Having created an attractive and relevant website, you are now ready to build your presence on the Internet. Using a variety of tools and strategies, you will attempt to increase the number of visitors to your site who will then have more exposure to your message, product, or service. This practice is collectively known as
online marketing, and it has been one of the most prominent and active areas in modern business and computing. The following are common marketing techniques used by Internet entrepreneurs, corporate marketers, and private individuals alike.
-- Search Engine Marketing: This involves having your site included in the databases of search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Google by simply registering with their services. If you are proficient in HTML or if you use the services of a
web designer/developer, adding meta-tags (descriptions and keywords) to the structure of your site's pages will increase their chances of being included in search results. Search engine optimization (SEO) is also a part of this technique where you post relevant keywords (the words and phrases that prospective customers use to search for your products) strategically throughout the site. Search engines will record and rank your site according to these keywords, making the site more visible to online users.
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Email Marketing: You can extend your online marketing efforts to include the use of electronic mail to send newsletters, product updates and advertisements to many prospective clients or visitors to your website.
-- Social Media: The popularity of social media sites and blogs is undeniable. Way more than a hundred thousand "tweets" are sent out every day. Around 30 billion pieces of electronic content are shared over Facebook every month. Every over online user reads blogs. The possibility that your promotional content reaches countless people through social media is not far-fetched. You can set up company pages or fan pages on social networks and link them to your main site. You stap into social media for
Online marketing-- Submission Services: You can produce your own articles, videos, and graphic materials or have them done by independent contractors, and then pass them to several free and paid content submission sites that will take your article, for instance, then link it tour your site and publish it to a broad audience.
-- Affiliate Marketing: You can start an Internet marketing campaign where you give other people the right to sell your products or services for a portion of the profits. They can create their own sites, start their own email promotion, write their personal blogs, and everything else possible to advertise and sell your products for you.
-- link building, banner advertising, and similar methods: You can strategically place text and graphic links to numerous other web sites, forums, portals, and pages whose contents are related to your product. Users who are interested and click on the links will of course be led back to your website for more information and possible sales transactions.
For your website to accumulate the highest number of visitors and eventually become profitable, you need to sustain and intensify your online marketing efforts, experimenting with all the methods described above until you hit the most effective combination of techniques and tools.
Sources:
http://eng.bluecoralsolutions.com/
http://www.thompsonlearningasia.com
http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/baye/080201mdom.pdf
http://seo-hacker.com/statistics-social-media-internet/
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/email_marketing.html
