Now that you’ve been able to get a glimpse of the history of internet marketing, let’s take a deep dive into the concept of internet marketing and its view on the web.
Okay, if you’re still with me, fantastic. You’re one of the few that doesn’t mind wading through a little bit of hopeless murkiness to reemerge on the shores of hope.
But before we jump too far ahead, it’s important to understand what online marketing is and what it isn’t.
That definition provides a core understanding of what it takes to peddle anything on the web, whether it’s a product, service or information.
When we talk about marketing on the internet, we’re talking about driving traffic or boosting visibility via a number of means. Any type of advertising done on the internet to promote any product, person, service, business or place for that matter, can be deemed as online marketing.
However, to succeed in this arena, whether it’s SEO, social media, email marketing or beyond, you need to ensure you adhere to the three pillars of trust first and foremost.
Types Of Online Marketing There are ten essential types of marketing that can be done online. Some of these can be broken down into organic marketing and others can be categorized as paid marketing. Organic, of course, is the allure of marketing professionals from around the planet.
It’s free and unencumbered traffic that simply keeps coming. Paid marketing, on the other hand, is still a very attractive proposition as long as the marketing pays for itself by having the right type of offer that converts.
#1 — Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO should be a core tactic in any marketing strategy. While it might seem difficult to understand at first, as long as you find the right course, book or audiobook, and devote your time to learning, you’ll be in good shape. Considering that there are over 200+ ranking factors in Google’s current algorithms, learning, digesting and successfully implementing good SEO tactics is essential to the success of your website or blog.
- Pay attention to the often-overlooked on-page optimization elements such as your page speed, which can be determined by using tools like GTMetrix, Pingdom and Google’s own Page Speed Insights.
- Leverage Google’s new Accelerated Mobile Projects (AMP) specification to ensure that you appear relevantly on mobile searches using this new lightning-fast loading spec.
- Utilized Google’s Webmaster Tools for suggestions on fine-tuning your site’s structured data, rich cards, and other HTML improvements such as discovering duplicate title and meta tags, and so on.
- Read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and ensure that your content and your overall SEO strategies are in harmony with what the search giant is looking for.
- Always build high quality, relevant content that’s unique, insightful and engaging, paving the way for a higher likelihood of visitors sharing that content organically and naturally.
#2 — Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Organic SEO’s flip-side offers up a paid method for marketing on search engines like Google. SEM provides an avenue for displaying ads through networks such as Google Adwords and other paid search platforms that exist across the web throughout social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and even video sites like YouTube, which, invariably, is the world’s second-largest search engine. By utilizing SEM, it provides you with a great avenue for getting the word out quickly and effectively.
If you have the budget, then marketing on search engines for competitive keywords might be the right fit for you. But be prepared to pony up. Keywords can range anywhere from a few cents to upwards of $50 and more.
The quality score for any term is reflective of what you can expect to pay for bidding on that keyword. The lower the competition, the lower the quality score and the lower the price. However, SEM doesn’t just cover paying for clicks but also paying for impressions.
That means, for example, that every 1000 times your ad is displayed, you pay a pre-arranged amount, regardless of whether anyone clicked on it or not. While this is a less popular form of advertising, it still exists today on some platforms.
#3 — Social Media Marketing One of the hottest forms of marketing anything online right now is through social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram, amongst others. Social media provides a near-direct avenue for reaching the masses, but it most certainly isn’t a simple or easy thing to achieve saturation, especially when we’re talking about millions of followers.
In a number of recent articles, where I’ve interviewed some of social media’s rising stars such as Jason Stone from Millionaire Mentor, Sean Perelstein, who built StingHD into a global brand and Nathan Chan from Foundr Magazine, amongst several others, it’s quite clear that multi-million-dollar businesses can be built on the backs of wildly-popular social media channels and platforms.
However, getting that saturation is a frustrating process. Obviously, it doesn’t happen overnight. Based on my conversations with numerous rising stars in social media, there are a few things that should be done when it comes to gaining attention through a variety of social media channels.
- Find your voice: decide what your message is going to be and stick to it. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Make a decision and stay committed to it. Whether it’s a topic, idea, niche, business or something else, do your best not to waver.
- Be real and be yourself: people can see through those that try to put up a front on social media channels. Don’t try to be something that you’re not. Be real and be yourself. It will resonate with people.
- Deliver value no matter what: Regardless of who you are and what you’re trying to promote, always deliver value, first and foremost. Go out of your way to help others by carefully curating information that will assist them in their journey. The more you focus on delivering value, the quicker you’ll reach that proverbial tipping point when it comes to exploding your fans or followers.
- Constantly engage with others: many of the social media superstars I’ve spoken to have said that, in the beginning, they followed the popular profiles and constantly commented, shared and engaged with others. Not just on their own profiles, but by directly commenting on photos and engaging in conversations on other feeds.
If you’re serious about finding your voice and discovering the secrets to success in business, one of the best people to follow is Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of Vayner Media, and early-stage invest in Twitter, Uber, and Facebook, has arbitraged his way into the most popular social media platforms and built up massive followings and often spills out the secrets to success in a highly motivating and inspiring way.
#4 — Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads PPC advertising is a method of advertising on search engines like Google and Bing. As mentioned earlier, with PPC ads, you pay each time that ad is clicked on. PPC ads also exist on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook as well.
However, if you’re going to engage in PPC advertising, it’s important that you determine conversion rates by using tracking pixels. By using the Facebook tracking pixel or the Adwords pixel, you can help to define your audience and work to entice them to come back to your site.
Let’s say the didn’t finish their purchase or they simply showed up and left after adding something to their shopping cart, or they filled out a lead form and disappeared, you can re-target those individuals. Re-targeting is one of the most effective ways to market your business online because you’re marketing to “warm” traffic, or people who’ve already visited your site. If you’ve ever gone to a website and then seen those ads following you around the internet, then you’re well aware of what re-targeting is.
When running PPC ads, it’s important that you keep careful track of the specific ads and keywords that you’re targeting. You can do this by using the Google Analytics UTM builder to create campaign URLs that you can use to track the campaign source, the medium and any keywords or terms that you might be targeting. This way, you can determine the effectiveness of any campaign that you run and figure out the precise conversion rate.
#5 — Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is the art of marketing products, services or information for others. It doesn’t require that you ever house or warehouse a single thing. But it does require that you have an audience to market those things online. Without that audience, whether it’s through search engines like Google or social media channels like Facebook, you’ll find a difficult time with affiliate marketing.
However, if you are a seasoned online marketer, and you’ve built a substantial following, then marketing as an affiliate might be the right fit. Jason Stone from Millionaire Mentor has built a seven-figure business with affiliate marketing, while David Sharpe from Legendary Marketer has built up an eight-figure business by creating an army of affiliates that market products in collaboration with his team.
There are numerous repositories to source affiliate products and services from. However, some of the biggest are sites like Clickbank, Commission Junction, LinkShare, and JVZoo. You’ll need to go through an application process, for the most part, to get approved to sell certain products, services or digital information products. Once approved, be prepared to hustle.
#6 — Email Marketing For those that are not in the know, email marketing is a substantial money generator. In fact, email marketing can far outstrip standard website sales because, at least for unknown brands or websites that are not household names, clinching a sale on the first interaction often doesn’t happen.
That’s why seasoned online marketers build squeeze pages with lead magnets, webinars and sales funnels to drip-deliver value and build a close personal relationship with their email subscribers, effectively moving them up a value chain to sell them high-ticket products and services.
If you have a website or a blog, be sure that you create a lead magnet or give something else of value away for free such as a trial software to a SaaS system or anything else for that matter that people could get value out of. Exchange your free offer for the email address and drop them into your sales funnel.
Use an email marketing system like InfusionSoft, ConvertKit or MailChimp, amongst others, to drip-feed value to those subscribers while also working to move them up to your value chain. Russell Bruson does a great job of explaining sales funnels and marketing virtually anything on the internet is his best-selling book, Dot Com Secrets.
#7 — Influencer Marketing Using influencers to market your products or services is a great way to quickly saturate yourself into the marketplace, no matter what you’re peddling. However, finding the right influencer at the right price is the hard part. You don’t necessarily have to go to the top-tier influencers; you can also opt for micro-influencers (those that have 10,000 to 100,000 followers or fans). Some influencers charge a hefty sum for a simple post on platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
You can expect to pay upwards of a million dollars and more for some of the top-tier influencers. If you’re looking for mid-level influencers, you’ll likely get away with paying roughly a couple hundred-thousand dollars and up.
The really important part of influencer marketing is to find influencers that are in your niche. Be sure that they represent your target demographic audience before deciding to part ways with your hard-earned cash. It can get incredibly costly, but it can also bring you instant attention and business.
#8 — Blogging Blogging is one of the best forms of marketing online. It’s free and it gives you a platform to build a massive audience as long as you don’t give up. While starting a blog is relatively easy, actually following through and growing the blog is nothing short of downright frustrating and seemingly impossible.
However, some of the world’s top-earning blogs gross millions of dollars per month on autopilot. It’s a great source of passive income and if you know what you’re doing, you could earn a substantial living from it. You don’t need millions of visitors per month to rake in the cash, but you do need to connect with your audience and have clarity in your voice.
#9 — Video Marketing Video marketing is a great avenue for exposure on the internet, and utilizing a platform like YouTube to deliver value in the form of tutorials and other useful information such as courses or entertainment is a great way to grow your brand and build a presence. While there are several platforms for doing this, clearly YouTube is the most popular for doing this.
However, video marketing is also a great form of both content marketing and SEO on its own. It can help to provide visibility for several different ventures, and if the video is valuable enough in its message and content, it will be shared and liked by droves, pushing up the authority of that video through the roof.
#10 — Content Marketing Content marketing is one of my favorite go-to strategies when it comes to marketing on the web. It’s my favorite because it’s one of the most powerful, free and organic methods that are available for online marketers no matter where they’re from.
However, marketing content is difficult. So be prepared to put in the sweat equity. My favorite style in this is article marketing. You create anchor content on your website or blog, then you build authority-content links to that content, effectively driving up the visibility.
I’ve used this single strategy to rank hundreds of keywords in the #1 spot on Google, and I would highly recommend that if you’re going to learn any marketing strategy, that you get really good at this one.
The type of content you can market is wide open. Aside from articles, you can use infographics, tutorials, ebooks and many other forms of content marketing. As long as it’s done the right way, and it isn’t intentionally setup to trick or fool search engines, but rather to add value to human beings, you’ll see immense results from this.
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