Internet Marketing Solution

Marketing is a key function for any business, whether it is a huge corporation that operated across continents or it is a small work from home business. Every business needs to market because how else would it inform the people about what it has to offer – product or service? Over the last 10 years or so business has changed quite a bit, or more precisely how business is carried out and this is because of the emergence of the Internet that has broken down the barriers of time and space and opened by new opportunities and markets. But one thing has not changed and that is the need for marketing. Even if a business wants to carry out its activities over the Internet, it still needs to market itself. But this is a lot different than traditional marketing. We call it Internet marketing.

How is Internet marketing different than traditional marketing?

There is one basic difference. While traditional marketing is basically ‘one to many’ (such as those campaigns that are carried out over newspapers, television and billboards (there are exceptions to this of course that include direct marketing such as mailers), Internet marketing as a medium is basically ‘one to one’. This is because only a single person sits in front of the computer and thus the business is speaking to that individual alone. Though there are many prospective customers, but at any given time, you are essentially talking to one person.

The medium of distribution is hugely different between the two and thus this is also a factor. Because of this huge difference, the messaging also has to be different of course.

What constitutes Internet marketing?

Many things together constitute Internet marketing. They are as follows…

Search engine optimization: Search engine optimization or SEO is an effort on the part of the optimizer to make the website rank well in the search query page of major search engines for popular keywords. This is important because if the website is not ranked well, it can never get the traffic it needs to do business. The bottom line is – if you have a website, it needs a good Internet presence because according to statistics, most people find a website from the search engine.

PPC marketing: PPC or ‘pay per click’ refers to running a campaign in the PPC search engines such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter. These are the advertisements that are seen in the sponsored section in the search engines. The advantage of PPC is that, you start to get results almost immediately. All you need to do is just open an account, do a keyword research, define the bid values, write the advertisements and they are ready to go live. The website begins to receive traffic almost immediately. PPC exists because in many cases with SEO it may take a lot of time to get the ranks and in some cases, the ranks might not come at all – PPC on the other hand provides almost instant traffic. But on the other hand, since the website has to pay for every click, a PPC campaign might be quite costly, particularly if the landing page is not converting very well.

Website conversion rate improvement: In this, you are essentially not trying to increase the number of visitors to your website through SEO or PPC, but trying to make changes to the web pages so that more number of people converts to become paying customers. When this happens this is a great thing because as the website owner you do not pay more to get the traffic but you end up increasing your revenues. So the traditional theory that more the cost – more the revenue is not true here and this is why it is so great.

Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is possible both for a business and for an individual as well. As an individual you just have to search for websites that offer an affiliate program and then you have to sign up. If you have a website you can put the advertisements and whenever someone clicks or purchases from that website, you earn a commission. This offers a great opportunity – there are many people who do this full time and earn a lot of commission money. In some cases, you do not even need to have a website – you just start a PPC campaign and send traffic to the parent company and you can earn your commission either on the traffic or on the sale. Of course the commissions are more when you are being paid for a sale and not just traffic.

Blogs and forums: Blogs and forums also offer a great opportunity to market yourself on the Internet. Publishing articles on the blog can establish you as an expert in the field – and if the articles are informative, interesting to read and are published regularly, you can expect a good stream of Internet traffic.