What Is Online Marketing?

Online marketing is the promotion of products and services on the Internet, which is why it is also called Internet marketing or e-marketing.

To explain how online marketing works is like picking up the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and arranging them to form an image. It is not easy at all, especially when somebody comes to you with a Field of Dreams mindset: If he builds a website, customers will come.

Given all the Internet’s power and global reach, even professional online marketers cannot guarantee results. There is no formula to ensure success other than sound strategy and hard work… and a little luck.

For me, Internet marketing is an art. You must learn how to use color combinations and get to master the strokes to come up with an auctionable piece of work. The color combinations here are the marketing forms, and the strokes are the tactics, strategies and tools needed to get the desired result.

Forms of Online Marketing

• Search Engine Marketing is the art of pushing up a website’s rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) through search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.
• Pay-per-click (PPC). Owners of websites being promoted (the advertisers) pay their host (usually the search engines that put them ahead of the generic search results) when their online ad is clicked.
• Content Marketing is about providing relevant and helpful content to web visitors seeking that particular information.
• Attraction Marketing is the art of using your website as a magnet to attract prospects or potential customers.
• Contest Marketing. Businesses usually resort to contest marketing as a tool to build a database or to crowdsource content for their websites.
• Social Media Marketing uses the various social networks and online communities to achieve branding and marketing communication goals.
• e-mail Marketing has become more sophisticated with the inclusion of company newsletters in e-mail messages.
• Article Marketing is the act of promoting your company, product or service with articles, including press releases.
• Viral Marketing is the art of producing and distributing content that people would love to share with everybody. Use this to build links to your site.
  
• Video Marketing is a powerful tool to generate traffic. Great videos have the potential to go viral. It should be easy to search for video sharing sites where you can show your videos.
• Mobile Marketing includes strategies that enable businesses to communicate with their customers and prospects through a mobile device.

We will discuss the tactics, strategies and the tools needed to effectively deploy these forms of online marketing in our next class.