With more than 70 per cent of the population regularly going online, your website could expose your business to hundreds of thousands of new potential customers every day. It’s an exciting concept, isn’t it?
But a website alone won’t do it. To get outstanding results like that you need a dedicated and precise online marketing strategy which employs all the tricks of the trade to support your site and get it to the top of the search engine rankings where it will be seen and noticed by people looking for the products and services you sell.
Search Engine Marketing - SEM
Search engines are critical to your website’s success, so understanding how they work is imperative. An effective search engine marketing strategy uses a combination of free and paid web listings to ensure your website reaches people who are searching the web for the products and services you have to offer.
Search Engine Optimisation - SEO
SEO is the art and science of using keywords and key phrases to increase your website’s visibility with the search engines. Having an effective SEO strategy involves keyword research and development, competitive analysis and industry benchmarking, back-end-coding optimisation, website submissions and results reporting.
Pay-per-click advertising - PPC
PPC involves paying for your website to have a prominent position on the relevant search results page of a specific search engine. For each visitor that clicks on your link you are charged at a specified rate. The benefit of a PPC program is you only pay for results.
Pay for inclusions - PFI
PFI involves paying to get your website listed on a specific search engine. But it doesn’t guarantee prominent rankings. For prominence you need effective SEO. PFI gives you an opportunity to gain a top spot, but without an SEO strategy, so its effectiveness may be limited.
Affiliate Marketing
This is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer delivered by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It is an application of crowd sourcing.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. These methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing and, in some sense, display advertising. Affiliates will also use less orthodox marketing techniques such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Banner Ads
A banner advertisement is a form of online advertising, whereby a display advertisement is placed on a web page. The advertisement links to the advertiser’s website and effectively sends traffic to that site when the ad is clicked on.
E-mail Marketing
This is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail to communicate commercial or fundraising messages. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent by a business to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term usually refers to e-mails designed to enhance relationships between a business and its customers, or to advertise products and drive sales.
Web 2.0 Strategies
Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web applications which facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centred design and collaboration on the web. Examples of this include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact with other users or to change website content. This is in contrast with non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information.
