What is Online Marketing?

September 1st, 2010

Online marketing or internet marketing is the use of the Internet to advertise and sell goods and services. Online marketing includes search engine optimization, PPC advertising, e-mail marketing, search engine marketing, banner ads, blog marketing, and article marketing, social media marketing, and lately geo targeted and in apps advertising.

In other words, lets keep it real simple. This is a virtual marketing. Its use and purpose is similar to the one in offline life. Internet marketing can include information management, public relations, customer service, and sales. Steadily over the years, online marketing is gaining momentum over other forms of marketing, now even more with social media marketing and mobile marketing.

Also creating a dialog on a forum in a friendly way can also be a very powerful tool. Have in mind that this is very sensitive area, don’t become a spammer. Having a live chat on your website is a way to save the day in last minute. If you can get your visitors to start a conversation with you, maybe you can pursue them to reconsider your products.

Some consider a website by itself a form of add, marketing or maybe complete internet marketing. This cannot be more wrong! A website is by far a much more powerful weapon. Also only some actions of online marketing can be performed directly on a website. Online marketing can promote your products, make you money, cut expenses, increase sales, can be put in an auto pilot mode, works 24/7/365, and like everything else online it’s better than offline!

Define Affiliate Marketing

August 31st, 2010
Affiliate marketing illustration by User:xDani...
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Can you imagine a marketing that is directly making you profit? Probably the best kind of marketing, that is still working only online because it makes tracking available thanks to information technology.  Here is an example. You promote my product and if you are good, you will probably sell it. If you sell it, I will give you a commission (up to 50%).

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying a finder’s fee for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per sale), or any combination.

In this marketing anyone who wants can promote your product, and they will be paid appropriately. But some companies care about future and potential costumers so they if promote them they will pay you for every visit, subscriber etc. Pay for performance. I will defiantly try to provide some affiliate marketing companies.

Successful affiliate programs require a lot of maintenance and work. The number of affiliate programs just a few years back was much smaller than it is today. Having an affiliate program that is successful is not as easy anymore. Although some consider affiliate marketing as a hoax, it is a legitimate way to profit and needs hard work.

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Define niche marketing

August 31st, 2010

This is one of the most important terms in online marketing. Sometimes a biggest difference between a success and complete failure is a niche marketing. Also if you are a beginner, and just started your career as a marketer you should pick a good niche and do the best you can do.  Let me give you an example; a niche marketing of “hosting” is “quality business web hosting“. You know that there are not many people that know SEO, affiliate marketing, (little bit of web design and hosting) and loves perfumes or cigars or golf clubs, or professional quality golf clubs.

A niche marketing is a focused, portion of a market sector that you can take over. Basically you can use this everywhere! For online marketing you can use this when picking keywords or keyphrases on which you wish to target your SEO or when you are creating your adwords campaign. When you are creating you hosting packages, or products in your shop, or what exactly service do you wish to provide.

For big companies those market segments are often too small in order to serve them profitably as they often lack economies of scale. Word of advice, pick a niche that interests you. Because it is hard to write, promote, sell, do anything with a market that doesn’t interest you.

Core deffinition of niche marketing would be: Niche marketing is the process of finding and serving small but potentially profitable market segments and designing custom-made products or services for them.