Online Marketing Methods

There are four key online marketing strategies you can use to promote for your website after it is live on the Internet. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Marketing (SMM), and Email Marketing. Integrating these four methods into any Internet marketing campaign can bring positive results to your website.

I like to look at the three methods excluding Email Marketing as a part of a triangle. Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing are on the bottom of the triangle. The reason those two are on the bottom of the triangle is that the more effort you place into Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing the better chance you will achieve better Search Engine Optimization or “Natural or Organic” search results.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) requires Pay-Per-Click ad campaigns and is targeted to specific demographics. Those demographics could be a specific state or country, users of a specific product, or a target audience you are trying to attract to your website. The platforms that are most popular for Pay-Per-Click Marketing are Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter (Bing and Yahoo!).

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is both paid and non-paid promotion via Social Media Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. You can only run Pay-Per-Click ads through Facebook as of right now. The great thing about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn is that they are all free to use. You as the business person are ultimately in charge of how you are going to use the free resources to benefit your website whether it be hire an outside company to do it for you or market your website on your own time.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of pulling Internet traffic to your website through search engines using “Natural or Organic” search results compared to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) like Pay-Per-Click Marketing or Social Media Marketing (SMM). For a website to gain “Natural or Organic” search results the computers that run the search engines must see new content on the website. New content on your website might be a blog, weekly news updates or a change on one of your web pages on your website. Whether this information is posted daily, weekly or monthly the computers that generate the search results will notice the updated information. Just because you consistently change the content on your website doesn’t mean that you will get more “Natural or Organic” search results. You have to keep updating the content for three to four months consistently before you start seeing results.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing in the past few years has become a very effective way to keep in contact with a client. The average person checks their email three times a day whether it be through a mobile phone, at work or home. This in turn gives your business a chance to reach out to a potential customer or client with much less effort. Email Marketing is very cost effective considering you are not buying envelopes, postage or paper all you have to do is collect Email addresses.

In the upcoming weeks I am going to go more into depth about the specifics of Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for industry updates and News from Cascading Media!