Internet Marketing and Promotion 101

Internet marketing is perhaps the most important aspect of business website management. So what is internet marketing, and how do you get started?

The design of a professional website interface, programming code and informative content to assist potential and existing customers of your business is an important step in moving your business online, but it’s a small part of the process of online marketing. Your website is an important marketing and sales tool, and is often the place that your internet marketing activities are designed to direct people.

Internet marketing is the ongoing process of promoting your business, and includes pre-defined objectives such as increasing brand awareness, advertising, promotion and customer relationship management. Common methods of internet marketing to promote goods and services include email marketing, affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, blog and article marketing, interactive advertising, membership and loyalty program marketing, and reseller marketing.

Internet marketing requires the detailed analysis of your business’ long term needs and objectives, and the creation of a marketing plan to accomplish them. Your website’s design should support and complement these objectives, and ensure that your ultimate sales objectives are facilitated.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Create an online marketing plan

2. Start a newsletter

3. Create an affiliate program

4. Optimise your website for search engines

5. Start an online blog

6. Write articles

7. Provide useful information and tools on your website

8. Provide “link bait”

9. Provide community-targeted services and facilities on your website, and allow people to register on your website to join the community

10. Start a loyalty program

11. Create a reseller program

12. Start a pay-per-click program

13. Advertise your online services offline

14. Create a viral marketing campaign

15. Use online gift and discount vouchers to drive customers to your website

16. Measure your results and reinvest in successful undertakings

Internet marketing should never be seen only as a subset of your business’ marketing mix. Your business website is such an important part of your business that it should be entirely indivisible from it. As such, all marketing undertaken to accomplish your business promotional objectives should encompass a route through your website in addition to any other first contact points to your business.

Likewise, any services you provide offline should be available online either supporting your core goods and services, or better still, as your core means of accessing your goods and services. By leveraging the ease-of-use, accessibility and ubiquitousness of the internet medium, you will soon be on the fast track to a well-oiled online marketing machine.

The Time-Tested Internet Marketing Tool: E-Mail

Many online companies are wary of using email as a marketing tool, because they believe that it’s too hard to avoid being labeled as spam. In fact, there has been a recent backlash against email marketing. Detractors point to stronger filters, safe lists, and other ISP-created tools as their evidence for denouncing email marketing campaigns.

For this reason, many companies shy away from email marketing, opting instead to solely focus on SEO and PPC methods. While these methods are very effective, newer technologies, it is a mistake to ignore email marketing, because it can be a very powerful tool.

In fact, there are a few very successful companies that use email marketing as the bulwark of their Internet marketing campaigns. By earning customers’ trust and marketing in voluntary email lists, these companies have a powerful advantage over their competitors, because they can directly communicate with their customers.

The Email/RSS Controversy

While RSS technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, the technology suffers from a few limitations that prevent it from completely replacing email as a marketing tool. First of all, email is nearly ubiquitous in today’s world, whereas RSS feeds are limited to a narrow group of people who are searching for specific, pigeonholed information. Next, email has a simpler and more personally customizable format, while RSS requires that the user spend time customizing his or her feed requests. In this way, email is more user-friendly, simply because people have been using it for longer.

If you really think about it, email will always be a recognizable part of the Internet, whereas RSS occupies a fringe market. This is especially true on the global scale. Therefore, email trumps RSS when it comes to Internet marketing.

Blogs are More Fashionable, but Email is more Reliable

In the mid 1990s, the Internet world suffered its own Influenza epidemic. This is known as the Spam War. During the spam war, sleazy, get-rich-quick scammers overloaded people’s inboxes with spam, or junk email. In response, many ISP’s designed strong filters to resist spam. Additionally, many people took protective measures to defend themselves against spam. Many businesses abandoned email marketing altogether, instead opting to use blogs as a marketing tool.

However, the facts tell the same story. Email marketing is an effective , proven way to increase your Internet marketing campaign.

An Online Marketing Dream: The Opt-In Email List

Opt-In email lists are composed of a group of people who want to be included in a certain company’s email list. While many companies mistakenly believe that no one wants to receive their email, the businesses who choose to employ opt-in email lists receive great benefits from this well known method of Internet marketing. However, instead of trying to sell something through their opt-in email listservs, these marketers choose to send highly relevant information or developments about the company so that they may boost web traffic to their site. It’s very simple and very effective.

Safe Lists: A Safe Way to Ensure Web Visibility

Email safe lists are comprised of subscribers who visit a web site and then voluntarily choose to receive email from a corporation or company. It’s similar to an opt-in list, but slightly different because the user initiates the action of joining. Many reputable companies have earned huge amounts of money by utilizing email safe lists, simply because when these lists grow to a certain size, it becomes inevitable that a huge amount of people visit the site. It’s good to practice and hone your skills when writing emails to a safe list, because you want to provide useful information to the recipients of your safe list.

Therefore…

Email marketing can drive a huge amount of web traffic to your website. Do not neglect this extremely strong marketing tool when you are drafting your Internet marketing campaign. It’s always good to communicate directly with consumers, especially if they are choosing to receive email from your company. As long as you follow the basic rules of SEO and you use common sense, email marketing will increase your web visibility and provide you with a wealth of new customers.