The internet is full of potential to make money. But just like the old business environment, marketing plays a crucial role on the success of the business. Without it and the business is doomed to fail with only a handful of prospects and buyers to present your offers. This may not be sufficient enough to keep the business up and running.
Having a few marketing strategies may work, but your business will be founded on a more solid ground if you diversify your marketing campaign to various techniques. Diversification of strategies will increase your sales level as well.
Hence, it is important to know the most effective techniques that online marketers are using today. Listed here are a couple of methods on how to market on the internet.
15 Highly Effective Online Marketing Strategies
1. Blog Commenting
This is an effective method of sending people to your sales offer. The process is very simple. Just look for high traffic blogs within the same niche, read their posts, and make a comment. Blogs normally require you to furnish basic data about you such as your name, your email address, and your website URL. When your comment is approved and published, your profile is usually hyperlinked to your site. The key to success here is to add valuable comments and your insightful opinion about the blog post. Readers who will appreciate your comments will normally try to get more details about you by checking your profile and your site. This strategy is SEO-friendly as well.
2. Forum Posting
Just like blog commenting, forum posting is another excellent strategy that is quite effective. Instead of commenting on blogs, you can post replies to various threads. You can also create your own threads and provide valuable tips to the members. This will earn respect on your part from the forum members, and those you will appreciate your help in the forum will usually check your profile that will lead to your blog.
3. Article Marketing
This strategy has been around since the onset of internet marketing, and it is still effective today in funnelling direct traffic. Top article directories like Ezine and highly respected web 2.0 properties like Squidoo and Hubpages are great places to start submitting and publishing your articles. To be effective in article marketing, you need to create top-quality articles loaded with facts and helpful information. This will give you outstanding click-through rate or CTR.
4. YouTube and Video Marketing
Another powerful marketing technique is YouTube or video marketing. There are millions of videos shared each month generating millions of monthly views. This gives you excellent potential to widen the exposure of your business. Create an impressive video relating to your business and start sharing the video to your network of friends via email or in Facebook. The more your videos are viewed by many readers, the wider the exposure of your blog. What’s even more interesting is that viewers will also share your videos to others if they find the content worth sharing with others.
5. Social Media Marketing
Social media is a trending method of marketing. The combined strength of Twitter and Facebook already reaches a milestone by going beyond the one billion mark. These social media users are treasure pot of gold for your business because they are prospects that you can convert into customers. Thus, start engaging in social sites like Twitter and Facebook and plug your adverts at times, but not all the time.
6. Pay Per Click Advertising
If you want quick results and you have the money, then the paid marketing campaign is best suited for you. There are many strategies, and one of the popular and effective methods is the pay-per-click advertising using Google Adwords. While investment is required to cover the cost per click, with proper targeting of keywords this will give your business not just a traffic surge but a boost in sales and profits.
7. Banner Advertising
Another paid technique is banner advertising. Buy or rent banner space in popular related blogs for a certain fee. This will quickly place your business in front of many prospects, thereby giving you a quick stream of income. Just like the PPC campaign, sufficient investment is required. But good ROI is forthcoming if you do it right by advertising at well-respected and high-traffic blogs that are somewhat related to yours.
8. Search Engine Optimization
Regardless of your choices on the marketing strategies to implement, don’t forego search engine optimization. This is important for every website. While this method may take awhile before you can harvest the rewards, the benefits are long term and the conversion rate is high.
Millions of people worldwide use the search engine to look for information and to shop for products. These are great resources of prospects to position your products to. That is why getting to the top pages of the results is very important. Once your ecommerce site grabs one of the highly-coveted spots in the front page, organic traffic will commence to flow towards your site, giving you precious prospects to present your offers.
9. Blogging
Blogging is an effective marketing technique. You don’t have to write about your offers but simply give your readers some tips and priceless information. This way, your blog will earn the respect of its viewers, and ads shown within the pages may attract the readers and follow the link to your product offers.
10. Directory Submission
This is somewhat related to SEO but different in some ways. Submit your site to different directories. This will not only help in improving the page rank of your blog but give you direct traffic as well. Consider only major or popular directory to submit.
11. Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal links is a link exchange method wherein you will insert the web url of your partner-site within the pages of your blog; in return, the web address of your site will also be featured in your partner-site. While some experts discourage the use of this technique because it is arguably bad for SEO, this is a quick route in giving your site a traffic blast if your partner-blog is already enjoying high monthly hits.
12. Guest Writing
An excellent technique is guest blogging. There are blogs looking for guest writers in exchange for a valuable link to your site. To make this work, make sure to post an article as a guest writer at a popular blog already enjoying high traffic.
13. Email Marketing
To implement this strategy, you need to build a list of subscribers to your email campaign by giving them free newsletters with priceless information. You can plug in your offers in some of your emails.
14. Press Release
Press release is a popular method of driving traffic. Give awe-inspiring facts and interesting stats in your press releases and many readers will follow the link in your content.
15. Classified Ads
Just like the traditional advertising, place your offers in online classified ads like Craiglist. These sites are being viewed by thousands of buyers every day, and they are shoppers on a buying mode, thereby making it easier for you to close a deal.
All the above 15 marketing techniques are by no means the only effective methods of marketing on the internet, but they are very powerful in giving your business a boost in sales and income. Therefore, choose and implement some or all of the above strategies and you will strengthen the foundation of your business.