What is Online Marketing?

While there are many distinct methods of marketing online, I tend to look at the various methods as fitting primarily into one of four different categories:

Paid Marketing

This consists of paying someone to use their servers to market to other people.

This is the most capital intensive method of online marketing as it requires a continual expenditure of cash.

While it can be very effective for those who know exactly what they are doing, it is, in the long run, typically not the best way to go.

Some examples:

• Paying to have a banner or other advertisement displayed on someone elses web site
• Paying to have an ad displayed when a user enters a particular word or phrase into a search engine

Offline Marketing

This consists of advertising something which exists online offline.

This is fairly inexpensive and can be quite effective, but requires existing customers.

As this site is about using a web site to bring traffic to an online store, I will not be considering it further into this module.

Some examples:

• Including a business card, coupon, or flier with a customers order
• Dropping a card on the ground with your web site name somewhere that people might find it

Organic Marketing

The closest thing to this offline is word of mouth marketing.

This consists of having customers seek out and find you ( or your advertisements ) via normal web sites and search engines of various types.

Some examples:

• Someone types a phrase into a search engine and chooses to view your site.
• Someone comes across something you have written or created and finds your site from there.
• Someone finds a link to your site via some other site and follows it.

Direct Marketing

This consists of contacting people directly to sell to them.

Done properly it can be very effective and beneficial to people. Done poorly and it can be extremely annoying.

Some examples:

• e-mail spam/scams/blackhat marketers
• e-mail newsletters
• craigslist contacts
• craigslist scammers and/or blackhat marketers

A good newsletter is looked forward to by those who receive it ( or simply no longer received by way of a working unsubscribe link ), while spam is typically people sending advertisements to as many people as possible because there is always that tiny percentage that will buy just about anything.

With a web site designed to bring extra traffic to your online store, your marketing will be focused upon two seperate, but closely related tasks.

Getting visitors (traffic)

One primary focus of your marketing efforts will be to get people to come to your web site so that you can direct them on to your store to make a sale.

Clearly, if you do not get people to your web site then having a web site is a bad investment in time, effort, and energy.

Gaining Page Rank

The other primary focus of your marketing efforts will be to gain page rank in the eyes of the major search engines.

The higher the page rank of your site, the more authority search engines attribute to the content on your site…and the higher such pages will rank on search engines.

By building page rank, you make it easier to get your own articles to show up on the first page of search results…which brings in more visitors.