There has been lot said and even predicted on the internet and the future of world
wide web but the most important thing which makes it unique is the revenue a lot of business professionals are generating from the same.
World Wide Web has turned the world into a local community where you can find the person or a thing of your choice irrespective of geographical boundaries. Its quite obvious that both importers and exporters have collaborated through internet on a massive scale.
But what actually makes a person or business and ultimately their website through which they communicate each other is marketing. Cyberspace is scattered with many millions of websites and growing but only just a fraction of them makes upto the mark and people know them. The driving factor for a website is its traffic and that cannot be directed so easily.
Today there are lots of online marketing channels available like :
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
PPC (Pay per click)
Social Media marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Banner Advertising
Emailing Marketing
Etc.
Most important is to drive the relevant traffic on your site which could convert that into loyal customers.
So if you are selling a diet supplement that you should place your ads on health related or obesity sites , blogs or forums.
Currently SEO (Search engine optimization) is the most important channel for driving targeted customers into your site, the reason is that its ROI (Return on Investment) is so high that its a very popular channel for internet marketing.
Besides Social media too is good for creating a viral marketing scenario as well as branding amongst the community. A social community page like Facebook fan page can targeted to bring in themed fans to join the page thereby increasing the chances of traffic onto your main site. Moreover you can even get your product / service branded onto social media sites because now they have almost 80% of total internet users.
Pay per click is the advertising form of search engine marketing so its similar to SEO, the different is that you are paying to search engine to get your ad placed on search engine results pages.
Apart from this, the affiliate, emailing too are major chunks of online marketing and if used properly they too can bring a lot of clients. In email marketing we must restrict that to the newsletter marketing to the signed subscribers rather than spam as it could spoil the business as a whole if any unethical practise is tried to drive traffic.