Internet Marketing

What is Internet Marketing?

Marketing efforts done solely over the Internet. Internet marketing is the process of promoting a brand, products or services over the Internet. This type of marketing uses various online advertisements to drive traffic to an advertiser's website.
Banner advertisements, pay per click (PPC), and targeted email lists are often methods used in Internet marketing to bring the most value to the advertiser.  Internet marketing is a growing business mainly because more and more people use the internet every day. Popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo have been able to capitalize on this new wave of advertising.

The Internet has the power to connect millions of people from around the world. Thus, it also has the capabilities to bring your business to millions of your target market worldwide. What makes this process a best inclusion to your promotional effort is the fact that you don’t need to shell out plenty of money.

In addition, the effectiveness of your campaign can be easily measured using web analytics and cost-volume-profit analysis tools. However, it requires you to learn the many facets of Internet marketing so that you’ll know whether your efforts are giving the return on investment that you want for your business. 

Internet marketing is divided into different types:

Affiliate Marketing:

It is a marketing practice wherein a business pays an online retailer, e-commerce site or blog for each visitor or sales that these websites make for their brand.

Display Advertising:

This refers to advertisement banners that are displayed on other websites or blogs to boost traffic for their own content. This, in turn, can increase product awareness.

Email Marketing:

From the name itself, this is a marketing process that involves reaching out to your customers via email.

Inbound Marketing:

This type of Internet marketing involves sharing of free valuable content to your target market to convince them to become your loyal customer. This could be done by setting up a business blog. Content marketing through the forms of blogging, podcasts, video, eBooks, e-newsletters, whitepapers, and social media marketing are just some of things that are considered inbound marketing. 

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. This includes keyword research and placement, link building and social media marketing.

Search Engine Marketing:

SEM, is designed to increase a website's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines provide sponsored results and organic (non-sponsored) results based on a web searcher's query. Search engines often employ visual cues to differentiate sponsored results from organic results. Search engine marketing includes all of an advertiser's actions to make a website's listing more prominent for topical keywords.

The main difference between SEO and SEM is the amount of marketing that goes into SEM. SEM is a big umbrella that usually involves SEO, but what sets it apart is its focus on paid advertising through Pay Per Click, Google AdWords, and display ads you see on various sites as you browse the internet.

Sponsored search

Sponsored search (also called sponsored links, search ads, or paid search) allows advertisers to be included in the sponsored results of a search for selected keywords. Search ads are often sold via real-time auctions, where advertisers bid on keywords. In addition to setting a maximum price per keyword, bids may include time, language, geographical, and other constraints. Search engines originally sold listings in order of highest bids. Modern search engines rank sponsored listings based on a combination of bid price, expected click-through rate, keyword relevancy and site quality.

Social Media Marketing:

Based on its name, social media marketing is the process of promoting a website through various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many more. These are all ways to expand your brand and your product to more people. Many companies will create info-graphics to gain traction in the social media world as well as contests, giveaways, hashtag chats, etc. Many companies promote their products by posting frequent updates and providing special offers through their social media profiles.

Another huge focus in internet marketing is paid advertising on the web. A major way of doing this is through Google AdWords and Pay Per Click (PPC).

Google Adwords:

Adwords is an advertising service Google provides for businesses wanting to display ads on Google and its advertising network. This program enables you as a business to set a budget for your advertising efforts and only pay when people click the ads you set up.

Pay Per Click:

Pay Per Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked.

This model has been around for quite some time and is one reason why Google is a multi-billion dollar company. Honestly these two components are such an in depth topic it deserves its own blog post.

Another focus of Internet marketing is analytics, reports, and results. You can focus on all the things we’ve talked about, but it doesn’t really matter if you don’t see a bottom line result.

Web Analytics:

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.