The Essence Of Online Marketing Strategies
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009There are a bunch of misconceptions when it comes to online marketing strategies. Beginners in the field can simply fall prey to appalling internet marketing strategies that promise instant results. The thing is, “instant” doesn’t always mean long lasting. They can’t guarantee sure profits either. Some of these internet marketing activities might raise the number of hits to your website, but they won’t automatically bring in the cash.
Knowing your SEO hats
Article marketing makes up a big part of online marketing promotion. Businesses online rely on websites, and the blood work of all websites is content. You want to keep your content relevant if you want to attract customers. However, customers aren’t the only ones you want to write for.
To increase the page ranking of your website in popular search engines and directories, you need to keep your content optimized. This means knowing how to place the correct number of keywords inside the article. These “keywords” or key phrases will subsequently be indexed by search engine “spiders”. Since these spiders are programs, they can’t primarily gauge the quality of your articles based on the significance of information included in it. Most pages are ranked on search engines because the correct keywords are often mentioned in the same article.
While this is fine for the search engine, being too redundant in the article (e.g. saying the word “hormonal imbalance” 35 times in a 500-word article) is annoying for the human reader. Keyword stuffing this intense is also referred to as “black hat SEO” or bad SEO. While this may produce top page ranking quickly, you may also lose your position in no time once your irrelevant content was “found out” by human editors.
Other people use the term “white hat SEO” for article marketing that is more tuned into human readers than search engine spiders. However, no online marketing tactic today can claim to be entirely white hat SEO. Because of the intense competition of businesses online, companies are bound to make use of a little black hat SEO trick one in a while, but probably not to the extent that they’re risking being expelled from the search engines.
The most common form of article marketing today makes use of gray hat SEO strategies, which is a reasonable scheme that considers both the human readers and the search engine spiders.
Email marketing morals
If you are personally irritated at spam mails, then you might immediately want to cross out email marketing from your list. You may not want to do this just yet. Email marketing is an effective internet marketing strategy if you know how to do it right.
Sending out advertisements and newsletters to a indiscriminate number of email addresses will not help you gain customers. Instead, you’ll be putting all your hard work in someone else’s trash bin. Think about your target viewers instead. Don’t just blast your advertisements everywhere.
What you are seeking here is a list that is more focused on quality, not quantity. A targeted list of 20 consumers, or prospective clients, is more effective than 200 strangers who might just see your unsolicited newsletter as an annoyance.
Getting the list right
Targeted lists can be created from databases on your website. People who visit your website could simply drop a line, and voluntarily give out their email addresses so you can send product catalogues, newsletters, and whatnot that is related to your product.
If you are a conventional business who also trades offline, you can collect emails during tradeshows. If you have a shop somewhere in the city, you can invite your clients to fill out a small survey form, which also asks for their email addresses. It can be a plain line at the bottom saying: “Would you like to be updated about our latest products? Tell us where we can find you in cyberspace so we can drop a line.”
