What is internet marketing and how can you stay on top of things?
Internet marketing or online marketing is a form of marketing and advertising that makes use of the internet in order to drive direct sales via electronic commerce. It also makes use of sales leads from emails or websites, social media marketing, display advertising such as display banners and search engine marketing among others in order to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers which will in turn result into sales.
In order to make your internet marketing a success, you need to remember these important things:
- You audience is important and so instead of striving to acquire new customers every time, it is better to nurture relationships with the existing one, hence drawing them back each time. This is because, when all is said and done, the same customers that you nurture will in turn spread the word of your existence hence helping you build your customer base. You can also strive to acquire new customers along the way, as long as you don’t leave the existing ones feeling left out.
- The social media has taken internet marketing by storm, and with it come real people who prefer feeling like they do matter to the company or website. This means that you need to inspire them to keep coming back for more, with quality content, call-to action statements and contests or prizes among others.
- Content is becoming king in marketing. People crave for quality content that provides them with the right information in an interesting manner. They need to be engaged in what you are trying to deliver with the content that you present if you wish to make some conversions to sales and if you wish to keep getting traffic to your site or web page.
- Last but not least, the above are only made complete when they are brought together, and so you need to find strategies or ways to incorporate them all if you wish to become a success on the internet.
Over the years, internet marketing has evolved into a number of areas over the internet, with the basic three including:
- Web marketing which makes use websites to send the promotional messages. In this case, affiliates marketing web sites, e-commerce websites, informative or promotional web sites are used in addition to organic search engine results via search engine optimization and online advertising on search engines.
- Email marketing which makes use of email messages to send promotional or advertisement material to current or prospective customers. There are basically two types of Email marketing; the transactional and direct emails which can further be broken down to emails such as newsletter emails, catalog and video emails, press release emails, invitation and survey emails, thank-you emails and lead-nurturing emails among others.
- Social media marketing which makes use of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube among others in order to advertise or market a given product or service. With so many people making use of social media sites, it comes as no surprise that marketing can be done on them. People love sharing new and interesting content, which is why while marketing on such sites you need to keep this in mind. Marketing campaigns on such platforms are relatively much cheaper as compared to other platforms.
In order to remain on top of things with regards to internet marketing, you need to keep in the loop with what the current trends are. For example, in today’s online marketing world, content marketing is taking the front seat, social media marketing is seizing the day, image-centric content are becoming the rule of the game, people are demanding more mobile-friendly content and less is actually more! With so much to do in order to get the sales you need or the rankings that you desire on search engines, sometimes, help might be needed, which is where the Internet marketing specialist steps in.
An Internet marketing specialist plays a number of roles for online sites. The specialist’s role includes:
- Developing quality content for the online site
- Researching web copy
- Improving upon search-engine rankings
- Creating search engine optimized(SEO) websites
- Obtaining quality links through developed relationships with websites
- Developing, maintain and sending out quality messages to social media profiles or accounts
- Ensuring that traffic is driven to the sites by making use of a number of methods
- Keeping track of a company’s online reputation
- Managing and delivering email lists
- Following up on responses
- Creating internet ads
- Managing comment activities on blogs or articles
The above are just the tip of the iceberg of what to expect from an Internet marketing specialist. There are instances however when you wish to do the marketing on your own or you wish to obtain credentials as a marketing professional in order to sale your services to site owners, which is where Internet marketing training comes into play. With training, you learn of strategic practices that will enable you maximize every marketing dollar. An internet marketing coach will impart in you the necessary knowledge in order to help you make the best strategic decisions with regards to online marketing and in essence help you turn a website from rags to riches.
What does SEO stand for and why you need SEO training
You may have come across the abbreviations SEO at one point or the other and wondered what it meant, or you may have wondered why some websites make it to the top of search results and others don’t. In essence, you may be wondering what does SEO stand for. SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is the process of getting traffic from the free, natural, editorial or organic search results on search engines. It takes into account how search engines work, the actual search keywords or terms that are typed into the search engines, what people search for and which search engines are a favorite to the target audience. When you search the engines for information, the keywords or terms that you type enable them bring forth the most relevant informant they find in terms of what you have requested. For this reason, a search engine optimizer needs to be careful in the way they choose to optimize the website or web page.
You need to horn your techniques or skills if you wish to make the best of SEO. After all, an increase in search rankings relates to an increase in traffic to the site which in turn equates to an increase in profits.
A number of internet marketing solutions do exist to enable you get the very best out of your website or web page, however, there are times when you may be overwhelmed as to which solutions will work best for your website or web page. At such times, you may choose to make use of an internet marketing specialist whose role is to ensure that you website or webpage achieves its very best potential. This is made possible by the strategies, or solutions that are implemented along the way.
There may be times however when you prefer to deal with your website or web page on our own without involving another party. In such instances in order to achieve the best results, you may need to undertake SEO training which will enable you make the right decisions when it comes down to making your site or page shine in search engines. With the training, you will learn of the strategies to use in order to market a website, you will lean of ways to gain top search engine rankings as well as ways to improve upon website monetization and increase conversion rates.
At the end of the day, in case you wish to rank well on search engine results, you need to tailor your site or page in accordance to the latest algorithms that search engines use in order to rank sites.
A look at some of the things that could make or break your site’s SEO.
- Keywords: When people are looking for something online, they type in a few words on the search engines and get results based on what they have typed. With this in mind, keywords do play an important role in SEO. You need to make use of target keywords if you wish to attract targeted traffic to your site or webpage. You can make use of keyword tools to help you get the best keywords to use, or you could make use of the longer keyword strategy which will ensure that you have less competition for that phrase in the search engine.
- Content: Quality content makes for quality rankings and traffic to your site
- Meta tags: Ensure that your page title provides relevant signals to your keyword of choice
- Backlinks: Quality links take precedence over weak links when it comes down to site rankings. You can get quality backlinks by developing relationships with reputed companies or blogs in order to obtain backlinks from their site to yours.
- Social Media: With so many people accessing social media sites, it is no surprise that users are playing a role in site rankings by way of their social media accounts or profiles.
- Images: Quality images do play an important role in SEO as they prompt potential customers to click on them hence driving traffic to your site.
What to expect from a Search Engine Optimization Training
Now that we have covered the question, “what does SEO stand for” and looked into the need for training, let us have a look at what to expect from the search engine optimization tutorial. When it comes down to search engine optimization training, you need to garner for the very best, after all, the site’s ranking or stand on the internet depends on it! Within the training, expect to find useful advice in ways to adapt a given site to the correct SEO. You will learn of how search engines work and how your site or web page is looked at by them. You will learn of techniques that can help build you sites’ search engine rankings and those that may lead to its total collapse. You will learn of on-Page SEO(changes to the website that enable the site rank better) and off-page SEO(work that is done away from the website itself). You will learn of different techniques that you can incorporate in order to improve visibility of your web pages on different search engines. In essence, you will get an opportunity to learn of ways to make websites or page more search engine friendly, hence pushing them to higher positions in search results. Often times, many of the SEO experts who offer training also perform SEO tutorials or experiments which can be very helpful if you get involved.