Online Marketing Guide – Advantages, Disadvantages, and Strategies

While some of online marketing’s advantages benefit can be enjoyed right away, some of its benefits require discovering. Internet marketing or online marketing refers to the ability to market products and services through the internet.

Internet marketing offers the following advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages
– Gives the ability to freely market products or services at an incredible low cost.
– Nearly anything can be sold through internet marketing.
– Payments can be collected conveniently online. It supersedes traditional businesses including orders and transaction.
– Products or services are placed on a world wide audience. The product is marketed globally that can even reach the most remote places.
– There are many available ‘How to’ resources’ to improve marketing strategy.
– Affiliate marketing can also be combined with online marketing while both provide passive source of income.
– Online marketing can stay open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
– Requires ample time for site maintenance

Disadvantages
– Requires tremendous amount of skill to learn.
– It can be very confusing to try, especially for beginners.
– Online marketing sometimes loses its appeal shortly after six months.
– It requires an overwhelming knowledge to understand.
– Intense competition makes it very hard to succeed.

Building a name for a particular product online can be tough, especially in today’s competitive market. So to make your online business easy and effective, here are some effective techniques to help improve your business revenue:

Video Marketing:
– Incorporate rich streaming videos or various media ads to your site.
– Try to make your marketing video creative, simple, and funny (optional).
– A video where ‘research shows’ can heard or seen is one of the most effective testimonial videos to post. Tutorials and funny videos can also do well.
– Distribute your video across different video sites.
– Buy post-roll or pre-roll ads on to your videos.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
– If you’re running on a large budget create an account on prominent PPC networks like MSN, Yahoo, and Google.
– If you’re running on a low budget you can go with Google.
– Find keywords and niche markets that you can target that related is to your product that are not heavily competitive, but still generates moderate to high traffic to reduce your PPC cost down.
– Learn how to use keywords and SEO to maximize your product’s online exposure.
– Remember to place and use quality advertisements only.

Mass Media Marketing
– Mind your ethics and promote your product as ethical as possible.
– In order to leverage your social media successfully, be active in the community. Keep your social media accounts and sites to a handful. This way, managing them will be easier.
– You can also introduce online bookmarking campaign.
– Create web contents either linking to an informative article, or your own articles, or links to support Wikipedia’s edits.

Search Engine Optimization
– Optimize your meta-tags including your title tags according to your keyword product.
– Creating friendly search engine HTML sitemaps can also help improve product exposure.
– Create source HTML source code and optimized robots.txt
– Create an optimized XML maps too.

Using Social Network Affiliate Advertising to Find New Affiliates

Can you really use social network affiliate advertising to bring in new affiliates? Most people want to find motivated people to join their affiliate. The whole point of locating those who are looking for a potential business plan is to help them raise their income while raising your own. Thus, where you find your potential affiliates actually does matter.

The most motivated people to join your affiliate team are going to be those who feel as though they have a connection with you and can trust you. The relationship that you can develop with potential affiliates through social network affiliate advertising can be very powerful. Because it’s not that hard to find interested individuals in business, marketing, and your marketing niche you can develop a following of fans that not only relies on your opinions but also values your contributions.

Because social network affiliate marketing is based on the idea that social networks are interactive rather than sales platforms you want to go about this with integrity. Think about how you might not like to be sold to every time you open up your page. Think about the kinds of things that would interest you when you open up your page. Using a social network involves a bit of human psychology and understanding. You don’t have to hold a degree, of course, but being able to understand basic human nature is helpful. Users want to feel as though there is more to the relationship than just a marketing plan. This isn’t hard if you put your focus on people before profits. That’s how the profits are made.

Keeping your focus on people who are interacting with you (or vice versa) will help guide you toward more potential affiliates. The more you are able to connect with your potential affiliates the more that you will find it easy to transition them from “potential” to “actual.” With so many marketers hitting the sales and hype angle so hard, those who slow down and focus on the people end up building trust in a short period of time. Anyone who has looked online for a business of any sort is much more likely to feel comfortable when there is someone to talk to and connect with before joining anything. It’s just natural.

As you progress through the social network affiliate marketing plan you’ll find that you’ll be able to increase your efforts ten fold to find more fans, find more potential affiliates, and transition more to actual affiliates. Many marketers that have been doing this kind of social marketing for more than a few months state that they have a new affiliate interest almost daily. This is why it has become such an important method and such a popular idea.

Using connection and people skills to build an affiliate business does not need to be deceitful or manipulative in any way. You’re just logging on to interact with people, let them get to know you, and then offer them a chance to join the marketing business. It’s really that simple.

Speaking With Influencers – A Buzz Marketing Guide

Consumer conversation and engagement are increasing in value as a new era in marketing emerges. Consumers are empowered to be their own Private Eyes – dig deep to find true value via reviews, free reports and blogs. Consumers are turning to word of mouth (via the web) as a valuable resource to make purchasing decisions. Access to communication tools on the web have amplified the importance and influence of word of mouth. Though it’s not possible to transition all of your marketing efforts to a viral campaign on YouTube, companies are realizing the power of product / service value and their communication with influencers.

To elevate your word of mouth efforts, we are going to take a look at how to effectively speak with influencers:

Buzzworthy Product

The first step to generating buzz, is to have a compelling product that adds value to the market. It’s all about “earning” the buzz through great products and experiences. Do your market research, crunch the numbers, do whatever you have to to find a market need. Nothing is more wasteful than creating a generic product with little to no value. Influencers will not respond positively to an average, mundane product / service. If your product has value, it will earn its stripes through word of mouth. Value is essential in generating buzz.

Engaging Buzzing Influencers

When engaging influencers, identify the right target person / group to talk about your product. If your product / service is not relevant or important, it will fall upon deaf ears. Go big then fine-tune your target. Identify the market, then the key players within it.

Once you have a shortlist of influencers, you can develop a strategy. For example, if you’re launching a new iPhone app, you should consider influential blogs such as Mashable, RWW or the iPhone App blog. Once you’ve decided on a shortlist of blogs, what are their passion points? Mashable is geared towards social media, covering a swath of topics, whereas iPhone App is very specific. Now you have the key players, how are you going to…