Internet marketing refers to the various methods used to advertise goods and services on the World Wide Web. These methods include viral marketing, Web 2.0, article marketing, email marketing, banner ads, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). While some of these methods cost money to employ, others can used utilized with little or no financial investment.
Instructions 1 Make your website the focal point of your entire Internet marketing campaign. If your website is amateurish, then all of your Internet marketing efforts, regardless of how well planned and executed they may be, will only produce amateurish results. Decide whether you will build your site yourself or hire a graphic designer to do so. There are pros and cons with either approach. However, when your budget allows, you may find that hiring a graphic designer and webmaster will allow you extra time to engage in more important money-making activities.
2 Use articles to market your product. Many online directories offer free articles to websites looking for relevant content. Write an article related to your product or service. You will not only gain credibility as an expert in your field, but you will also have the opportunity to guide readers to your site and your product. What makes article marketing effective is the potential of having many different sites pick up your article. Every time this happens, the search engines eventually "spider" the websites again and record the links you have left for your website. This in turn creates a back link, which is a link to your site that appears on another site. With each additional back link that a search engine collects, it ranks your site a little bit higher in relevant search results. For every back link to your site collected by a search engine, it will interpret this to mean that your site is popular and important in the public eye; hence, you'll have a higher ranking. It is recommended you submit your article only to the top 20 or 30 directories. If your site is found on hundreds or thousands of sites, some search engines may interpret this to mean that your site has little value.
3 Use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Networking is as easy to tap into as typing a short message to your customers to let them know what you are up to. These messages can go out to potentially thousands of existing and potential customers, with no more effort than the simple push of the "Share" button. Another option, and often more effective, is to set up an "Event" page that offers information on an upcoming teleconference where people can find out more about your service or product. This can be effective when such teleconferences offer valuable information available nowhere else. After the page is created, send out invitations to the friends in your network. They in turn are given the opportunity to invite their friends. This method is used on Facebook, for example, to attract thousands of interested people to specific services and products.