Beginner Guide to Internet Marketing (PART2)
When you decide to start your own online business, I guess somehow you should have some internet marketing knowledge but do you really have what it takes to start or grow your business? The thing is that anyone can come out with a business idea and sell any product or service online but if you don’t know how to market and sell online. Then, you are unlikely to make a breakthrough and succeed.
Okay, probably you know how to create a website and Facebook page and start suggesting your circle of Facebook’s friends to like your page. Probably you have advertise it in someone Facebook’s group but do you know that this is highly perceive as spam by the others? Soon you will realized that the group admin have send you a warning message or worse removing you from the group.
So how do you market for your business when you are just starting out? I could simply tell you that prior to building a successful online business, you will need to have a powerful internet marketing knowledge. Yes, you can hire a professional digital marketer to do so, but that would have cost a lot for someone who just started their entrepreneurship.
Conversely, there are many internet marketing seminars and workshops out there, with each selling and teaching different ways to start your online business or to grow your business. Yet, many people failed to realized that it is the internet marketer’s job to keep you arouse with the sales pitch and selling. Thus, you should’t listen to what all the internet marketer had told you, because most of the time you are entice by your own feelings and the marketer’s Whao Whao sales pitch to react on taking action.
Thus, some self assessment is required before you find out whether if the program is suitable for you or question like asking yourself if the program will help in your overall business’s goal.
Your own success is your own responsibilities and as an green entrepreneur, it is important to do some self assessment before searching for a suitable program, by that I mean finding a profitable niche market to begins (Read more here). As a business owner, it is your responsibility to choose a program that is relevant in achieving your business goals. After all, we as a consumer will do some research and consider the pros and cons to protect ourselves before purchasing anything that is relevant to us.
The Science of Internet Marketing for Online Business Success
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing, also known as “online marketing” or “digital marketing” is a method of promotion efforts that uses the internet to communicate the message across to its target market. In a nutshell, it means marketing on the internet.
This includes search engine marketing, email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing and many more.
It has become very popular since the internet has emerged and had since become widely use by marketers. It is only a few years back where people have started to use social media as a platform for promotion and communication.
It allows company to target more effectively than those traditional ways of marketing. And most of the internet marketing platform has its own mechanism to collect feedbacks, tracking and statistic data which allow rapid and effective measurement. This allows companies to have a higher ROI as compared to traditional marketing.
If you are unfamiliar with what the internet marketing can do for your business, I would highly recommend you to start learning each of the internet marketing components. It is what help to shape and grow any online business but many entrepreneurs have failed to realize the important of internet marketing and this is what left many entrepreneurs to fail miserably when they first started their online business.
Note: The components of internet marketing components are correlated to one another. If you learn one component without learning the other, you will not be able to identify which strategy move will be able to help shape and grow your business. By understanding each of the concepts would help your business apply the best strategic method to build your business success. As every business is unique, the strategic moves you used will be slightly different depending on what your business goals are.
BEWARE– Misconception by many Green Entrepreneur:
To get more Traffic: They focus too much in applying their SEO knowledge to build the traffic by free organic search or paid advertisement but would have probably lack of a valuable content or missing subscribe button. So even if they have attracted the traffic, they may lose out in making the target customer to stay longer to read the content and they may lose out in capturing the email address for future communication.
To get Higher Ranking in Google Search Engine: They did what they are taught to be listed high up in Goggle search engine but did not submit their sitemap to Goggle Webmaster and get their website listed cos nobody tells them to and they are unaware of.
Increasing Subscriber List: They start to advertise in Facebook, in hope to get more people to subscribers to their newsletter after bringing the target customer to their website. However, there is no FREE bait to entice them to subscribe or even they should have bring them to a landing page to subscribe instead.
You see, all the strategies and tactics of internet marketing is closely related to one another. If you apply one strategy which you think is a smart move but unknowingly know that other internet marketing components may have been the causes of failures, you would never be able to identify and rectify it to grow your business.
The power of internet marketing knowledge will allow you to made the best strategic plan for your business growth success. As mentioned, every one has a unique offer and it is only yourself that can made the best appropriate decision from learning from the right expert or to make any any strategic moves towards your online business success.
Yes, Internet marketing is a huge topic which includes web marketing, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, visual marketing, search engine marketing and more…
I was once like everyone else, struggling to learn and explore the mystery of how internet marketing can route to my business success.
And I have meticulously identify 5 crucial components of internet marketing that is most critical for any online business success.
And now I am going to share with you …
Top 5 Most Important Internet Marketing Components that any Online Business Should Know
1. Content marketing
Consumers are getting smarter these days, they avoid most of the sales pitch from traditional marketer as they know that the talks will most likely end up into selling
instead. And this is one of the reason why the modern marketer has been using content marketing to communicate with their customers these days. If you are building an online business, content marketing will become necessary.
Content marketing is an art of communicating with your customers without doing any selling unlike those traditional marketing method. It is a strategic marketing approach where you create and deliver consistent, relevant and valuable content to attract your prospects, in hope to educate them, alter their behaviour, make them like and respect you more, and ultimately treat you like an expert in your field so trust can be gain. This way, when you promote or sell anything in future, your prospects can be easily convert into paying customer instead.
Note the key to writing a good content is “Free Valuable Content”. Simply put, your focus should be on building relationship and not doing the hard sell. And those good content will make a person to read… stop… think… react… differently. However, it is an ongoing process that is best integrated with your “Overall Marketing Strategy”, yes I specifically put double apostrophe so you can remember what I said.
2. Email Marketing
Yes, the money is in the list.
You have heard of how internet marketer have made millions dollars of sales within an hour, a day or so… but do you know how do they do it?
Well, they have an email list!
It is the asset; subscriber list they had built over the years with their cold hard sweat. The potential customers subscribed to the email list because they know it will be beneficial for them to learn from the latest valuable news, tips and probably the next promotion.
I have to honestly tell you that email marketing is a vital marketing strategic that “Must” be use in almost all types of industries especially for online business. Communication is what keeps the relationship going between you/your business and the target customer. You need to maintain the bonding you have with your customer or readership. Ask yourself which big corporations you have bought a product or service from doesn’t have your email address?
They constantly send you email to update you their company’s latest news, product launch or promotions because they know it is easier for an existing customer to buy from them again. Because you have already use their product and had already experience their service before, it closes the gap of your buying process like doubtfulness in doing product’s research and evaluation.
By now, you should be aware that it is unethical to email anyone without their permission, otherwise your email will be disregard as spam mail. So how do you get your potential customer to willingly provide you with their email address?
The proven strategy is FREE bait. You entice them by providing something free in exchange for their email address. Depending on your niche or industry, you can provide a free consultation, free trial, discount coupon, ebooks, videos and many more.
Other strategies you can use is pop up subscribe button on your website’s homepage, if you don’t like the idea of pop up, you can consider placing the sign up button at the top right side or center of your website’s homepage or even place the sign up button on your most view blog entry.
Once you get their permission to send email message, you can share with them your personal story, update them on latest blog post, or promote to them with products that may be helpful to them. You need to build the authority and relationship with them, the more they like or trust you the more chances for you to convert them to a paying customer.
There are a lot more strategies to share with you but I can’t finish it here. I would say that if you learn the strategy and use it well, it will definitely pump up your company’s sales dollars.
3. Social Media Marketing
In the past, small business owner who just started their business could not advertise and make their business heard because of the cost restrictions, it made them hard to compete with large companies that have huge marketing budgets.
However, the past are gone now all thanks to the appearance of the social media platform. Everything is possible for anyone who have tight marketing budget but before you start executing your plan, do consider if your plan to proceed is the best decision that will allows you to reach your business’s goal. After all, you want to make your dollar and effort well spent that allows you to have higher ROA.
Let’s face it, the social media platforms are way too much to choose from. Of course, the more platforms you choose will mean that more people will hear about your business but it will also mean that it is harder for you to manage. Sending your tweets and message out, checking and keeping track of all the analytic in various social media platform would mean more work to be done. Not only that, keeping up with the social media change is tougher than before.
Before you start picking your social media platform, you need to consider and pick those platform that is sure align with your business’s goal. One best question to ask yourself is what social media platform does your target audience like to use?
If you are unsure, start with Facebook first, you should know why.
4. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing is a promotion of websites by using “Paid” or “Unpaid” advertising efforts in order to gain traffic and visibility from the search engine. The goal of SEO is to achieve a high ranking placement in the search result page from the search engine.
Search Engine Marketing Comprises of:
Paid strategy- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is subdivided into 1) On Page Optimization and 2) Off Page Optimization
Unpaid strategy– Pay Per Click (PPC) and CPC (Cost per Click)
As the user do not usually look through pages by pages from the search results, it is necessary for internet marketer to work on their SEO to make their website on the top ranking, thus improving their visibility in the search results and greater chance that the user will visit their website.
However, do note that it is not 100% guarantee to get your site to rank as no. 1 and staying at the same rank is impossible because Goggle algorithm changes very often which will probably make your site ranking changes every now and then.
Search engine marketing is a little bit more complicated especially for non technical people like me. Yes, I admitted it and it takes quite sometime for me to figure it out and guys not to be bias or what but I do realized a lot of green entrepreneur especially guys tend to go overboard over search engine marketing. Once they learnt about what SEO (Unpaid strategy) can do for them, the only goal they have in mind is to provide a better organic search result. Call it their arrogant discovery or what that had perhaps trigger to make them work on this way.
I’m not saying that you should not do your SEO, just don’t go overboard and overlook the important of other internet marketing components like social media marketing, visual marketing or content marketing etc that may also have help to reach for your business’s goal. Moreover, once Goggle update its algorithm, search index changes and refresh, meaning your effort would have been gone to waste.
Yes, you could have your keyword research done, your link building and long tail keywords etc but ultimately Google and other search engine want to be sure that they can refer people to most relevant, valuable and professional website and they are very particular about “User experience” so bear in mind about that and don’t go overboard, you have to focus on other internet marketing components too.
5. Website
You only have 5 seconds to capture a new visitor to your website. Yup, only 5 seconds the first time they visit a website. Try it if yourself, if
nothing grabs your attention in the new site you visited, you’ll leave for sure. The fact is humans have short attention and it is important to create the first good impression and make them not leave your website or pages.
The architectural of the website is important but many chose to ignore it or rather threw everything to the website designer. However, the website designer capability might only consider the overall look and feel of your site. So before you begins to do it yourself or hire someone else to do it for you.
Do consider the few things before you begin:
- The type of website: E-commerce site, commercial website or personal blog?
- Your goal of having a website: What is your marketing objective and aims?
- The overall website’s look and feel: Think about the impression you want to give to your site visitor before considering the design like colour scheme, graphics or brand image. You can visit other sites to find some inspirations if you don’t know where to start.
- Your target customer: Are you selling to businesses or consumers? What is their age, gender, working status
- Website structure: How do you want to sort the information? How many pages are needed? E.g. About, Home, Contact, Products, Testimonial.
- Technical: Hosting, mobile responsive, easy navigation and quick loading
- Functionality: Shopping cart system or contact us form.
- Call to action (CTA): What do you want them to do when they arrive at your website or pages?
Overall, you need to create a first good impression and user experience for your target audience.
Alright, once you understand the relationship between the internet marketing components for your online business, implementation will be a simple matter from picking which system you want to use and choosing the best strategy for your online business would be easier than before.
I want everything to make a total sense to you before you decide how to proceed on your next business agenda.
