Internet Marketing - A Quick Guide to Some of the Options Available

There are many that used to believe, and some who still do, that once their website was up and running an endless stream of visitors would immediately come flocking, eager to look and even keener to buy; if that were true then every Internet-based business owner would be a millionaire many times over. Nice thought, but hardly ever the case.

Having a website built and going live is only the first part of what should be an ongoing process of marketing the site and letting potential customers know it's there. The World Wide Web is an extremely vast place filled with millions of websites all competing for prominence in search engine listings where the top spot is king and reaching it can very much depend on choosing the right marketing strategy. What follows is a quick look at some of the more popular methods of Internet marketing and what are perhaps the most effective to date.

Affiliate Marketing

Very simply, affiliate marketing is where you as a website owner agree to advertise another company's products or services on your website in return for a percentage of any purchases made by a buyer who arrives at the seller's site via your own. This can be a rewarding option but only if you choose the most suitable affiliate scheme for your business and market your website effectively.

Email marketing

Email marketing is probably the most efficient method of marketing available today. Numerous software programmes allow businesses to create fully-automated marketing campaigns at a fraction of the cost of most other methods. Speedy customer feedback and detailed campaign results data are just two major benefits of this type of marketing.

Banner advertising

Banner advertising is all over the Internet. Similar to the affiliate scheme insofar as a company will have a banner advertising their services or products on a third party site from which they hope to attract potential customers to their own site. Banner advertisers will generally pay another website owner to let them advertise, or alternatively, agree to a banner exchange, where in most instances no fee changes hands.

PPC (Pay per Click advertising)

Pay per click or PPC advertisers 'bid' on keywords and search phrases they believe their target market will use when looking for particular products or services. When a user types in a keyword or phrase on an advertiser's list, the advertiser's ad is shown and appears either next to or above the natural listings on search engine pages. PPC can sometimes be expensive depending on the popularity of the chosen keywords.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation or SEO, concentrates on making a website more visible to search engine robots by taking into account how search algorithms work. A few of the many methods used are making sure that the site is appealing to visitors, adding unique content to the site and paying detailed attention to coding, structure, presentation, and of course keywords and search phrases. One of the alleged drawbacks of SEO is that some search engines tend to alter their rules from time to time so sites may need regular tweaking to keep them up to date with search engine requirements.

Others

There are of course other methods of Internet marketing available such as the use of articles and blogs for example, but because all of the methods mentioned are obviously much more involved than described here, future articles will look at each of them individually in more detail.

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John Sheridan is a professional proofreader of hard copy items and website copy. He also writes web copy and occasionally accepts small copy-editing assignments. He can be contacted via: http://www.textcorrect.co.uk