Top 10 Internet Marketing Tips for 2008
Internet Marketing has grown phenomenally over the last few
years but the shift has quite clearly moved to a market
that is driven by the consumer and that is no longer
dictated by journalists and corporates. Online consumers
are responding more favourably to non-intrusive, relevant
and socially attractive campaigns and have quite frankly
had enough of intrusive, forced online advertising
campaigns.
The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:
1. Optimise your website's content
2. Create a content development strategy for your website
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
4. Publicise your website through article marketing
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
6. Create a Company Blog
7. Experiment with video marketing
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
10. Create an effective email marketing strategy
Let's look at each of these in more detail:-
1. Optimise your website's content:
First and foremost, get your website content right. Make
sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines.
An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way
in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of
the content that the search engine is indexing.
2. Create a content development strategy for your website:
In addition to optimising the existing content on your
website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to
continuously increase your website's content on an ongoing
basis. All new content should be written specifically with
the web reader in mind and should also be optimised for the
search engines.
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign:
When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your
advertisements that are being advertised on search engines,
this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising.
Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine
traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the
products or services that you promote and sell on your
website. Paid search advertising is particularly
beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on
search engines through natural search.
4. Publicise your website through article marketing:
Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts
as one of the most effective promotional methods to
publicise your website and to increase the number of back
links (incoming links) to your website content. To ensure
ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable
article directories, content publishers, article
announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds).
Each article should be published on your own website first
and should include a bookmark button to encourage social
bookmarking.
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy:
Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top
global companies will have had some form of social media
marketing strategy in place. Corporates and small business
owners should create a clear social media marketing
strategy as part of an integrated communications and
marketing strategy. Social Media has become an essential
component of online marketing and search engines are
adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation.
One of the effects of the social media revolution is an
exponential increase in the amount of content online.
6. Create a Company Blog:
In the past, corporates have been focusing marketing and
communications efforts on becoming faceless. This has
changes significantly. Where the online consumer has become
very much in control, companies will no longer be able to
connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional
way without having a personality. More and more companies
are starting to realise the significance of establishing a
company personality and we are starting to see more
Corporate Blogs coming alive. Business Blogging will
continue to become more lucrative as more and more people
look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for
insight.
7. Experiment with video marketing:
There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential
in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of
YouTube's traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet
Television websites, streaming video is dominating the
international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to
capitalize on this exciting channel. As companies seek to
simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more
interactive which could have huge implications for
Affiliate marketing.
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing:
Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted
marketing technique in recent months. Many new Blog
oriented services are launching Widgets providing
businesses with the opportunity quickly introduce their
services and new products to audiences.
Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide
miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside
of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only
an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming
one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for
businesses advertising online.
9. Discover the benefits of mobile media marketing:
Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric
pace as many web companies recognise the huge potential in
mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard
websites are converted to ones can easily be accessed by
mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that there
websites are mobile-friendly. This leads the way for new
and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with
improved brand and marketing experiences.
10. Create an effective email marketing strategy:
Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as
part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing
customer base and to expand your client base significantly
through permission marketing and regular targeted
communications. Engaging your customers with relevant,
targeted information when, where, and how they want it is
crucial to marketing success. By combining technological
advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future
still looks bright for email marketers.
To conquer commercial combat, a significantly powerful
Internet presence, supported by a brilliant E-Marketing
Strategy, is paramount to ensuring that you remain
competitive, increase revenue and magnetise your customers!
----------------------------------------------------
Blue Magnet is an Internet Marketing Training & Consulting
company in South Africa. Visit http://www.bluemagnet.co.za
for more information.