Updated: September 29, 2022
- Display Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Interactive Advertising
- Social Media Optimization
- Web Analytics
- Cost per impression (CPM)
- Cost per action (CPC or PPC)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Contextual Advertising
- Revenue Sharing
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Paid Inclusion
- Search Analytics
- Mobile Advertising
That can seem overwhelming, but thanks to Wikipedia you can find out all about each of these internet marketing tactics and the differences, just click through and see what each item is about. Before we get started with all of these amazing tactics let’s take a look at one of my favourite web-based tools: Google Docs. Google Docs is a cloud-based office suite of software that allows you to have a secure mobile office. If you don’t have a Google or Gmail account please sign-up for one now. If you already have one let’s head over to and check out the features of this amazing free set of tools.
We need to start by looking at the roots of our internet marketing strategy. The roots are made up of:
- Research – Situation, competition, audience
- Strategy – Attract, engage, convert, multiply
- Branding – Focused, clear, brand message, compelling
- Content – Relevant, benefit driven, organized, unique & valuable
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- Facebook like or Twitter follow
- Blog subscription via email or RSS
- e-newsletter sign-up
- Request a quote, Inquiries, email, phone
- Purchase
Don’t give people too many choices as this can overwhelm and put visitors off. Let’s look at a few sites who are trying to serve so many customer groups that it can be challengingto navigatetheir websites. According to the tree chart above the website has two parts which will stem from the roots: research, strategy, branding and content.
The two parts of the website are development and design. Development should involve rich media: video, photos and sound where appropriate. Development should be scalable. What if your site is a great success? You need to be ready to grow when your user base is ready to (See: Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Your design elements should be usable, straight forward and flexible. Imagine that a visitor of average intelligence reaches your website, will they know what to do? This is what I call the LCD factor and it’s something that I tried to incorporate into most of my thinking about marketing.
Create some funnels or buckets for your website and try to keep the initial options for your visitors to five at the most. Your website will need to be optimized for search engines. There are number of levels to SEO or search engine optimization. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or page in search engines via un-paid search results. SEM or search engine marketing targets paid listings.
You can spend hours or thousands of dollars working on SEO. It is recommended that you build your site with SEO in mind but don’t spend too much time on this initially as you will learn more from your site over time. Today let’s look at keywords, link building, backlinks or inbound links and page rank. Here are some tools for link tracking and SEO:
The most basic level is keywords or how people search for your site. This can be optimized with tools like Google Seach-based keyword tool or Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. Each of these tools will help you to learn new ways that people find your products or services. It’s very important that your content reads naturally and doesn’t seem jam-packed with keywords for search. The ability of a blog to keep fresh content on your site and increase the frequency of keywords is important. For more on SEO and SEM be sure to see this massive list of blogs about SEM and SEO and here are 150 more.
This just brushes the surface of SEO; a deep and complex science when a company can afford it. Next look at Monitoring and Measuring everything you do online. This is a vital part of using the web effectively. The first thing I want to do is a short lesson in tracking everything. Click here to get started.
These are tools you can use to analyze your own efforts. Let’s talk about measuring and monitoring all of your activities online with these tools:
What is value? It depends on your audience, but if you are real estate agents it could be 5 ways to increase the value of your home before you sell or 5 ways to quickly inspect a potential home before you bring in the professionals. If your audience is mothers then your value will be different. Front load your newsletter with the valuable information and supply more conversion opportunities throughout. These could be a survey, a coupon, an invitation to find you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter. Mail Chimp is the best free tool for email marketing and Constant Contact is the best paid email marketing tool.
Landing Pages are a very important part of any internet marketing campaign. A landing page is a webpage specifically designed to receive visitors from a campaign or ad. It is often said that “A homepage is where clicks go to die.” Most often this is because we are trying to serve so many different customer groups on our home pages that visitors from ad campaigns don’t know what to do when they do when they get there.
Now that we’ve talked about the free methods let’s look more closely at the kinds of internet marketing we have to pay for. Today we will be discussing the following:
oDisplay Ads
oWeb TV Preroll
Blogging and why it’s so important to your site. Blogging is a word that has had it’s day. The word originated from it’s initial meaning of “web log” which was shortened to “Blog”. A blog is apublishing mediumfor ideas, opinions and thoughts. Some people blog about their personal life or interests while others use blogging to discuss ideas in their work and bring together insights gathered from others. The name of the game isvalue, provide it. Don’t know what it is? Ask your audience. The largest blogging platform isWordPress.com and it is the recommended option. I useBloggerbecause it’s what I am used to and it works for my purposes. Advanced users or those with access to capable technology professionals should useWordPress.org. The major differences between WordPress.com and .orgare listed here by WordPress.
Your blog should be consistent and consistently create value for your target audience(s).
Social Media Marketing and it’s uses will be covered in detail in Friday’s class.