Friday, May 22, 2009

Tips and Strategies for Internet Marketing

By Barry Monteiro

Determining whether or not your Internet marketing campaign is working for you is a very important part of the advertising process. This is so important because while there is a great deal of Internet marketing which can be done without a great deal of expense, other types of Internet marketing do have financial costs associated with them. Also, in both cases there is a time and energy burden to orchestrating the Internet marketing. For all of these reasons it is important for business owners to continuously evaluate their marketing techniques and strategies to determine what is working and what is not. This will help the business owner to focus his efforts on marketing strategies which are providing positive results as opposed to those which are either not providing results or are only providing lackluster results. This article will examine a few different marketing strategies as well as how business owners can evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies.

When it comes to cost effectiveness affiliate marketing is one of the best techniques in internet marketing that you can use. Affiliate marketing allows other website owners to place you ads on their sites in order to increase traffic to yours. The reason this is so cost effective is that the web site owner, or affiliate, as they are known, only earns revenue when they produce the result you desire. This could be a simple click through of the ad or an actual sale that is generated by that ad. This means you only pay for advertising when it works. Sometimes you will need to evaluate the ads themselves if they are not producing click throughs or ads, it may be the ad and not the affiliate who is to blame.

Affiliate ads are nice because they have a tracking mechanism built into them, which allows you to see how often they are producing results. When you set up an affiliate ad there is a code imbedded in the advertisement that tells you, which affiliate, brought you the traffic. The purpose of this information is to keep track of the payments you will issue to the affiliate, however they can also tell you a lot about which ads are the most effective. If you have several affiliated ads in the works this can tell you which particular advertisement is the most powerful at generating sales, then you can choose to use this type of ad for all of your affiliates.

Search engine optimization, SEO, is one of the best strategies for internet marketing campaigns you can find. While SEO itself is not simple, quite the contrary in fact, it can take years of experience to launch a successful SEO campaign. However hiring a consulting firm who specializes in evaluating SEO is a simple as being able to conduct a good interview and then choose the most qualified candidate.

Handling your own SEO efforts can be rather difficult but hiring another firm to take care of this for you is not only easy but it can have a significant impact on your website traffic because high search engine rankings typically translate to improved web traffic. This is because Internet users trust search engines to serve the most relevant websites first and typically only visit the best ranking websites when they search for a particular term.

If you are looking for overnight success, you are looking in the wrong place. Internet marketing is like weight loss, home business building there are no short cuts, or magic formulas that will make all your dreams come true. That being said it is important that you know internet marketing is not horribly difficult either. Here you have learned some of the basic concepts to use to create a successful internet marketing strategy to promote your business.

A few things you can utilize are message boards, business owners can use this internet marketing strategy to promote business, and a helpful idea is to ask customers to complete a survey when they make a purchase. Include in your survey helpful demographics as well as the information about where they first heard of your service or product. Next, include the message board web site address in the survey so you can also evaluate which boards are bringing customers to your door. You will likely get some unofficial feedback on your postings as well. Overall if the responses are positive you can deduce that you are creating at least some interest in your product or site through this particular method.

You can evaluate an internet marketing technique by paying attention to the amount of traffic to your site. Whenever you try a new strategy in internet marketing look over your website traffic reports as well as your sales to see if there was a sudden spike of interest in your business. For instance if you sent out an marketing email to your contacts list about your website or your products and then you notice there is a sharp increase in either traffic or sales you know that the email was well received. On the flip side if nothing happens the following week you will know your email or newsletter bombed!

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