Internet Marketing Strategies - Traffic, Traffic and More Traffic.
Internet Marketing strategies are aimed at bringing businesses closer together and making
profits, the latest Internet marketing strategies enable e-business owners to continue to
create a flourishing business within this dynamic, constantly changing arena.
The latest Internet marketing strategies are hot topics in any business debate and there are
plenty of experts willing to share their views on the feasibility and reliability of these
modern Internet marketing strategies.
These new strategies include social networking, blogging, use of video and audio, viral
marketing and ezine marketing.
There is little doubt that these particular Internet marketing strategies are creating
millions of dollars for various Internet businesses world-wide. Now, whilst these particluar
strategies may not have led to a faster ROI (return on investment), they are definitely
raising returns through increased volumes and sales, which, to a marketer is what matters.
So if you are an Internet marketer still struggling a little with knowing how to boost
your business’ income potential, below you'll see outlined some of the latest Internet
marketing strategies that you need to start using:
1. Social Networking
This is one of the latest phenomena and it looks like this will become even bigger in
2007. Sites such as MySpace, DirectMatches, and a whole host of others, many of which started
out as dating sites, are becoming increasingly important areas to promote your internet
business. The key to working any of these sites is to avoid spamming your ads. Use your profile
to advertise your sites when you are giving information about yourself. Be clear in your profile
about your reason for joining the site (this helps cut down on some of the more salacious offers
you may otherwise receive), join relevant groups (or start your own), gradually increase your
circle of friends and contacts after trawling your way through to other likeminded professionals
on the system and post relevant tips and information, referring to your sites only when appropriate.
Let your profile do the work for you. If you are making relevant, helpful posts in the clubs that
you join, people will take an interest in it. There is also usually a classified area for you to
post ads, but again be very careful to follow the rules here.
2. Blogging
According to The Interactive Media Lab of the University of Florida, creator of Project
Blog, a blog is a website which contains dated entries laid out in reverse chronological
order. The best part about this type of web-site from a search engine point of view is that
it is updated frequently, it is linked to similar sites, and it is archived. The blogger is able
to make their posts at any time, needs little or no knowledge of html programming and can
re-write or edit posts at leisure. Imagine how simple this can make writing about your products
and services? It also brings you closer to your customers by enabling them to give you
immediate feedback on your blog as posted and also your products. Instant testimonials...
Blogging is great for enabling people to share ideas and concepts, its about comparing notes
and putting things into perspective in the way you would use a diary or journal previously,
but you get the added advantage of being able to use this technique to put your products into
peoples minds, getting them to think about why they would benefit from buying or using this
without having to view your salesletter!
Blogging is about creating traffic, the very crux of Internet marketing. You can use it to
keep a constant influx of people visiting your website just because they have read something
good in a certain blog, (not necessarily your own even), with your link posted on it.
Remember, with a blog, you don't so much promote your ideas and services or products, at least
not using the usual hard selling rules. With blogging, you get traffic and sell your products
and services in a more subtle way — one that compliments your salesletter but gets you
recognised as an expert in your field. The person to trust because everyone is mentioning you!
3. Use of Video and Audio
These days, video and audio are everywhere! and they are set to increase even more.. People
are recognising that audio and video messages are another way to bring your customers closer
to you and enable them to feel as if they have a more personal relationship with you.
Here it is important to create a professional, yet friendly persona that you use to
communicate with your prospective customers. If you can inject some humour and show
your sincerity and enthusiasm about your product and services, the sky will be the limit
for you in terms of having a responsive list of contacts.
When using this medium you need to be aware of possible trade offs in loading time of
your web pages / download times which can severely affect dial up users. Keep your audio / videos
short and sweet when you are placing them on your web-site and offer an alternative download
medium ie pdf format for dial up users if you are providing lessons or longer information videos etc.
We have used our own web audio plus software to
create the audios on our site here.
4. Viral marketing
As Internet marketing grows, everyday is suddenly Christmas day with everybody rushing
to give their products or services for free to try to boost their online business as fast
as possible. The point of this is to ensure that your products and services become known to
everybody. You literally want to infect them with your items and make them feel that there
is a huge pandemic (caused by your services or products). You need the word to spread like
wild fire, infecting everybody with the knowledge of how great your products are. Many of
the most effective launches of recent times have used this approach, spreading the word
way before the product is actually launched, getting everybody hyped up and ready to spend.
Think of the Brad and Andy's latest Stompernet launch and Mike Filsaimes' Death of Internet
Marketing report. These are samples of Butterfly marketing at their finest, honed to
perfection and the envy of many, although they are designed to look effortless, in fact
pretty accidental.
5. Ezine marketing
Content is king! It has always been that way and there is no reason for this to
change in the future. People search the Internet for information and the search engines
are being increasingly designed to be able to recognise good content that relates to the
search terms, not just in the keyword phrase but in its use of related terms, or latent
semantic indexing, as it is also known. This is where the keywords searched are surrounded by
relevant other words that help the user to learn as much as possible about the subject.
The search engine programmers know that if the customers do not get what they want, they
will go elsewhere and just like us, they don't want to lose those customers. We all want the
customer to to take interest in our product and buy from us rather than the next guy.
Google, Yahoo and MSN are no different, why would they be? So their search engines have to
be made increasingly sophisticated.
The good news is that one of the best ways to market your product is still to create
unique articles and post them in ezines. Your aim is to get your words out there so that
people start finding out about the things that you want them to know, and recognising you
as someone who knows their stuff. The next move is to bring those same people to your site.
You can do this by affixing links in your articles posted in the ezines. Check with each ezine editor
as to how they are happy for you to present your links, ie resource box and main body of the
article.
Now that you have created this link back to your site, chances are good that people will
be keen to find more information regarding the article that they have just read. Once they
come across the items that you are selling, believing in them will be that much easier
because you have already established a connection between the article they have just
read and what they think they need now (because of the solutions that you have recommended).
Another way that you can use ezine advertising is to pay for some form of advertising within
the ezine so that it's customers actually get to see your product ad. Some ezines have sponsor
ads within the ezine and it is alos possible to buy solo ads which are sent out to the membership
list in a separate mailing, hence the name.
6. Article Directories
Another good way to create one way links and traffic to your site is to submit your unique
articles to the better known artilce directories such as GoArticles, EzineArticles, and ArticleAlley.
You still get to link from the resource box to your own site and occasionally you will be allowed to make
a couple of links to other relevant articles from the main body of your text but check the
rules before submitting to ensure that you don't have any problems here.
Don't submit exactly the same articles to your web-site, ezines and article directories,
you want your web-site to get ranked highly, not penalised for duplicate content and if your
web-site is quite new, there is a good chance that the ezine or article directory article is
going to be indexed before that same article on your site, so make it relevant but different
for the best results. The extra work will pay you dividends in the longer term with both the
search engines and your readers / customers as they recognise your expertise and trust your
judgement / recommendations.
If this seems to be a little daunting, don't forget to review our
article submitter software
to help alleviate some of the burden. You will still have to make the changes to the article or
actually write it yourself, but at least this will semi automate the submission process, for a very
reasonable cost, without penalising your submission in the eyes of the article directory editors.
I hope that you've enjoyed this brief overview of these modern Internet marketing
strategies. Now you just need to decipher which strategy will work for you best (and which of our
products will best help you to achieve this)...... Sorry I couldn't resist the tongue in
cheek there, but you get the picture?
