Introduction to Web Marketing

This is an introduction to web marketing and some of the popular marketing methods.

Introduction

The techniques of online marketing may be different than traditional marketing but the goals are the same: to increase profits. Traditional marketing talks about "market share" where online marketing talks about "mind share". You want your site to be the site that someone thinks of when they need something in particular.

The different internet marketing camps tend to be very polarized. Whenever you read a webmaster site promoting a specific type of marketing (search engine optimization, pay-per-click, etc.) they will talk about that particular technique as if it is the magic way to become successful. If you read a site written by someone who had been successful with PPC they will want you to think that you have to use PPC in order to succeed. The same goes for the SEO guys. They will want you to think that the Google algorithm is the heart beat of your site and you will live and die with it. I believe this happens for two reasons:

First, most internet marketers tend to pay allegiance to the first method they learned. If the first method was SEO then they will tend to spend all their time learning everything they can about SEO (links, algorithms, tags, text optimization, etc). If their first method was PPC then they will spend all their time learning PPC (the different networks, keyword research, etc).

The second reason I think that internet marketing is polarized is that a person will bring their preferences to the table when deciding on which marketing method to choose. For example, if someone is cheap then I think they would tend to look at SEO. If someone has a higher tolerance for financial risk then they may be more likely to spend money on PPC.

Marketing Planning - Choosing the Right Marketing Channel

Each marketing technique has benefits and drawbacks so you your job as a webmaster will be to look at the different techniques and choose the best one. There are two questions you can answer that will help you along this road. The first is to figure out which marketing technique will benefit your particular site the most. To do this you will have to see which marketing techniques fit best with your site. For example, if you don't have a lot of content on your site then you won't get much SEO. If you have only static content on your site then e-mail marketing won't help you much because an e-mail newsletter will only work if you have updated content that your visitors will want to read.

The second question will be to figure out which techniques you have the resources for. The main resources I am referring to are time, money, and skills. Pay-per-click, merchandising, and press releases will take money. Word of mouth marketing takes interpersonal skills. YouTube marketing takes technology skills. Viral marketing requires creativity. A good e-book will take time. If you don't have the required resources then those particular techniques may not be available to you.

After you figure out which marketing techniques are possible, you will have to figure out what your planned expenditures, traffic, and profits will be so you can calculate you projected profit and see if the plan should go forward.

Benefits of Online Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

  1. You can easily quantify the value of the traffic and the return-on-investment of your marketing dollars. One of the hardest things about marketing is that many times you can't tell what the financial benefit of your marketing was so you don't know if your marketing is making you money or costing you money. With traffic tracking systems, custom landing pages, and other techniques you can run a much more efficient operation.

  2. You can more easily test market strategies by starting with a small budget of $5 to $50. In the offline marketing world you'll see many examples of people who tried to advertise through newspaper ads by spending $1,500 then complained that it was wasted.

  3. The greatest thing about online marketing is that it is cheap to scale. For example, take SEO. Once you are done with your site - including optimizing your pages - then you are all set. When your site grows, your SEO efforts will be leveraged to your advantage and your traffic will grow with very little extra SEO effort.


 
Bookmark this page: