What Is Online Marketing?

Online Marketing is the interactive process of selling your company, goods or services over the internet. A good online marketing strategy will create a synergy between your company’s business model and sales goals and your overall website appearance and function. Some of the most commonly used online marketing strategies include internet advertising (hyper links and ad banners), the management of a customer data base and email strategies. Using a broad mix of components (see “Social Media”) the purpose of online marketing is to increase brand awareness and generate revenue through sales.

How Is Online Marketing Used?

Online Marketing should be a part of your overall marketing strategy. Although many companies still utilize more traditional methods of marketing, not having a strategy for online marketing means you are not reaching an incredibly large sector of the market. Online marketing should showcase eye-catching web design, develop and enhance your brand, utilize online advertising and ultimately, increase your sales. In addition to promoting and advertising your business, an online marketing strategy will allow you to conduct research revealing the preferences, needs and demographics of your customers. You can also post press releases and articles.

Why Is Online Marketing Important To My Business?

Online Marketing is important for the same reason a more traditional marketing plan is. How are you going to generate revenue without selling anything? Online marketing combines creative and technical elements so that you have a specific look and feel to your company while maximizing the broad marketing opportunities web technology provides. One of the most exciting things about online marketing is that you can reach your customers anywhere at anytime! Probably the most important reason to engage in online marketing is that almost everyone else does. If you don’t, all of your competitors will attract and keep your customers!

What Is Social Media?

Social Media is an internet based means of communication allowing you to interact with other people. There are various forms of social media. You may recognize the names Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Digg for example. These sites allow users to create a presence on the internet as well as post and exchange written content, pictures, video and audio messages, emails, blogs and podcasts. Social media is inexpensive and wide reaching, allowing you to connect with literally millions of people both nationally and internationally. Social media gets your message, business or products known in a web based interactive way.

How Is Social Media Used?

Social Media is used to create an online community, develop a following, exchange ideas and information and build relationships. It is also a great way to generate “traffic” to your website which is another way of saying that people are able to find you online and then go directly to your website. There are also many ways that Social Media can be effective for specific business purposes. A business can “gather links” which means you can provide a link to someone else’s website where they then promote you. You can also post other business links on your website. This encourages cross promotion and is a great way to attract more internet attention. Businesses also use Social Media to test a market or product, generate feedback, provide customer service, hold webinars, blast emails and post announcements or useful company information.

Why Is Social Media Important To My Business?

Social Media is an incredibly fast way to develop or increase brand awareness, improve your reputation or position yourself as an expert in a certain field. Social Media can also keep you up to date on industry news, provide you with an education that can be applied to your business model, and have related industry recommendations. It is also an excellent path for personal development. Finally, Social Media can build strong and numerous relationships, enable you to network with an international community, post testimonials about your products or services, advertise or promote and in general, build your business bigger, stronger, faster.

In conversation with other marketers, I am often asked how Social Media Marketing is useful to a website. I realize that not everyone understands how social media marketing (SMM) can affect a websites page rank, traffic, sales (the list could go on).

Content is an extremely valuable resource to all web users. By putting it to work for your website you can find yourself as the “Reliable Content Provider” also known as an “Authority” on that topic. You can use social media to give you that authority.

Recently, I implemented just a few of the social media techniques taught my Social Media Rockstars and promoted my website to top ten Google rankings – making it an authority site for a keyword related to my business. Here is my example of how social media marketing affects the natural search listing.

1. First, I had a business website that needed more traffic (what website couldn’t use more traffic). This is already a successful website for a few other keywords, but I wanted to spread the valuable content provided with this website.

2. I then researched a high traffic, low competition keyword that was related to my business website. You only want traffic that is looking or searching for what you can provide them. I do not want to falsely advertise with irrelevant content otherwise all my efforts with social media marketing would be a waste.

3. Next, I researched my market to find out what they were looking for and how I could best provide valuable content to the web searchers looking up that keyword.

4. Then I created multiple forms of content – content is information provided to a website searcher; this can be text, video, or audio. *Remember that relevant content is what you want to create.*

The content was broken down into one short video and 12 articles. 3 of the articles were 1000 words, and the remaining nine articles ranged from 300-500 words. Note: be sure that this content is in someway relating back to the main site that you wanted to increase traffic, sales, or reputation. Whatever your purpose, be sure that this content is helping.

5. Now you need to spread the content across the different social media sites. I added the larger articles to the more popular social media sites.

Of course the video went to you tube. And for the social media sites that allowed me to share a video along with my content I added the video to it.

These 12 articles and one video spread across 13 sites drove traffic back to my businesses website. The key here is to post your content on a site that has a high page rank. This will tell the search engines that the content is coming from a reliable and valuable source. In return, those high ranking sites give your site higher rankings (or a more trusted reputation) because it’s being promoted by a high ranking website. (Sort of like the popular high school student introducing the new kid – you start off on a higher social status).

Don’t stop there! With social media marketing you need to share the content. You can so this by using social bookmarking sites, posting the information to a blog and sharing the article links in a forum. People are always looking for free information. Share your free information with everyone you can. If it’s valuable and relevant to the web users you shared it with they will also bookmark it on social bookmark sites creating viral traffic.

Now if, you remember form the beginning my main purpose was to increase traffic to an already published website. I now have 12 articles, loads of social bookmarks, and a video linking back to my website. If I did my social media marketing correctly this will definitely increase the traffic coming to my business website.

But that’s not my only result: because I have all of these popular authority sites sending traffic my way, the search engines now see that I am providing valuable content. In return for providing this content and sharing it through social media marketing tactics I have boosted the listing placement of my original website. Now in the search results for my targeted keyword I have dominated the top 5 pages with articles, social bookmarks, videos, and more importantly my main business website.

With my recent efforts in social media marketing (with in the last month), I moved my business website from the 21st position in Google to the 8th. On top of that, I hold 14 other positions in the top 30 search results for my targeted keyword. All this and I didn’t use half of the resources available with social media marketing.