Starting from the early 1990s Internet marketing and SEM made a huge development from simple text-based websites that offered product information into highly complex and complete online businesses promoting and selling their services on the Internet. I will be writing a series of post to educate myself and everyone interested on the topic, this post will serve as an outline, and will be interlined later on.
Nowadays, the Small business internet marketing industry has become a complicated science involving a great deal of theoretical knowledge in combination with practical and applied techniques allowing businesses, including small ones to reach growth never imagined before. As a science, it ranges from browser-side and server-side programming and coding on one end to marketing and economics on the other.
Internet marketing means the use of the Internet to advertise and sell goods and services. It includes:
- Banner and Text Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Interactive Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (including Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising).
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a specific area of an online marketers’ business, especially when we are talking about small business. Mainly, its purpose is to increase targeted traffic from search engines via organic search engine ranking, paid listing and advertising. Actually, every successful SEO professional should be aware of top search engine demands and consider them while creating website and improving on-page and off-page factors for Web pages. There are numerous important factors influencing search engine ranking of a Web page.
There are certain methods that go beyond SEM (Search Engine Marketing) that can help improve your small business site online visibility and traffic numbers. These include, for instance, creating and spreading a banner / ad network and / or paid link partnerships, as well as social media, email marketing and building affiliate relationships with other websites.
Social Media Marketing today is more popular than ever before and it mainly consists of social media channels on the Web, blogs and micro-blogging services, social networks, social news sites, media sharing sites, wikis, etc., offer a valuable opportunity to moderate and share content. Social media channels are a perfect place to interact with existing or potential consumers; a good viral marketing campaign within the online community creates buzz around your brand and may result in new inbound links to your site appearing on the Web.
Another important part of any effective internet marketing campaign should be Email marketing – is an independent branch which has to be dealt with separately and does not have much in common with SEM. Email I will be covering this topic in the future and will provide insights into the main direct mail campaign steps and guidelines from my own experience and industry best practices.
Banner networks relate to SEM as long as they touch upon your link popularity (which is a component of SEM).
Affiliate Marketing is a popular method for promoting web businesses when with few marketing dollars marketers can establish a presence and earn a profit recruiting affiliates. Such partner networks can grow with your company business projects and add its profit to your marketing budget.
Web Analytics - Its role can be hardly underestimated as Web Analytics is an essential measure for continually improving web business performance, advertising campaigns, organic search engine results, ranking positions and others. Generally, Web Analytics deals with the traffic already generated at the previous stages. Its primary goal is to improve traffic quality and enhance conversion. You might also be interested to take a look at my earlier post on google analytics alternatives.
Although it is possible (and advisable) to understand every theoretical aspect of Internet marketing, in practice you may do much better by specialization in a specific area or technique and simply start your Internet Marketing business. These posts will give you a good understanding of how internet marketing should be employed by small businesses. Feel free to let me know your comments and suggestions.
Interesting and useful article. Thank’s.
[...] or increasing search engine visibility, because ultimately it all leads to conversions. A good internet marketing strategy besides SEM should involve conversion optimization and I will talk about conversion rate [...]