There are a lot of techniques for us to approach our internet marketing strategy. The benefits of long term online advertising advantages is that, it can be the single most efficient advertising and marketing with compared to conventional advertising or marketing strategies. It is also a relatively even playing field, so even if we are beginner in this field, still we can compete with national or international household names.
Our online advertising and marketing are ranging from banner advertising, through to pay per click, email marketing, Social Media optimisation and search engine optimisation (seo for short), with or without link building, which is utilizing reciprocal or one way links, commonly referred to as backward links to increase your natural search engine listings and affiliates marketing.
Banner Advertising:- Banner advertising is a marketing strategy which is internet based, as opposed to magazine advertising which is paper based. With this online marketing strategy we have to pay search engines or web directories, or relevant sites to place a banner of our site at the top of their pages. There are a few qualities that generally make for more effective banner ads in many situations. If we are like to have a banner ad campaign, then we should keep these below suggestions in mind:
- Post banner ads on pages with related Web content -- the more related, the better.
- Advertise a particular product or service in your banner, rather than your site generally.
- If you do advertise a particular product or service, link the banner ad to that part of your Web site, rather than your home page.
- Put banner ads at the top of the page, rather than farther down.
- Use simple messages rather than complicated ones.
- Use animated ads rather than static ones.
- Your graphic content should pique visitor curiosity, without being too obscure.
- Keep banner ad size small. If the page takes too long to load, a lot of visitors will go on to another page.
The most important things are to make visually appealing ads with interesting content and to intelligently place the ads so they are exposed to audiences that would be interested in them.
Pay Per Click:- PPC (pay per click) bid management begins with identifying the maximum CPC (cost per click) we are willing to pay for a given keyword phrase. If we do not know this value, it is perhaps not advisable to engage in PPC advertising. The max CPC will change over time and could vary from search engine to search engine. If we don't know this value, start with an educated guess. This could be based on an industry rule of thumb or calculated based on internal factors such as profit margins. For example, let's suppose we're bidding on the keyword phrase "poker chips" but do not know our max CPC. One way to estimate a max CPC involves taking the top 5 bids on Overture and computing the average. The current bids are: $0.51, $0.50, $0.33, $0.32, $0.31. The average is 39 cents. Use that as our max CPC to begin with.
A better approach is to base the CPC on your profit margins. Let's suppose our average sale price on a set of poker chips is $80 and our profit margin is 20%. That leaves $16 of profit for each set. Also, assume that our conversion rate will be 1% (this is a conservative estimate). For every 100 visitors from a PPC ad, we expect 1 sale. If we have $16 of ad spend to spread over 100 visitors, then we have 16 cents to spend per click. Another way to approach this problem is to have an ad spend based on revenue. For example, if our goal is to spend 15% of revenue on advertising then our ad spend would work out to $12 per poker chip set. Again, assuming a conservative 1% conversion rate, that would leave us with 12 cents per click. As our campaign progresses and we have to determine our actual conversion rate, adjust the CPC accordingly.
Email Marketing:- Many email marketing programs develop organically. An idea is born, an email is sent, it works, and another email is sent, and so on. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, we can often accomplish more in a shorter time frame by putting a strategic plan into place.
What’s involved in developing a plan for an effective email strategy? Is it our first email marketing campaign or an existing campaign that we want to take to the next level? Writing such a plan takes considerable time and effort, and may seem a bit daunting at first. Not only is a plan necessary for the long-term success of our campaign, it’s also critical for keeping us on track in the short term.
A strategic plan is an evolving document. As your knowledge of, and experience with, email marketing grows, we’ll want to chop and change our plan to incorporate the new ideas that we’ve learned, and remove those that aren’t meeting our expectations
Generally these are the appropriate set of steps that we can use in our own email marketing campaigns. This process involves the following tasks:
- Undertake a competitive analysis.
- Answer some key questions about your offerings, audiences, content, mailing schedule, goals, and price.
- we have to set quantitative goals for the strategy.
- Set and allocate the budget.
Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, adding a "Digg This" button, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos. Social media optimization is a form of search engine marketing.
Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social book marking, video and photo sharing websites
Search Engine Optimisation: - Search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users or online user find Web sites. That's why a Web site with good search engine listings may see a huge increase in traffic. In this process we can get a huge number of visitor or we can call online customer for our websites without investing much money in it.
Affiliate Marketing:- Having an affiliate program is one of the best and cheapest ways to increase sales and achieve higher targeted traffic. Affiliate marketing is very effective solution, because it allows us to base advertising on a pay-per-performance model. Instead of paying for advertising and "hoping for the best", merchants using affiliate marketing programs pay only when advertising results in an actual sale.
