We must absolutely understand what internet marketing is, if we run any sort of business.
And we must understand all the different aspects of internet marketing that are available to us, so we can determine which ones are going to best suit our business.
I define internet marketing as:
“Anything and everything you do online that relates to your business”
That’s a wide range of “stuff”.
So many business that I talk to can only think of online marketing, like they do their offline marketing: Buying Ads > Getting Customers. Rinse. Repeat.
While this can and does work online there is so much more you can do online that will help drive new customers to your website. So let’s list a few areas you may or may not of thought of that are included under the umbrella of “internet marketing”.
You don’t necessarily have to know what or how to do any or all of these. I’m going to break all of them down in future posts. But they are:
- Search engine optimization; using Google and the other Search engines to drive traffic to your webpages for free.
- Pay Per Click; Purchasing ads to promote your business and only paying if someone clicks on your ads and visits your site!
- Social Media Marketing; using the power of connections and the viralness of the internet to promote your business, using sites like: facebook, myspace, digg, stumbleupon, twitter and other “web 2.0″ sites
- Video Marketing: you can harness the power of the online video giant youtube.com to drive massive amounts of targeted traffic to your website
- Blogging: you can add some personality to your website site with a blog, and increase your web traffic and footprint by 100% or more
- Media Buying (AKA Banner Advertising, Pay-Per-View); a technique not as pervasive in todays market, this is going to be a topic not often covered in this blog, as it is one of, if not THE most ineffective form of internet marketing
- Email marketing: the key to exploding your business online is gathering an email list of your current customers and prospective clients and marketing to them on a regular basis through email
- Grayhat/Blackhat/Spam; not really it’s own category but worth a mention, you can grayhat or blackhat (spam) almost all of these techniques mentioned above. Use these blackhat at your own risk, blackhat has the extreme power to either make you a lot of money, or completely kill your business.
These are the major prongs to the umbrella of internet marketing. We are going to discuss all of these techniques within this blog, each technique can have it’s own book written on it. So I’m going to bring you the information in an order that I think is digestible and actionable.
Now think about these items, which ones can you see your business doing that you’re not already doing? Which ones are you already doing, but could be doing better?
So do you think you have your mind wrapped around the vast world of what internet marketing is? Good, that your mind digest, and I’ll be back soon with some more.