Practical Internet Marketing for Business

If you have a website, hopefully it is monitored and measured and has an objective. Common objectives or "conversion" for a site can include:

• Selling a product or service
• Generating a sales lead via email or call
• User registration
• Collecting an email address

To get these conversions, you need relevant traffic to the site. Generating this traffic means generating awareness of your site and getting people to visit. This can be done simply and cheaply, or through sophisticated, expensive campaigns. Business can deal with this in a variety of ways from hiring an advertising agency through to doing doing it all themselves in their spare time.

The intent here is not to tell you how to do it, this will be different for each business, but rather to create awareness of the options and how to manage them.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing requires offering a reward to others marketing your product, should a sale be made. Affiliates can drive traffic to your site, and if there is no conversion this traffic will normally not cost you a cent. The affiliate marketing industry includes merchants (retailers), the network, the publisher (website) and the customer. Essentially the publisher is paid a commission for a converting customer by the retailer, and all of this is managed by the network. Affiliate marketing generally works in the favour of the retailer.

Read more on affiliate marketing as an online marketing strategy.
 

2. Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is a form of advertising on the web and entails embedding an ad into a webpage. The ad can be an image or a multi-media object and is usually clickable, to get viewers through to a website. Ads are generally managed centrally by a central ad server and measured on clicks and/ or impressions. Banner advertising has been losing momentum and not seen by many as effective. Banner blindness is also an issue, affecting click throughs.

Read more on banner advertising and if this is an option for your business.

3. E Mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing using email for commercial purposes. There are numerous legalities around email marketing and penalties (US$11,000 per violation - Can Spam Act) for those companies which break the law, however spam in email remains a significant issue. The European Union, United States and Australia require opt-in by users to receive emails, requiring users to authenticate their addresses and have a 1-click unsubscribe process. Email marketing to registered users can be a powerful way of bringing users back to your website and cross selling new products to them.

Read more on e-mail marketing and how this may best work for you. 

4. Offline Marketing

While this is not about offline marketing, we mention it, as it will in most cases drive traffic to your website. Some tweaking will ensure that traffic opportunities are maximised.

Read more on how to tweak offline campaigns.

5. Partnerships

Maximising online partnerships for traffic and back-links is something often overlooked but often a valuable and much overlooked opportunity. As they say, the trouble with common sense is that it is not always that common. 

Read more on maximising Internet marketing opportunities through partnerships

6. Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing includes both paid search using in Google's case Ad-words and obtaining organic rankings through search engine optimization or SEO. Search engines are extremely powerful at driving relevant users looking for your product or service to your website, increasing the potential for conversion and thus delivering a very high ROI (Return on investment). Anyone online should be looking at search engine marketing as part of their marketing mix.

Read more on search engine marketing strategies and options.

7. Social Media

All the buzz is in social media. It can be fun but takes consistency and effort and has worked well in certain industries. Facebook, Twitter and site like Digg offer many opportunities for the social marketer or marketing manager.Make sure you think this through properly before investing in social media campaigns.

Read more on social media marketing.

Internet marketing is exciting, interesting and rewarding when successful. The flexibility often allows smaller businesses to move faster and be more effective in this space, while larger corporates consider brand protection, budgets and ROI. Large or small, if you have an online presence, you will need to be marketing your website. 

Go back and read more on Internet marketing strategies.