Acclaimed Web Development & Online Marketing Blog

I am a big believer in multi-channel marketing. I have always said market your products and services online and in print and if appropriate, radio, television, bill boards, etc., but now I believe there are so many ways to market yourself online that the phrase Multi-channel Internet Marketing is what we are going to be hearing more about in the future.

Nothing beats being number one on the first SERPs (search engine results pages) for the phrases your customers are searching for, but search engine optimization is supplemented and even improved by having a complimentary paid search engine marketing campaign and vice versa.

Email marketing is another way to keep prospects “on the hook” and customers coming back to your site. It’s a great supplement to other forms of internet marketing because it does what no other form of internet marketing can do. It allows you to not only target customers, but allows your customers and prospects to ask for your advertisements and opt-out if they are no longer interested. If your customers can get your advertisements in the form they want them, at a time when they are most likely to read them and only as often as they want them, they are more likely to look at your advertisements and remember them when they need your products or services.

The newest addition to our arsenal of internet marketing services is social media marketing.  Marketing on social media sites can allow you to reach millions of customers through sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Linkedin.  Posting your messages on these sites allows your follows to repost your content allowing you to get a lot more links to your website and blog, so social media marketing has search engine optimization benefits as well.

In marketing, one of the most important pieces of advice I can give is to always keep your company name and your brand in front of people’s faces.  All the methods of internet marketing can be used together to show that your company is well-established and experts in your field.

I see on craigslist all the time. Someone wants a website for their small business idea. They know that a website with a shopping cart is what they need, but once they have it and sales don’t start rolling it, they wonder why no one wants to visit their website or buy their product. What happened?

Well, it’s simple really. It’s not that no one wants to visit your website or buy your product it’s that no one knows it’s even online.

Most websites, especially popular website get more than 90% of their web traffic from search engines, but search engine don’t automatically put your website on the first page just because you’re online. You have to use a series of techniques called search engine optimization or SEO to show the search engines which keyword phrases your site should be listed under. You need to provide the search engines with unique content with those keyword phrases in it, so they know your site is relevant to those keyword phrases. Not just relevant, but more relevant than all of your competitors because if you want web searchers to client on your site, you need to be on the search engine’s first page for your keyword phrases.

While you’re working on getting the search engines to list you on their first page, which can take months, you can almost immediately bring targeted traffic and customers to your website by bidding for keywords through search engine marketing (SEM) or pay per click (PPC). In programs like Google Adwords, you can bid on keywords and only pay when someone clicks on your site. You can also advertise through social media marketing on sites like facebook.com.

Email marketing is another way you can bring visitors to your site. Building or buying an email list and email those customers that opt-in to your mailing list is one of the cheapest and most effective ways of bringing traffic to your site.

Online marketing is an essential part of success on the internet. No matter how great your product or how beautiful you believe your website design, it’s not enough to just put your website out there and hope for the best.