The ABCs Of Online Marketing

If your business does not have a website, you are simply not going to succeed in the modern marketplace. The fact that you are reading this right now demonstrates that you acknowledge the importance of the internet, so the fact that you could be using it to promote and grow your business becomes rather obvious. The numbers justify this interpretation as well. With the global e-commerce market worth about $22 trillion, if you are not online, you will not be able to earn a single cent of that money. The brilliant thing about the internet is that it is available to everyone. Of course, getting a computer and an internet connection costs money, but once you have got that far, you are ready to start creating an online presence and finding customers around the world. The only problem is that lots of people are already trying to make their voice the loudest. There is a lot of competition. One study suggests that there are about 110,000 e-commerce sites that make a meaningful amount on the internet. There are probably over a million in total. But if you are smart about how you go about marketing yourself online, there is no reason why you cannot become a success. Here are some of the basics of online marketing and how you can make it work for you:

There is a lot of jargon that you need to learn to become fluent in e-commerce, and one of the most important terms that you need to learn is SEO. This stands for search engine optimisation. At its simplest, it refers to the practice of trying to improve the position that your website has when somebody searches using a site like Google. There are lots of rather complex algorithms that calculate which sites are worth showing. The metric that is used to decide this is, in part, whether a particular website is mentioned on other reputable websites. It is not called the web for nothing, after all. This is why some website owners will try to improve their SEO rankings by paying for their site to be mentioned in sponsored posts on lots of different blogs. It is an added benefit if a prospective customer reads one of those posts and goes to that particular site as a result, but otherwise, it is useful because it gives them a better chance of being noticed by Google’s algorithms. There is an entire digital economy that revolves around this practice.

Another crucial technique that some companies use to drive traffic to their website is what is called PPC. This stands for pay-per-click. A website might pay a small fee to have their link and a small synopsis featured at the top of a list of search results. Search engines can make a lot of money by allowing companies to jump to the head of the queue in this way. PPC management is also an important part of the new digital marketplace. A lot of people now utilize ad blocking plugins so that they do not have to see any of these paid advertisements. Strangely, some ad blocking companies are now offering to exclude certain websites from being blocked. Cookies may be something that you have heard a lot about. When you go to a lot of websites, they may tell you that they use Cookies and will accept the continued use of their website as tacit permission. These help search engines to target people with ads that they think will appeal to them. If you spend a lot of your time online reading about art or literature, for instance, you may find that you see online ads that feature museums and book festivals. This is obviously no accident, but a use of the information that is collected about nearly everyone all the time while they are online.  

Finally, not every aspect of online marketing has to be so seemingly devious. If your company does not have a social media account, you are not likely to be able to compete with your more innovative rivals. Facebook now has an estimated 1.9 billion unique monthly users, while Twitter can boast 328 million. It is free to join both sites and start extolling the virtues of your products or services, but you can also pay to advertise on both sites and once again use the users’ data to target potential customers. However, one of the most effective ways to reach a lot of people is to try to produce viral content. It is not easy because you have to try to figure out what would appeal to hundreds of millions of people enough that they will voluntarily share it. However, it is cheap and effective.