Internet Marketing For Dummies

Just building a great website with some fantastic products is simply not enough to make your online business a huge success. A well planned Internet marketing plan is a must to drive traffic to your website and encourage sales. Here are some Internet marketing strategies that are commonly deployed by ecommerce websites to increase their sales. Paid Banner Advertising: Paid banner advertising is an online marketing strategy in which banner ads of your website are displayed on other websites. It is imperative to check that the visitors to the websites you choose to display your banner ads on belong to your target market. You can either do a CPC website marketing campaign or a CMP website marketing campaign. A CPC or Cost Per Click banner ad campaign is one where you pay a certain amount of money for every banner that is clicked on. A CPM or Cost Per Thousand banner ad campaign is one where you pay a certain amount of money for every thousand impressions of your banner ads on the website. Paid Text Advertising: Very similar to paid banner advertising except the ads are in text form and not graphic banners. Research has indicated that customers tend to trust text ads and find them more believable than banner ads. Email marketing: The single most effective online marketing strategy. Almost 88% of customers in a survey said that they made an online or offline purchase as a consequence of an email received. You can choose between several types of email marketing campaigns. Email lists are programs or services that send your marketing email to a large consumer base for a low price. The drawback is that your email can be marked as SPAM and ignored by most of the recipients. Having your own ezine or newsletter is a far more practical and effective use of email marketing. The number of subscribers are lower but more likely to buy from your website since they are genuinely interested in what you are selling. Search engine optimization: Search engines are the tools that most people use to find websites. Search engine optimization is an Internet marketing strategy that is free and guarantees results. Proper placement of keywords, keyword rich content, title tags, description and keyword metatags and use of keyword links are all methods to improve your search engine rankings. This is an online marketing tool that is absolutely indispensable for any website. Free traffic generators: There are softwares that can generate large volume of traffic to your site for a small price. However, the only problem with such software is that the conversion ratio of visitor:buyer is extremely low. If your website is largely dependent on eyeballs and not purchases then this is a good Internet marketing strategy for you. Exchanging links with other websites: A surefire way not only to increase traffic and sales to your website but also to better your pagerank and boost your search engine rankings. It is always better to exchange links with websites that offer services or products that are complementary to the services offered by your website. This is a great website marketing strategy since it offers your website exposure to a target audience instead of random visitors. Thus, Internet marketing is all about time and patience. You need to put in dedicated effort and consistently modify your online marketing strategy to ensure that you maximize the business potential of your online shop.