Internet marketing is exciting, challenging, and confusing. Being an expert can make or break your Internet business career and yet many people who depend on Internet marketing don’t have a full grasp of the essentials involved in Internet marketing.
In fact, many Internet entrepreneurs waste a great deal of time, energy, and momentum because they do not fully understand Internet marketing. Don’t let this lack of understanding undermine your income potential.
In order for you to better understand Internet marketing and its impact on your Internet business you must know the answers to these three key questions:
What Is Internet Marketing?
Marketing is actually rather simple. Marketing is communication about an idea, product, service, or organization. Marketing, therefore, encompasses advertising, promotion, and sales as well as the various techniques and forms of communication used to advertise, promote and sell.
Marketing is broader than simple advertising or promotion in that it includes researching the market to learn what consumers want and then set out to meet their needs with the appropriate product, price, and distribution method.
Marketing includes market research, deciding on products and prices, advertising promoting distributing and selling.
Marketing also covers all the activities involved in moving products and services from the source to the end user including making customers aware of products and services, attracting new customers to a product or service, keeping existing customers interested in a product or service, and building and maintaining a customer base for a product or service.
Internet marketing includes these same activities but also pulls in various internet tools including websites, email, ezines, banner advertising, blogging, RSS, text links, search engine optimization, affiliates, autoresponders, and other eCommerce applications.
What Is The Cost Of Internet Marketing?
The range of expenses for Internet marketing is huge. There are a number of promotional and marketing ventures that can cost you nothing or only pennies a day while other advertising efforts can cost you thousands a day.
It is important to consider your goals — both long-term and short-term — as well as how much each prospective customer is worth to you. This will help you determine a workable budget for your Internet marketing campaign.
Many Internet promotions are free, you can set up a website and/or blog for $250 a year, and you can buy text links for $10 a month. You could easily spend $25-50 a day for advertising but there are many cheaper ad options available.
The best program is to start small and cheap and slowly build as you test and learn what is successful for your market and product. There is no perfect advertising solution that works wonders for everyone. Each marketer and each product has a different formula.
What Is The Benefit of Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing offers more benefits than many traditional marketing mediums. The very nature of websites and blogs is that they continue working to promote and market your product long after your initial marketing effort is over.
Similarly, many advertising efforts, such as ezines, newsletters, banners, and text links also continue to increase in power over time.
Email marketing can be a tremendous surge in contacts and sales and offers the ability to personalize your message as well as reach a targeted audience so your chance for sales goes up exponentially.
The other tremendous benefit of Internet marketing is that it offers convenience and immediate satisfaction. Your potential customer sees your marketing message when it is convenient for them — and often when they are seeking information about your specific topic.
Then you offer them the ability to act on that interest right then. They can locate your product and buy in the time it would take to watch a commercial on television or turn a page in the newspaper. That is the power of Internet marketing.
Targeting Niche Markets
The World Wide Web has captivated my attention ever since I was introduced to it in 1997. That was about 20 years ago and ever since that time, my interest about all the different things that can be done through the Internet has continued to grow.
For the last couple of years, I have been grappling with the idea of making money online. Although I searched and found a lot of information, but most of it was vague and did not give me any concrete answer to the most important question: what to actually DO to make some money on the Internet.
During my quest of getting answers, I came across a very informative video on the Internet which gave me a lot of information about Internet marketing and gave me some pretty good food for thought. The video talked about “Niche Markets”; what they are and why they are important to any person who would like to make money on the Internet by selling a product or service. In fact, the concept of Niche Markets is applicable to any business or service provider, whether they operate on the Internet or otherwise.
If you look it up in the dictionary, the word “Niche” means “A situation or activity specially suited to a person’s interests, abilities, or nature”.
A “Niche Market” is a group of people with a common interest or ability or nature, who would all be interested in a common product or service. The common interest of these people can be any thing ranging from a common hobby, a common problem, a common cultural background, to any common desire they might have. Let me explain this to you with a few examples:
- A niche market of people who have a hobby of scrapbooking
- A niche market of people who have common problem of lower backache
- A niche market of people who are all Hispanics
- A niche market of people who have a common desire of learning plumbing
People with common interests tend to cluster and you can easily find pockets of such people online; in forums and groups or visiting websites of their interest.
It is best to direct your marketing to select niche audiences for maximum benefit to you and to them. It is always a waste of time, effort and resources to market your product or service to a niche audience which is not interested in what you are selling. For example, if you try to sell scrapbooking materials to a niche audience who wants to learn plumbing, you will not get any customers. Granted that you will find a rare plumber who also likes to maintain his scrapbook, but you will not make a profit! Similarly, marketing a new and effective acne product to a group of people with lower backache will only lead you to lose the money you spent on marketing your innovative acne solution to them.
Niche Marketing is very cost effective and powerful; the world’s most successful businesses use this concept to maximize their profits. Therefore, if you have a certain product or service that you want to sell, concentrate your marketing efforts to the Niche Market that it caters too. Conversely, if you do not have a specific product in mind that you want to sell online, it is advisable that you seek out large Niche Markets and then think about what they would be interested in buying and then provide them with that particular solution/product/service.
5 Ways to Boost Your Website Traffic for free
1. JV Partnership
You’ve probably heard about Joint Ventures before. They are one of my biggest sources of traffic. Initially its hard to find JV Partners especially big names because nobody knows you so start with smaller marketers.Don’t forget to keep a list of everybody you have had a successful JV with. They know you and they like to work with you in the future.
2. Write Articles
Writing articles is another great method to attract tons of visitors. It takes little time and builds your credibility all over the web. It improves your sites search engine ranking because of link back to your site.
3. Forums
Forums are the best place to drive targeted Visitors to Your Website. You can also increase your marketing knowledge, make joint ventures and get quick help by joining some marketing forums. If you’re serious about building your online business, it’s must. Be sure to check out the rules of forum before any posting.
4. Viral Tools
Viral e-books and reports can drive massive traffic that you cant imagine. Why? Because it’s VIRAL. Your reader can customize the book with there affiliate links and giveaway for free. That’s why it spread like a virus all over the net and send traffic to your site.
Pay per Click Search engine is also a good way to get instant and targeted visitors but it’s not free. You need to do a lot of homework and make a huge list of relevant keywords before starting or you may burn your hands.
Some Hype You Should Avoid
A. Guaranteed 10000 Visitors for $
You have seen it every where on net. When you buy a package you will come to know that you haven’t made a single sale by the time the package runs out. The reason behind it is that they show your site in a small pop-up window and pop-ups are not much effective. The other reason is your site shown in front of untargeted people who are not interested in your product.
B. Blast your ad to over 10 million sites
There was a time when it really worked but its no longer true. There are so many automatic submitters these days and there’s very little chance anyone will ever see your ads.
C. Send your ad to 10million email address
This type of Marketing Are Now Considered SPAM! And if you are reported for SPAM, you can lose your ISP, website, e-mail account, and much more!
D. Guaranteed Search engine ranking
Top placement on search engines is a hard task and requires lots of money and time. There are millions of websites across the Internet and everyone wants a top search engine ranking. If you are not in Top 20 for your keyword you’ll not be getting many visitors.
E. Just Push one Button and get 1000 visitors a day type Software
Internet is filled with this hype “Targeted traffic at the push of a button”. They show your site at auto surf traffic exchange programs where everybody uses this type of software to gain credits and nobody actually sees your site.
7 Secrets of Internet Marketing
Many marketers have been shifting their marketing budgets to the web over the past few years. Marketing online allows you to target specific audiences and easily track return on investment, commonly referred to as ROI.
Unlike traditional marketing methods, results of Internet marketing campaigns are almost immediate. This allows you to better evaluate what elements of your campaign are producing results and which are not.
When buying online media, you must be willing to shift your marketing dollars to the online methods that produce a positive return.
To be successful at Internet marketing, you must understand the essential secrets of Internet marketing. These secrets can allow you to achieve success by finding the right audience, communicating your message properly, and leading consumers down the path to purchase.
These secrets include:
1. Website Directory Listings
Before you begin any marketing campaign, make sure that the website you’re promoting has been listed in the common directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, and Google. Even if you’re using a marketing page off of the root directory of your website, be sure that the primary site is listed. This ensures that prospects can continue to find your marketing pages long after you’ve launched your campaign.
2. Generating Traffic
In order to realize a return on your investment, you need to generate traffic to your marketing pages. There are a number of ways to do so online. Some of the most popular include Google AdSense, Overture, and Looksmart. Other methods include affiliate programs and targeted website advertising. Research other websites that have the audience you’re looking for and negotiate favorable ad rates for your online marketing campaign.
3. Marketing Pages
Don’t lead prospective purchasers to a generic website. If you do, potential buyers won’t know what to do next. The easier you make if for prospects to take advantage of your offer, the better. Whenever creating a marketing campaign online, provide a specific page for leading purchasers to your product or service or a billboard that showcases the offer. Take the guess work out of making a purchase and more consumers will buy.
4. Testimonials
Customer testimonials are the most powerful way to sell your product or service. When consumers hear from those who have purchased and used your product or service, they gain a certain level of trust and comfort in what you have to offer. Solicit testimonials after each purchase and use those that are the most convincing to prospective purchasers.
5. Create a Compelling Offer
Be sure to offer something that no one else is currently offering. If your offer is similar to your competitors or is not very interesting, consumers have no reason to learn more. Of course providing something for FREE is often a great way to entice potential customers. Maybe it’s a 3-day free trial or a free evaluation of some kind. Be creative, try something new, and measure the response.
6. Developing Trust
Before anyone will buy from you, your website or company needs to be seen as reputable. This means that consumers can purchase from you and not worry about the safety of their credit card information, personal information, or anything else being exchanged. A good method for developing trust is to purchase and display safety and reliability icons such as BBB Online, Trust-e, and VeriSign.
7. Provide a Guarantee
Nothing makes a consumer more comfortable with a purchase than offering a guarantee. Perhaps you can offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee or a money back guarantee. A guarantee is a great way ease the risk of making a purchase. If your competitors are offering a guarantee, you want yours to be equal or better.
Internet marketing is an incredibly powerful medium for segmenting your prospects and delivering targeted advertising. Online, you can easily measure you return on investment and refine your marketing campaign over time to improve results.
If you are a local business you can benefit from Internet marketing as well. Look for local directories to list your business or service. Or, you can supplement your local advertising with product marketing pages on your website.
Internet marketing is more than just placing ads online, it’s using the web to communicate the value of your products and services.
The Formula to a Successful Internet Marketing Campaign
The Internet has made a profound impact on strategies and techniques, no matter the size of your business. For years now, the Internet has been an outlet for businesses to get the word out about their industry or a particular product. The focus now is on strategic inbound techniques. More and more business are able to find success by formulating unique and educational content rather than simply paid advertising. Although paid advertising can be beneficial, creating a following of your niche audience through natural content will allow your business to gain or maintain the branding that it needs.
With this strategy in mind, finding the right outlet for your business is the foundation of your internet marketing plan. Let’s start by understanding the basics of Social Signals and SEO.
Social Signals and SEO
When formulating an internet marketing campaign, understanding social signals and SEO will help you lay your groundwork. The primary goal of Google and other search engines is user satisfaction, so creating and publishing content that is providing users with the most relevant and up to date information, combined with proper social signals will give you a better chance of rising to the top of the search results.
Social signals don’t usually have the same impact as a traditional link, although it is undeniable that they play a role in organic search rankings. The more people that are sharing a piece of your content, the higher the quality it’s likely to be, therefore its position within the search pages will increase. Think of your social shares as a stamp of approval. If users AND search engines see hundreds or thousands of shares, then the content surrounded by these signals will be deemed valuable. The more you generate valuable content, the more equity you will gain with search engines to help build your brand. This technique needs to be applied each and every time you place any sort of informational content on or off your site.
Image Content
We are constantly hit with advertisements, so it’s becoming more important for our ads to be easily digestible, but how can we do that while being educational at the same time? Let’s take Pinterest for example. Pinterest is a hotbed for advertising, with users flocking to it in great numbers for image-based content. By placing an emphasis on images they are breaking up the traditional concept of content to make it more appealing to users because it gives the user a sense of an easy read.
A successful blog post can also share these characteristics. By peppering in images to break up that content, it places an emphasis on certain areas making it more reader-friendly. Another way to make use of image-based content is with infographics. Bear in mind, an infographic has a very small amount of text allowing it to weigh heavily on the image itself. This will give you the opportunity to show off your design skills while selling your products or featuring your services through the image. The traditional text-based content will never go out of style, but incorporating images will clearly be beneficial to your internet marketing campaign.
Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads are a recent trend that can be a very valuable advertising tool. It works by utilizing browser cookies to track the websites that users visit. When a retargeting ad is in place and a user leaves a site, the products and/or services they viewed previously will be shown to them again in the form of advertising on other websites. This can be an extremely valuable and effective technique if utilized correctly. The probity is low that a user will engage in the action that is on your site within the first visit. We all know as users, we like choices, so exploring other options is very likely to happen. Having a retargeting ad in place it can increase your conversion rate drastically. Although this might be an obvious statement, you MUST be getting traffic to your site before applying a retargeting ad.
4 Super-Secret Marketing Strategies
Creating a website is really just the first step towards online success. In order for your e-commerce business to thrive, you’ll need an extensive internet marketing campaign. While some business owners handle their own marketing, hiring an SEO professional usually leads to the absolute best results.
Even if you work with website professionals, as a small business owner you’ll still want to understand the basics of internet marketing.
Today, let’s go a little more in-depth. Here are four e-marketing strategies that aren’t very well known, but which can help increase site traffic and customer conversions.
Use Both Brand Non-Brand Segmentation
Your brand’s current position in the marketplace makes a difference in the marketing strategies used. Ideally, your brand has what’s called a “strong presence.” This means people are familiar with your brand what products or services you provide.
Some common examples of brands with a strong presence include Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart. But you don’t have to recognized internationally in order to have a strong presence. Even a small brand can be widely recognized among a niche audience.
If your brand has a strong presence, you’ll want to segment your campaigns on Google Shopping. To do this, you’ll split your Shopping campaigns into both “brand” and “non-brand” segments.
Your brand campaign should be set to low. You’ll also want all brand keywords to be negatives in your non-brand campaign.
These strategies might seem a bit counter-intuitive. But if your brand is already well-known, then your non-brand campaign should only target those looking for the type of product or service you provide. People looking for your brand specifically won’t typically search for you by product or service type.
Use a Variety of Audience Segmentation
Not all potential customers are the same. You want to divide your audience into different groups based on common needs. This lets you develop specific marketing techniques based on what each audience segment will respond to best.
Many marketers only segment their audience into two groups:
- People who visit a site without making a purchase
- People who select items but abandon their cart before making a purchase
This identifies high-intent and low-intent audiences. The problem is two segments aren’t enough to identify all your potential customers.
Audiences should be segmented by time spent on site, a number of pages viewed and other detailed metrics.
Use Both Dynamic and Standard Remarketing Ads
Not everyone who visits your website will make a purchase. When a visitor leaves your site, you want to follow up with remarketing strategies. These are marketing techniques that address the reasons why the consumer didn’t make a purchase. In essence, remarketing strategies attempt to bring a potential customer back to your website.
Many remarketing techniques rely on dynamic ads. These are ads that appear when people search for products or services similar to those you provide. The idea of dynamic ads makes sense. People are in the market for a certain type of product, so you want these potential customers to consider your brand.
However, standard remarketing ads shouldn’t be ignored. Standard ads have more flexibility as to where they can appear. You can test different messages and designs in order to refine your ability to connect with potential customers.
Use Shopping Engines Beyond Google Shopping
Google Shopping is the largest shopping comparison engine online. If you sell a product, you’ll want a strong presence on this platform. But Google Shopping isn’t the only comparison shopping engine available.
There are a variety of other shopping engines online. Most of them are industry specific. While the overall volume of potential customers is lower, these shoppers are also usually highly interested in products or services related to your specific niche.
For instance, if you sell pet supplies, you’ll likely want to list your products on Petazon. Many industries have similar shopping comparison engines. A professional internet marketer will be able to identify specific shopping websites worth targeting. Of course, as an expert in your industry, your expertise will also be a valuable asset.
Marketing Efforts Both Big and Small
The difference between good and great brand exposure is often found in the smallest details. While pretty much any internet marketing pro can cover the basics, the real secret to success is implementing as many lesser-known marketing techniques as possible. Even small, seemingly insignificant strategies can help you stay ahead of your competition.
3 Marketing Myths that are Stopping Your Success!
These 3 marketing myths can cause you to lose sales if you base your marketing decisions on them. We’ve given you some marketing tips to blast each myth and boost your sales.
Myth 1: People buy a product at the cheapest price they can find.
That is not true – if it was then companies like Rolex and would not exist – Timex would have put them out of business a long time ago. Despite the ease of research that the Internet affords – buyers are generally lazy and don’t undertake full research. Even on eBay where it is far easier to check the relative prices of a product – people often buy a product at a higher price than they could. So what causes people to buy? These are called buying triggers – the most common are:
• Confidence in the seller
• A high perceived value
• Recommendations
• Ease of purchase
Blasting Myth 1:
Establish your credentials – for example we have over 20 years of business consultancy experience – so we know what works and what does not work in a business.
Find ways of enhancing the perceived value of your product or service by adding extras or clearly demonstrating the value of its purchase.
Ensure that you include some actual recommendations within your sales letter.
Make it easy to purchase and receive your product by not introducing any barriers to purchase such as extra forms, obscure or complex payment methods.
Myth 2: Offering your customers numerous different options will boost your sales
When confronted with several options, most customers have difficulty making a decision. They often react by procrastinating – and going to a seller who offers a clearer product. Now by this we don’t say add extras or up sells, just clearly state what is included in the product and don’t offer options that not only confuse but making your selling and processing more difficult.
The human mind works better when offered the two options “buy”, “don’t buy”.
Blasting Myth 2:
Only offer one product – or product package per page. You can have a clear (and short) menu on each page to encourage multiple purchases.
If you have more than one option for a product or service – then give them different names and present them each separately. For example you can call them “silver service”, “gold service”, “opal service” etc. This what we did with our various marketing services and it works quite well.
You should always aim at a small, easily understood product or service range. You should be able to explain each of your products in one or two sentences. If you can’t do this – how do you expect your potential buyers to understand what they are buying?
Myth 3: Everybody Needs My Product or Service
Unfortunately, most people don’t believe that they do need a particular service of product. Obviously with items such as Ipods – your teenager will try and tell you they really, really, really need one, but this peer pressure that has been built up with millions of dollars. Much of this was spent on research into what there market wanted – and they got it right!
If you believe this myth then you also believe that you can succeed without doing much marketing or selling. Unfortunately, despite what some marketers tell you – it does not happen that way. Undoubtedly there some very successful marketers around, but they will all admit that a great deal of market research, testing and reviewing of their offerings – happened before they became successful.
Building a successful business is hard work – most of it devoted to finding potential customers and then matching them with your products and services. Even if most people can use your product or service, you still need a marketing strategy to reach them and a persuasive sales message to close sales – because you can bet your last dollar – that where there a lots of potential customers – there are just as many sellers.
Blasting Myth 3:
• Do your homework – find out where your potential customers are, what particular needs and desires they have and what they are seeking to solve these.
• Look for a narrowly defined niche market where your product or service will solve a unique need of the customers.
• Design your product or service to meet these needs.
• Test, Change, Test, Refine, Test and obtain customer feedback.
Unless you are one of the millionaire marketers around – you will find many myths that you follow and potentially lose money on. Hopefully the ones above have helped you.
