and phrases that your customers use, again, you can check Google Adwords to see how many people use certain phrases to make sure they’ll benefit you. It’s also important to get other sites to link to you to show that people appreciate your content and want to share it. Good SEO is an ongoing job but will come into its own in the long run when high quality visitors start to find your site.
Video Marketing
Video is one of the fastest growing areas of online marketing. Not only is it popular with people who prefer watching to reading, it allows you enormous flexibility to present your business in a way that just isn’t possible through words alone. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google, and it’s free to host your videos there as well as many other video sites. Facebook now also encourages videos to be uploaded directly to your timeline there so that they play automatically in your followers’ news feeds.
The possibilities of using video are really quite extraordinary and a lot can be achieved without investing in expensive equipment, making it easily accessible even for small businesses.
Social Media Marketing
One of the huge advantages to Social Media Marketing is that if is free to use even for business accounts, meaning you can put your business in front of its ideal customers who spend their time on social media over and above anything else. Most social media platforms also allow some level of paid advertising so that you can reach even more potential customers, often for a far lower cost than through other forms of online advertising such as PPC.
For many, the main cost of Social Media Marketing is the time it takes, as the whole point of the platform is to be social rather than to sell. In fact, most social media users are averse to advertising, what they want is a one-to-one relationship. Business that do well on social media do well because they are social. Links, photographs, video and blog posts all do well to help build your relationships, they also help you build credibility and expertise so that when people are ready to buy they will remember your business because they have been gently reminded of your name every time they’ve seen or liked a link on Social Media.
Content Marketing
Content is the word used to describe the articles, posts, videos, images, and anything else that makes up the substance of your web page.
Websites rich in content are seen as trustable, the more you have to say on a subject, the more you must know about it, therefore you can show yourself to be an authority or an expert. If you have a website for your business, you should have a blog section there that you update regularly. Look for ways that you can use the content of your website or blog to market your business so that when people read your page you are giving them something they want – knowledge – and subtly pointing out that you can offer them more.
Look for ways to get your content in front of as many people as possible, because the more who see it and visit your site, the more it increases the chances of your content being shared and seen by even more people. Good content will also help with your SEO. If you’re not sure where to start with sharing your content, try some of the popular submission sites such as e-zine, Business2Community or look for something similar that serves your particular niche.
Online Advertising
This term includes other types of online advert that you see, such as Banner Ads and Text links Many of these fall under a PPC category, but istead of being on search engines they’re on other websites. One of the best things about online adverts is that if something works, you can quickly scale it up to a bigger audience. If it doesn’t work you can tweak it or turn it off.
Typically though, you’ll need to be prepared to do persistent testing and constant optimization to get it right and as there is no such thing as a test environment, you could be throwing your own money away on adverts that don’t hit the spot with your audience. Unless you are confident with what you are doing it’s usually best to try out other, simpler avenues first before you transfer your learnings to the wider world of online ads.
In conclusion, you might find it best to choose one or two channels of internet marketing and master them first before you move on to the next. If you’re a complete beginner, Social Media, Video Marketing and blogs are a great introduction and most forgiving to mistakes. They also provide a great learning curve in the form of user feedback and comments – great for asking questions to your audience and getting a direct response.
A huge benefit to internet marketing is that you can track everything – and you should. If you analyze what you are doing you will know where you are getting your best returns so that you can put more effort into that area and increase the return even more. The first rule of marketing is knowing your numbers!
No-one gets their marketing strategy right first time, or second or third. Keep going, keep tracking your progress and don’t expect perfection.
If you’re still figuring out where to start, or if you are revamping your online presence, then why not have a read through our free report – Websites that sell. You can sign up and download it here!
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