Marketing, as a fast-paced industry, has to follow the trend. Therefore, when internet became widely and publicly available, marketers need to up their game so they won’t lose to competitors.
Internet marketing gains popularity, not only for business owners who wants to market their products or services to more customers, but also for individuals who want to establish a business without a product of their own. Blogging, vlogging, paid-reviewing, endorsing, and many new ways to gain income from marketing became a job that can pay even more than full-time job.
If you are interested to be one of those million-dollars blogger, vlogger, reviewer, and endorser, don’t be afraid to start the first step. Establish a website or a social media account and start gaining followers. Of course, everything is never as easy as it sounds, but as long as you have patience to build your reputation and skill to attract followers, combined with the stubbornness to never give up, you can. Before you go to your battle, however, prepare yourself and learn about the basics of internet marketing.
Professional website
When someone visits your blog for the first time, there’s no guarantee that he or she will buy the product or service immediately. Their decision to buy your product or service may change in a split second, depending on the website. Imagine if a visitor arrives at your blog via advertisement, read a good article, and decided to buy your product, but can’t find the “buy” button? What if he or she can find it, but has to go through a survey or a questionnaire? If she isn’t really determined to buy the product, she may call it quit.
Website is where your customers find information about the product and service and make the decision to purchase – whether intentionally or on impulse. Therefore, make sure to have your website professionally designed. Make it easy to look at and easier to navigate. Periodically, pretend to be a visitor and go through every menu to check if there’s anything unsightly with the design or if there’s any conflicting content.
Quality content
People visit your website looking for information. Maybe, at first, they are looking for the most basic information, however, as they finished consuming the basic, they’ll want to have more advanced content. If not, they’ll turn their way and look for other website where the information they want is available.
It’s important, therefore, to manage the quality content of your website. The process of creating quality content may be started even from the very early time when you decided what kind of website you want to make. Picking a niche that is unique, specific, and in area you are proficient at, is important. A website containing too much general information won’t really interest visitors, because there are so many bigger competitors. Moreover, people searching general information usually is not ready to buy products or services. They are still deciding whether they need or want the thing or no.
Search Engine Optimization
For your internet business to flourish, you need to be there when people are looking for you. Traditionally, when someone is looking for a service or product, they look at yellow pages. Online, when someone needs info about something, they use search engine. So, to have visitors, your website needs to appear in search engine search result. SEO is how you do it.
Search engine ranks search result based on many criteria, including keyword, post length, links, and so on. If you want to have an article from your website rank in the first page, then you must follow the rules. After deciding a topic, use free tools to determine the best keyword. Find keyword that has the most searches. Next, incorporate that keyword in your article pages – from the title, the header, and spread out through the body text. However, keyword isn’t all you need. Make good quality content which decent length post, normal keyword density, added with image and links to appropriate website or page.
Email Marketing
Email is not just a tool to keep your subscribers updated with your website. It is also a tool to sell, that can convert email reader into buyer. However, to be able to sell things via email, you should understand your email receiver. What should you do so they open and read your email instead of sending it to trash? First, optimize your mail subject. Never use a clickbait, it will drive your followers to unsubscribe button. Instead, pick the best part of your product or promotion and write exactly that as subject. For example, “Flash Sale: 50% Off until Today 12.00 AM”.
After they open the email, the challenge is to make them click the link in the email that will bring them to your website. Pick some of the most interesting articles or products, write interesting copy for each, focusing on the benefit of products. Don’t put only one link, give your reader choices. Email marketing needs to be as personal as possible. Write your subscriber’s name, not just a generic “Dear Customer”.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is a big open war arena for businesses to promote their products or services. They fight to gain the attention of the public through contents that suitable for social media like graphics, videos, short texts. If you want to be successful in internet marketing, you should not forget marketing in social media as well. The key to success in internet marketing business is the number of followers, and not doing any activity in social media prevents you to have more of that.
To mark your presence in social media, choose two or three platforms that suits your business the most. Different social media attracts different demographic, so you have to observe what kind of content each users will like or favorite. Lifestyle products such as food, fashion, and traveling seems to be doing well in Instagram, because those products are pretty to look at, it matched with overall Instagram trends. B2B products like software to run a business function will have a success to join LinkedIn instead, and so on.