Choosing Internet Marketing Tactics For your Website

When running a website or online business, it’s important to choose the best Internet marketing tactics, which will offer the biggest reward in traffic or income compared to the amount of time or money invested. This is called getting a good ROI (return on investment) from your Internet marketing tactics.

There are many common, and general, forms of Internet marketing, and most can work for a wide variety of websites and online businesses through the different Internet marketing tactics available in each. These are some of the basic types of Internet marketing:

1. Email Marketing – email newsletters, coupons and offers, etc.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – link-building, keyword optimization, etc.
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – search engine advertising, etc.
4. Viral Marketing – video / file-sharing, tell-a-friend, etc.
5. Affiliate Marketing – having others sell your products for a percentage
6. Online Advertising – banner ads, text link ads, sponsorships, etc.
7. Online PR – online press releases, blogging, etc.

There are a few steps in choosing the best Internet marketing tactics for a website or online business:

1. Choose a niche or industry.
2. Identify the target market.
3. Determine what most influences that target market.
4. Evaluate the competition’s strengths, weaknesses, and their marketing tactics.
5. Create an Internet marketing plan, including a marketing budget.

As a part of creating an Internet marketing plan, list all possible Internet marketing tactics that fit your budget and have the potential to reach your target market. Once you have a master list of potential Internet marketing tactics, run each through the following checklist to narrow down the best options, and create your final list of Internet marketing tactics for your website or online business:

• Will reach the target market.
• Will be able to influence the target market.
• Has been used in this niche or other niche’s targeting a similar market successfully before (better if it’s been used to target a similar market, but never exactly done in the current niche)
• Will set the website apart from the competition.
• Will fit within the Internet marketing budget for the site.

The new face of Facebook's marketing model

Facebook is a social utility site that allows you to connect with friends. It is feature rich and allows you to upload photos and share notes with your friends. The company has always been innovative and launched new services everytime. Now, the latest one is a marketing initiative from the company. It allows you to connect directly with the brands. You can now become a fan of any brand which may be a musical band such as U2 or a Mc Donalds. Facebook will let your cirle of friends know that you have become a fan of this particular brand and publish targeted ads.

The model is a new concept altogether and catching up fast with the young crowd. However analysts are saying that the brand has to be really cool, then only people will be ready to associate with the brand and send targeted ads. Whether this concept stays or sinks is something that time only will tell but for now we can safely say that Facebook has again come up with a new concept. There are four concepts by which Facebook is planning to sell this to advertisers. The first is advanced targeting by age, gender, location, interests and more. The second one is content integration so that you advertisement get noticed. There is flexible pricing with concepts such as Buy Clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM). The last one is trusted referrals. You can attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your advertisements. It is a four step simple process to create a social advertisement. Once, you it done successfully you can find your web business roaring and your turnover increasing manifold. There is also an option of deep analytics and optimization. With so many features, you can be rest assured that every penny that you spend on your advertisement is returned.

Getting real website traffic with social marketig sites

Social networking sites (such as Myspace, FaceBook, and Orkut) allow Internet users to form communities online quickly and easily, from groups of friends to business networking. These groups of networked individuals, often in similar demographic groups, have become a virtual gold mine for Internet marketers, who can place their message in front of members of their target market on social networking sites for little or no cost.

Social networking sites have also become an easily abused Internet marketing tool, forcing social networking sites to crack down on new types of spam (such as message spam and bulletin spam on Myspace). This spam is a result of people artificially inflating “friend” counts (the number of other members in their social network) through mass-adding and bots. The owners of these profiles will then sometimes market their own products, or charge others to have their URLs blasted to the bulletin board of thousands of other members.

Why Social Networking Spam Doesn’t Work

Simply put, social networking spam doesn’t work. That’s not to say there won’t be any conversion for the marketing effort, but rather that it very rarely will offer a decent return on investment in comparison to other marketing tactics. Here’s why:

1. Huge social networking accounts rarely are filled with targeted members. Therefore, those seeing the message won’t likely be members of the target market (unless someone’s marketing something like a Myspace resource site, or a band marketing to legitimate fans, which are two exceptions to the rule)

2. Many of these paid posts (often in “bulletin” form) are only highly visible in limited quantities, based on post time, and only when a member is logged in. Therefore, most members blasted won’t ever even see the message.

3. Even if targeted members of a market do see the message, actually open the message, and actually read it, there’s still the traditionally very low response rate common in most direct marketing methods.

Ways to Use Social Networking Effectively for Internet Marketing

1. Build a highly targeted “friend” list, rather than using bots.

2. Personally welcome any new members of your network, or at least as many as possible.

3. Time bulletins and messages to when members of the target market will likely be online.

4. Offer something of value (like news or exclusive information) in the posts, rather than simply sending links.

5. Contact members regularly to keep the message in front of them, but don’t overdo it, to the point of looking like a spammer.

6. Join groups on social networking sites related to the niche, and promote in them where it doesn’t violate group rules.