Online Marketing Tactics That Work
Online marketing is also known as internet marketing, web marketing, and e-marketing. It refers to many tactics that are employed to promote products or services online. This is a very broad area that continues to grow as newer channels of online communication open up. For example, no one had heard about Facebook marketing a few years back, and today, it's the talk of the town; YouTube has begun embedding advertiser's links into videos posted by users – this too is a new marketing tactic. There are many different facets to online marketing, and these are:
Online marketing tactics
Pay-per-click advertising: The sponsored links that you see on search engine results' pages are PPC ads. Advertisers register with search engines' advertising channels, pay a small deposit and then bid on search terms (keywords) that are relevant to their business. Their ad shows up when the keyword / s is searched for and they have to pay a predetermined charge every time their ad is clicked on.
SEO (Search Engine Marketing) : The objective of SEO is to make a website highly visible to search engines and thenby increase traffic. SEO can be performed on-site by including HTML tags and titles, and including relevant keywords in the content. Offsite SEO helps generate backlinks by giving away helpful or entertaining information in the form of blog posts, articles, white papers, videos, press releases, and more. Content marketing, which includes article marketing, is part of offsite SEO.
Social Media Marketing: This reflects to the setting up of appealing pages and creating customized apps to be published on prominent social network channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Content can be posted on relevant and niche social channels as well. The objective of social media is to raise brand awareness, listen to customers, and generate a database of prospects. Companies can also advertise (PPC) on these channels.
Affiliate marketing : Merchants can appoint resellers (affiliates) by signing up with affiliate networks like CJ.com and LonkShare.com. The affiliate applies to become an affiliate and if the merchant approves, the affiliate starts marketing the merchant's products on his site. If he sells a product, then the merchant has to pay him a commission. The affiliate network takes a deposit from the merchant and it ensures that decisions are paid. Merchants and publishers have to work with the online software provided by the network.
Opt-in marketing: This type of online marketing involves collecting the contact details of prospects with the idea of converting them into customers. Whitepapers, reports, newsletters, etc., are given away free so long as the customer registers for these. The company then uses this data for future marketing.
Online marketing continues to evolve and newer applications are discovered by the day. Today, listing a business on Google Places, which is a part of Google maps, is hot because advertisers' physical addresses can be found easily online. Online marketing targeting mobile users is catching up in a big way as well. If you own a website and do not market it online, you will stand to lose because getting more traffic and posting quality content are the keys to online success.