Online Marketing
Online Marketing is basically the same as Internet Marketing. Online presence has become a very important part of 21st century marketing, with huge amounts of advertising revenues moving offline to online. Traditional media, such as Newpapers, TV and Radio have been signifantly hit by the Online Marketing boom. This article gives a brief history of this astounding rise and also discusses the various options to maximise marketing potential, online.
The History
Without the web, you can not market online. The world wide web was initially an internal military communication system for the US forces. Created in 1967 it was known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA network for short. The Universities within America soon joined in and it was a way of organising information on one side of America and people on the other side could access those files.
It is only recently, in the last 14 years, that we have seen an exponential growth in websites online. In 1993 there were only 130 websites, in 1996 there were only 600,000 but now there is an exponential growth that it isn't possible to give an accurate figure. This is the reason why Google is called Google, as it is named after the number Googel which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. The Google spiders were finding so many websites that it was such a high number, hence the name.
All of these websites do hold value for businesses to make money, if they get people visiting them. There are different ways of making the most of this huge volume of people.
Banner Ads:
Initially, these were the original way of marketing online. The first banner advert was put online in 1994. Until the dawn of pay per click advertising, this was the main way of reaching people online. Even in the early stages of the search engines, such as Yahoo, they were more seen as portals. Banner Advertising on the homepage (which is still being done today on Yahoo and MSN) was the most lucrative form of online marketing. The reason for this was because it was where the most amount of people congregated online, as they were going to the Yahoo or MSN homepage in order to make an online search. Online Marketing in this format is now seen as very much secondary to pay per click advertising or SEO (search engine optimisation).
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another way of online marketing through banner adverts. However, the different to standard banner adverts is that you don't pay for the number of times that it is shown or the amount of space it takes up or for the amount of time it has been on a website. Instead, affiliate marketing is priced according to conversions, be it sales or enquiries generated from the traffic it brings.
Online Marketing in this form is risk free, therefore can be seen as the most effective form of marketing online. However, the only downside to this marketing technique is that for the average advertiser it can't generate the same volume of enquiries or sales that other mainstream online marketing techniques can.
By combining affiliate and search marketing, you will find an effective online marketing solution.
Digital Marketing Online:
Digital Marketing takes banner adverts to the next level and also integrates the transition of TV to online in to the same marketing format. The benefits of this marketing is it is more engaging online than it is offline and the link to the website is good to drive more business, which offline marketing can't do.
Email Marketing
This has been around since the internet began and was originally the reason behind the internet, for ease of communication. Nowadays, emails are seen as an integral part of 21st Century business communication. Not only has this, but the rise of social networking and online socialising has lead to an area of growth with social media advertising. Email Marketing can come under this section of online marketing.
Pay Per Click
Bill Gross is the founder of the renowned pay per click advertising model. In his initial search engine called GoTo.com, website owners paid for each click that they received. The more the website owner was prepared to pay per click, the higher this listing. The pay per click search results were then used on numerous other search engines and was rebranded as Overture. Even Yahoo used Overture before they bought it in 2003.
Online Marketing through PPC was and is very effective. It was very direct which is the reason why this marketing was so successful; if someone searched for a 'gold chain with diamonds' then they are clearly looking for that product. Therefore, a great way to capture this person and get them onto your site is to pay for the traffic.
Since the autumn of 2002, Google Adwords has been in play. They had a larger chuck of the search traffic than Yahoo back at this time, which initially made their advertising program more successful. However, since 2005 Google Adwords adverts have been ranked on Quality Score. The benefit of this to online marketers is that advertiser position isn't just dependant upon the cost associated with each click. Online Marketing as a whole has benefited from this method and other major search engines such as Yahoo and MSN have updated their algorithms to a similar ranking method.
Search Marketing
The search engines have a huge role to play in the effectiveness of online marketing. They bring all of the websites to the people who are looking for the product or service. This is why pay per click is effective, but this form of online marketing means that you pay for the traffic that comes through. Before pay per click was born, search engines have always ranked websites organically, also known as SERPs. There is a way to manipulate your position within the organic listings, through SEO. This is an effective way of marketing online, but is also known for being a long process. Marketing through the natural listings can bring mass amounts of free traffic and if you have good positioning on relevant search terms, the online marketing can really maximise the sales or enquiries.
Online Marketing through SEO is broken down into numerous smaller marketing techniques, which are discussed now:
Article Submission and LinksM
Building up authority on search engines is crucial to your online presence. By showing that you are dominant within your industry you have to demonstrate that for the topic areas associated, you are knowledgeable. This includes writing articles about the topics and submitting them to popular directories.
Search engines rank website on a number of different variables, however links are an important criteria. By having a lot of inbound links to your website from other websites really helps to maximise online presence by boosting visitors from these sources, but also by increasing position on the search engines through the value of these links.
Online Marketing is a rocket fuelled industry which is going to expand further in the coming years. Given the estimates for growth of online access through mobile phone devices, online marketing growth is set to be the corner stone of most businesses. However, more importantly, it is going to re-shape the way we live and think in the 21st Century.
