Having constructed your web site and displaying your goods or services that are for sale the next step is to market that service or business to your potential clients or customers. They key to any online business is to drive traffic to your site and get visitors who are potential clients for your goods and / or services. There are various alternatives available to market any online business including search engine optimization, keyword advertising, affiliate sales, email marketing, banner, and buying traffic.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the art of creating of webs site and web site pages that are “search engine friendly”. This means that your web sites pages contain keyword rich content that tells the search engine what your web site is all about. As a result, traffic to the site is created organically by people searching the web on places like Google, Yahoo, and Excite.
Keyword Advertising
Keyword advertising is characterized by buying traffic through such vehicles as a PPC (pay per click) campaign using specific keywords or phrases. Google Adwords is the most dominate form of keyword advertising. Other such vehicles as Yahoo and Looksmart also encompass keyword advertising as their primary model of selling ad space. Looksmart was one of the first search engines where links were ranked in terms of the highest bidder for that given keyword. Looksmart’s auction model paved the way for the Google Adwords system where sponsorship slots by keyword or phrase are auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Affiliate Sales
The affiliate sales model is one in which the sales are generated by other businesses who drive traffic to your site and, in turn, are paid a commission for any sales which occur from the traffic they send. This is the common CPA (cost per action) where commission are paid on a “per action” basis when the prospect purchases the goods or service. Some forms of CPA include being paid “per lead” which may only require the visitor to enter an email address or other information which creates a lead for the business to follow up on in order to close a sale.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the business of selling goods and / or services through the sending of email advertisements to potential clients. This marketing vehicle has become more difficult over recent years as large ISP such as Yahoo and AOL block traffic from various sources that are a priori determined to be spam. In reality this has caused many legitimate small businesses from using this vehicle as spammers seem to be the only ones who are able to get email delivered regardless of the barriers posed by these companies.
Banner Advertising
Banner Advertising is a vehicle whereby web site banners are displayed on sites throughout the web that advertise the business. When the banner is clicked, the potential client is driven to the site that is advertised. In the earlier days of the Internet, banner advertising was the vehicle of choice and was characterized as a CPM model (cost per thousand views). Web site companies received compensation for per thousand views of a banner. Nowadays, most Internet savvy users are oblivious to banner ads and, as a result, this type of advertising is many times sold only on a cost per click or CPA basis.
Buying Traffic
This marketing vehicle is one in which traffic (or visitors to your site) is bought from an Internet advertising company whereby traffic is driven to the site through various means. Here, the idea is not to worry too much about how the traffic appeared on your site, but the quality of the traffic that you received. The key here is to determine find the company that can drive the best the traffic in terms of conversion from prospect to customer.