You will now learn the marketing methods that online businesses have been using in order to promote their services and products to the global marketplace. The following methods are the methods that will be discussed further and they all fall under Internet Marketing:
– AFFILIATE MARKETING
– ARTICLE MARKETING
– E-MAIL MARKETING
– BLOG MARKETING
– PAY PER CLICK or PPC
– SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION or SEO
– POP-UP ADS
– BANNER ADS
– SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
– MOBILE MARKETING
Each and every of the Internet marketing methods above are not the same or equal. Each of them has various and different strategies to reach the target audience and will produce various results based your marketing goals, pitches and the relationship you already have with your customers.
Whether you are going to create your own website and market your own products, or you are going to do mainly Affiliate marketing and sell other people’s products, I want you to know that you are definitely going to use some of the above methods at various times. Just note that the amount of reward that you are going to reap from this industry is always going to be proportionate to the amount of efforts and time that you put into it.
Now let’s continue as we progress to know all the juicy part of this great industry. You are now going to learn all about the different methods of marketing online as listed above. It will no longer be a puzzle for you, no not anymore after reading the info below.
Affiliate Marketing
This is a practice where you choose an online product or service, promote or market that and the merchant or company pays you for any customer that you bring in that buys the product or service of the merchant. You are not a staff of the merchant / seller, but rather someone helping the merchant out with marketing in return for a commission.
They are four players involved in Affiliate marketing namely the Merchant, Network, Publisher and Customer. The merchant is the company or business that is offering the product or service for sale. The network refers to the agency or department monitoring the affiliate program. This could be in-house or external. The publisher is the affiliate marketer who is helping the merchant to sell in return for a stated reward. The customer is the person who ultimately buys the product as a result of the affiliate’s efforts.
Affiliate marketing works by simply using the website or blog of an affiliate to drive traffic to the merchant’s website. The visitors from the affiliate’s website is forwarded to the merchant’s website and if they click, buy a product or service there, the affiliate marketer’s account is credited with the agreed amount of commission or gift or points.
Basically, this is also a revenue sharing mode between the merchants and the affiliates. It is just like working for a company as a sales representative, but this time, you are independent. No monitoring to see if you come to work or not; everything is strictly performance based and therefore risk-free. You get paid only for your results. No sales, no commission!
The compensation given to the affiliate may depend on how many clicks, sales or registrations were made on the merchant’s website via the affiliate’s referral. Affiliate marketing enables the automation of the advertising processes and the payment for the desired actions. Merchants have preferred this internet marketing strategy because it is a “pay per performance” model, where they do not incur any expenses for marketing their products unless the affiliate produces the results they need. Basically you can say that this form of marketing is risk free for the merchant as he does not have to make any payout unless there is a sale or performance.
Affiliate marketing can also be translated as a type of business relationship where you, as an affiliate, promotes a merchant’s services which are different from yours. This means that you do not need to have your own product in order to venture into affiliate marketing. You only need to promote your business provider’s services and products.
This is how affiliate marketing works – as an affiliate you need to have a web site or web page where you put a link that directs your visitors to the merchant’s website. When the so directed visitor makes any purchase from the merchant’s shop, you are immediately credited with the pre-agreed commission or fee.
Another thing that obtains in affiliate marketing is the use of web cookies or codes. This is an interesting part of affiliate marketing. It is a way of crediting you for the visitors that you send that does not make a purchase on their first visit. What happens is that on the first visit to the merchant’s site, some codes are deposited on the computer of the visitor linking him to the referring affiliate.
Let’s say the visitor later makes a purchase from the same computer, the merchant‘s site is able to relate or identify the sales to the originating affiliate even if it took some day later for the visitors to come back. Some of the cookies could last for 6 months depending on the merchant. For some merchants, the duration could be three months. This is an interesting aspect of affiliate marketing.
The success of affiliate marketing has allowed such companies as Amazon, Clickbank, Commission Junction and so on to rise up. Amazon.com is the largest online store today and has several thousands of affiliates who help them make thousands of transactions daily.
Article Marketing
This is another form of internet marketing which is effective and used by many companies and individuals online to market their websites, products or services. It involves writing short keyword rich articles that are related to their industry and then posting these on various article directories from where they are read and spreads to many places online.
Usually people post these articles on article syndication sites that have a good readership following. These articles will then be distributed and published in many places online and sometime this spreads so far where people read them and then following a link on the article will visit the article writer’s website.
Usually you are not allowed to place any advertisement on your article. Rather you will provide useful and entertaining information for the audience of the article directories but at the end of the article, you are allowed to provide what is called a Resource Box with a link pointing back to your website or blog. I am sure you must have come across some of these articles and the resource box. It will read like “This article is by S. Warner who is an expert on human resources. To read more of his publications, kindly visit www.xyz.com”.
In fact this is a very effective and powerful way of getting traffic or website visitors to any site and I tell you it is not just any type of visitors but the best quality of visitors; people who are already sold on your topic and are more likely to purchase from you.
Many are of the opinion that article marketing must be included in any marketing system that you want to adopt. Some years back when I was marketing a particular service, I adopted this marketing method and wrote so many articles which I distributed online. In fact for many years this was the main source of traffic to my site and it continues to provide visitors to my site even now that I am no longer providing the service.
Because theses articles were distributed to many places, at a point in time it led to a situation where the same article was in several places and Google who is the number one search engine and provider of free traffic to many online businesses began to filter this in their search result. It was a kind of penalty and many people were no more getting the same result from their articles.
What happens was that when there is a search for your keyword and one of the articles comes up in the search result, if there was any other place where the article was place, this would no more show up. So it now limited the source of your traffic from articles. Google did not want a situation where the 10 results will just be the same website.
In order for web owners to avoid this duplicate trap, they resorted to what is called article spinning or article rewriting. They would take the same article and try to rewrite them using a software to automate or simplify the process. In the process, they will get a variation of the article which will then attract more visitors to their website.
If your article is top quality it could be picked and featured in niche blogs or focused content websites that are managed by others. You can also send these articles to Blogs which are high trafficked sites and this can open the flood gate of visitors for you. Through this way you are able to reach and introduce your business to an interested audience that may have been otherwise unreachable.
The common practice in internet publishing is to have your articles contain relevant keywords and catchy titles with around 250 to 500 words in the body. If you include the keywords or keyword phrases in your articles, it is possible to get more search engine traffic.
Which of the hundreds of article directories, should you submit your articles to? This is actually one of the most tedious tasks in this marketing method. Today, businesses and experts usually outsource their article marketing methods including the submission process. There are some sites that will accept your article and then send it out to tens or hundreds of other sites. They usually will charge you a fee.
You can use Article marketing to build an email List.
What is email list? Never mind as you will soon learn about that as we go on. When you point your article to your opt-in page or what is called a squeeze page (a page where people sign on for your ezine, free offer, mailing list, etc), when they get there and sign on, then you can start creating a sales-winning partnership with them. This is an effective way of making sales online. Having a list and selling through the list will always be effective. We learn more about this in Email marketing.
Overall, the most important factor in article marketing is to get people to visit your website and sign up or purchase one of your services. Writing articles that are accurate, specific and helpful will attract more potential leads or clients.
E-Mail Marketing
This is one of the most cost-efficient methods used in internet marketing and this has stood the test of time. I do not think this method will completely die as people will continue to communicate online via email as long as we can foresee it.
E-mail marketing is a direct marketing method that makes use of e-mails to communicate a business or sales message to a target audience. It is the process of sending messages to your old or current customers in order to encourage them to do business with you again and in turn enhance your business relationship with them. E-mail marketing is also used to acquire new customers and convince them to buy something from you.
There are several advantages in using this form of internet marketing. For one, almost all internet users have e-mail accounts that they check from time to time. With this form of communication, advertisers can easily reach those who have signed up to receive regular communications regarding subjects that interests them.
It is cost-effective and has a short impact time. With this method, you can send a message to thousands or even millions of people at the click of a button. Imagine the old world where you had to buy postal stamps, and you will realize that this is so cheap in terms of cost and the reward can be so high.
E-mail marketing can be categorized into three types:
– Direct e-mail
– Retention e-mail
– Intermediary e-mail
Direct e-mail
Usually is an email message with commercial sales content. They are in most cases sent to customers who have previously bought or used a certain product or service of a company or to potential clients / customers who might enjoy and benefit from the service you are offering. Direct mail marketing may make use of a company’s e-mail list (also called opt-in list) or a purchased or shared e-mail list or a list that is acquired from a third party service.
These third party services may already know which audience can be targeted through e-mail marketing or they may conduct an analysis to find out which e-mail addresses will bring the highest conversion or responses for your business.
Retention E-mail or Newsletter Mail
This is an email that is designed and written for promotional use. The aim or purpose of the retention email is to capture a customer’s mind and make him or her purchase the company’s product or service. Therefore this kind of message is more or less like a sales page. The retention mail specifies the benefits of the products or services that a company offers in a more informative format. This may be sent to mostly new or potential customers.
Intermediary E-mail
Is a message sent by a company delegated by the main provider to send out such advertising and marketing e-mails to a list of subscribers that is usually owned by the intermediary company. This can be any message, but the distinguishing factor here is that the person or company sending the email message is not the owner of the message, but just rendering a service for which they are paid. The list however will belong to the sending company.
In order to be successful in e-mail marketing, you must always use all relevant information that is necessary for your business. You may send messages to your customers if you find that they will benefit from what you are about to offer them. In sending these e-mails, you must also write an informative and straight forward headline in order to grab your customer’s attention. Before sending out your e-mail, check the message and use both text and HTML formats to make sure that your message will be received and read. In my own case, I like to send only in text format as I realized many email platforms may not have the ability to receive emails in HTML format or where they have, it may not be enabled. So I just prefer to send in text format only and not both.
Blog Marketing
Blogs are nothing but online dairies. Just like we have our personal dairies offline where we scribble those thing of interest or things we want to remember, so also is blog in the online world.
Online, people create blogs where they write on topics of special interest to them. These are known as Niche Blogs. You can also have Blogs which may be of general interest; in that case it is not specific. E.g. a celebrity like Madonna or Alicia Keys may decide to have a blog where she just shares her thoughts with her fans.
Blogs have become one of the useful platforms for internet marketing because it attracts a lot of free traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. Subscribers of a blog usually sign up to receive content on a regular basis and since most subscribers remain loyal when they receive relevant and useful information, a strong following and readership develops. When this occurs, you can reach these potential customers and get them to either sign up or purchase a service from your business or another company for which you will be paid commissions or referral fees as enumerated above earlier.
Blog marketing, as the name suggests, is done via a web blog through a series of weekly or daily posts about a certain topic. Many companies now have a blog apart from their main website, from where they are able to communicate and interact with their customers while featuring their services or products.
Organizations can also use blogs to share and review a product’s features and benefits prior to their official launch. They also pave way for companies to gather or receive feedback from the consumers in order to confirm if their services and products meet the expectations of their clients.
Since blog marketing focuses on interaction with online users, you may also start blogging in order to market your product line or to get more exposure in the online world. However, you will have to write and design a blog that will stand out from your competitors. This way, your blog will also gain more popularity, making more websites want to link to it. The more websites linking to your blog, the more traffic and profit you will get. The more traffic you get, the more you can monetize the blog. You can put your own products or that of others on the blog.
You must always remember to give your audience or target subscribers a reason to always visit your blog. Make sure to write a new article or post on the blog regularly. If it is weekly, biweekly or monthly, make sure you keep to the schedule. Do not just write once and abandon the blog. If your subscriber leaves any comments, be sure to respond and thank them. Hold small contests every now and then where you can give away discounts and coupons to your subscribers. You may also ask your followers to post the link of your blog to their own websites in exchange for free product samples.
Pay-per-click or PPC
PPC or Pay-per-click advertisements, also known as Cost per Click, are used to bring in traffic to websites where advertisers provide payment or rewards to the hosting site whenever their ad is clicked.
A good example of this is the Google Adsense program where if you have a blog or website, you can apply to Google to be their publisher and once approve, you can generate and place some codes from Google on your site.
These codes would generate advertisements on your site and when a site visitor of yours clicks on any of the advertisements, you are paid a fee which is credited instantly to your account with Google. This will be a certain percentage of a fee paid by the advertiser to Google which they share with you. The percentage is jealously guided by Google but a lot of people have made much money through this. The beauty is that the money is made passively even when you are sleeping. All you need is to attract traffic to your site.
There are two models for determining how much is to be paid per click – flat-rate and bid-based rate. In both models, advertisers consider the value of a click from a certain source where such value depends on the type of customer that the company is targeting and what can be gained from his or her visit (which is usually revenue).
If you currently have a running website or a blog and would like to earn extra profit, you can try this internet marketing method. Put in pay-per-click ads on your blog or web page and merchants will pay you a percentage every time your visitors click on them.
If you are popular or your site attracts much traffic, you can decide to go to the advertisers directly and sell advertising space to them instead of using a third intermediary like Google. One clear advantage with this is that you make more money but you have to handle the technical aspects alone unlike where you are using a third party who will also share the money with you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is an interesting aspect of internet marketing, though not much used by beginners to internet marketing. You have to have certain knowledge or experience to use this method or system.
When you search for any term or words on the search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo, the result will display pages and pages of websites that have the keywords you typed in the search bar. Have you ever asked yourself or wondered why a particular website is listed first on the results of your search or why some websites are listed in the search results? The primary reason for this is Search Engine Optimization.
Search engine optimization allows a website to become search engine friendly, making it rank higher on search results compared to other websites that have the same keyword contents. Usually, these search engines read and archive sites regularly so that they can be found easily whenever a search is performed by a user. For example, if a user types in “make money online” in the search bar of Google, certain websites will be displayed in descending order from 1 to 10 in a page.
If you have a site with the topic on how to make money online and you have properly optimized your site, do you know your site could come up on the search result? And do you know what this means? Massive free traffic day and night so long as people are searching for the keywords of your website. And when you translate this free traffic, it means money. Traffic = money in the internet world. And people and companies pay a lot of money to have traffic. By getting it free, you are saving money that you would have otherwise spent getting the traffic and at the same time making profits and sales.
Basically, SEO makes your website easier for these search engines to find and list you in search results. Like I said this translates to money earned and saved. The goal of SEO is to increase your website’s rank in the search results that will in turn bring in more traffic to your site. Remember, the more traffic you get, the more potential for profit you will have.
Like I said earlier, this may be a little too technical for a beginner but there are companies or individuals that specializes in this stuff and you can pay them to work on your website to make it more visible and attract free traffic which ultimately translates into money. This is one of the ways people make their money online. If you have a site and plan to make money online, you may try this method.
Pop-up Ads
During your internet surfing time, you probably have come across many of these pop-up ads. These are advertisement windows that appear once you visit some websites. Their aim is to generate traffic or simply capture your e-mail address. They are called pop ups because of their behavior. They just pop up as you are visiting a site that has the script embedded.
Many people find this internet marketing method quite annoying since it disrupts them from getting information from the website they are viewing. Some of these pop ups will refuse to disappear even when you click to close them until after a particular time or action as specified by the website owner. This can be so annoying.
However these ads, intrusive as they have been perceived to be, also have certain advantages. For one, they are much more effective than banner ads. Some people find themselves attracted to the contents of the pop ups. In fact it is said to have 15% click through rate which means that for every 100 website visitors that sees this on a site, 15 will click and follow it. For banners the rate is far less at 3%.
Since they are more effective than banner ads, they also cost you a lot more. However, the return on investment (ROI) with the use of these ads is much higher. Furthermore, when this ad is the only window on the page, there will be no other images that will conflict with the brand that you are selling.
You can try this form of internet marketing, but note that in recent time, both pop up and banner advertisement have become less popular due to the development of pop-up blockers.
Banner Ads
A banner ad is basically a graphic, text or an image displayed on websites that aim to promote a company’s product or service. They are actually small HTML codes, but their importance in internet marketing and business is significant. Banner ads vary in sizes and will often come in various shapes, the most popular being the rectangular shape.
Visit a site like Yahoo and you will see some of the banners displayed there. People click on them and are directed to external websites or links. People pay to keep those banners there.
You can sell banner space on your site or pay to have it placed on high traffic site in order to attract traffic which as you have come to know now represents money online. Without traffic, no website will ever make any money online.
There is actually no universal rule when it comes to banner ad file sizes, but the size will still depend on the website where it will be displayed. These sites impose certain limits to banner sizes since it adds up to the total size of the web page they are displayed on, thereby resulting to more waiting times while the page loads on a browser.
Due to the banner ads’ graphic elements, you may find these ads somehow similar to those you see in printed media such as magazines and newspapers. However, these banner ads have the ability to direct the user to the advertiser’s main web page. If you are interested in displaying or posting a banner on a certain website, you can arrange with the publisher to have your banner posted or pay a banner network to post the ad on a number of websites. You may also arrange with the publisher to simply display their ads on your site in exchange for them displaying your banner ads. This is called banner exchange and it is good as you are not paying any money for this.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is basically the process of marketing your online service or business through social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and others. This allows for businesses to have a more personal and dynamic interaction and connection with their clients and potential customers.
The strategies involved in social media marketing can be as simple as maintaining a Facebook account, a twitter account or a blog. It could also involve putting a “tweet this” icon on your site / blog or attaching it to the end of your articles or ads. The complex method can include blogging, viral videos, tweeting, Facebook groups and so on. These days many companies especially the big ones has come to see the effectiveness of this form of internet marketing and are now combining them effectively in their online marketing efforts.
It now seems every online company has a facebook presence, YouTube videos and tweets. And the popularity will continue to grow as more and more people continue to use the platforms. For example, Facebook is said to have over 2.5 billion users at I write this post (March 2020) and many are expected to join the bandwagon as the days go by.
As marketing is the process of informing consumers what your business is, who you are and what your products are, social media further helps in introducing your business to a global network of possible customers. The use of social media to prove a business’ identity and to create business relationships with people who do not have the chance be aware of your products and services is a highly recommended option in internet marketing. Moreover, it is an avenue that can be accessed by anyone who has an internet connection and is an inexpensive way to implement your marketing strategies and business campaigns.
Mobile Marketing
This has evolved from the advancement of the mobile communication technology. Now almost everyone has one form of mobile device that is connected to the internet. You know what that means to the online marketing world!
Mobile marketing has been a concept that has attained various definitions. It is primarily described to be the marketing strategy that makes use of mobile media to communicate with a target market. Recently a more updated definition was given by the Mobile Marketing Association, saying that mobile marketing is actually a combination of practices that gives organizations the ability to engage, communicate and interact with their audience through a mobile device or network.
The most popular mobile device used for this is a cell-phone. To use this medium, you will need to set up a short code and have your customers register to receive your SMS or text messages. Mobile optimization will also make sure that your website is displayed correctly on a mobile phone browser. Search engine optimization has undergone further changes that made internet marketers become more interested in the mobile version of their optimized websites compared to the traditional website optimization. Most mobile phones today have internet access or wireless capabilities. These devices have provided more flexibility on both the business’ and consumer’s ends in terms of receiving and sending data related to the products or services which a company offers. Many people are now using their mobile devices to make purchases online.
The most typical types of mobile marketing include the use of MMS or Multimedia Messaging Service, Bluetooth technology, Infrared and Mobile Internet. Marketing through a mobile device is now a trend in many developed countries where almost every one has a mobile phone. This is also a more cost-effective method of promoting your business and is much easier for most age groups to understand. More time is now spent online with the use of these devices, making your business available to consumers who are always on the go and would still want to receive updates from your end.
In MMS mobile marketing, a slideshow of text and images that may include a video or audio is a perfect way to capture a potential customer’s attention effectively. The ad is delivered via MMS. The use of Bluetooth technology in marketing makes use of radio based frequencies to transfer data on higher speeds. Infrared, on the other hand, is a bit limited, as its frequency range only reaches as far as 1 meter.
Mobile marketing is a new way to ensure customer awareness and boost your sales. With all the new smart phones, tablets and modern mobile devices, mobile marketing is definitely destined to progress in the years to come.
CONCLUSION
We have discussed all the major methods of internet marketing and making money online. You have seen the vast possibilities provided by the internet. Many people around the world are now making money from the comfort of their homes and you too can join them. Now you have the basic idea of what it takes and how it is been done.