Friday, February 25, 2011

An Introduction to Internet Marketing

Internet marketing in its broadest sense is the use of the internet to market your products or website. You can achieve this in several different ways, or combine all of these methods in order to develop an effective marketing strategy.

Search engine optimization is the art of creating content for your website that will drive traffic from the major search engines straight to your site. The content will be rich in keywords that are relevant to your specific business or niche.

Pay-Per-Click search advertising is a good way to boost traffic until your site starts ranking higher on the major search engines. In effect, what you are offering is a small commission every time someone clicks on one of your ads. This can help to get that much needed traffic almost immediately while you focus on improving your rankings on the major search engines for the long-term.

Link acquisition in whichever way you look at it, is a solid foundation to your internet marketing plan. In simple terms, the more links you have pointing back to your site, the more chances you will have of getting traffic. These links will also help to improve your rankings in the major search engines. There is software to manage link building, but manual link building is always going to be more reliable.

Having your own affiliate program is an effective way to utilize link acquisition, which is also known as pay per action. A good example is a blog that reviews the kinds of products you sell. In the scenario, you would place your advert on the blog in question, and then pay the owner a preset amount for every sale that is generated from his links.

The last point to cover is permission-based email marketing. If done correctly, this form of Internet marketing can reap huge rewards. Just be aware that if you are considered to be spamming (sending mass quantities of unsolicited mail), your website could be black listed. You could also get into a lot of trouble, as spam is a serious crime in many countries. So keep in mind, no matter what type of marketing strategies you use, they should always be white hat.

To your dream actualizing

Timothy Anietie