Online Marketing: What Is It?

by Rahimah Sultan

Online marketing is using the internet, to reach people, to spread the word about you and your company’s products or services.

It is doing anything you can do online to get more people seeing what you have to offer and to get them to eventually buy from you.

Online marketing is a broad category with several sub-categories that include SEO, SEM, content marketing, social media marketing, PPC advertising, affiliate marketing, and email marketing.

SEO is the process of using certain words (keywords) in your online content to enable search engines to pick it up and show it as a top result for anyone searching for those words.

SEM is paid. Whereas SEO is used for organic searches, you can pay to get hits to your site which will get you top ranking in search engine results.

With SEM you have to have a paid product or service in order to do well or you will not be able to afford the cost. Do not use this method when starting out online and offering free content.

Content Marketing is a method focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to a particular audience with the intent of an ultimate profitable customer action.

Social Media Marketing is done on hundreds of social media networks. You have to choose the platforms that work best for your type business. The context must fit the platform.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is just that. You pay for each click received on your ad. It’s similar to SEM which is only one special type of PPC advertising.

Affiliate Marketing is directly communicating with your audience and customers. You can easily engage directly with your customers with this form of marketing, and it’s a great way to sell products and services.

Email Marketing is used once your customers have given you permission to contact them. You can email them at any time, providing value and asking them to buy when the time is right.

With the power of the internet and these forms of online marketing you can work from home after your day job or on weekends to build a very profitable business. As with anything worth having, you must be willing to put in the work.

For a more detailed article on this subject read this.

Communicate with your customers

Click here