The Skinny on Online Marketing

There are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to online marketing. Beginners in the field can easily fall prey to bad Internet marketing strategies that promise instant results. The thing is, “instant” doesn’t always mean long lasting. They cannot guarantee sure profits either. Some of these Internet marketing tricks might increase the number of hits to your website, but they will not necessarily bring in the cash.

Knowing your SEO hats

Article marketing makes up a big chunk of online marketing strategies. Businesses online depend on websites, and the blood work of all websites is content. You need to keep your content relevant if you want to attract costumers. However, costumers aren’t the only ones you need to write for.

To raise the page ranking of your website in popular search engines and directories, you need to keep your content optimized. This means knowing how to place the right number of keywords within the article. These “keywords” or key phrases will then be indexed by search engine “spiders”. Since these spiders are programs, they cannot initially gauge the quality of your articles depending on the value of information included in it. Most pages are ranked on search engines because the right keywords are frequently mentioned in the same article.

While this is good for the search engine, being too redundant in the article (e.g. saying the word “hormonal imbalance” 30 times in a 400-word article) is annoying for the human reader. Keyword stuffing this intense is also referred to as “black hat SEO” or bad SEO. While this may result in top page ranking overnight, you can also lose your slot in no time once your irrelevant content was “found out” by human editors.

Other people use the term “white hat SEO” for article marketing that is more focused on human readers than search engine spiders. However, no online marketing strategy today can claim to be purely white hat SEO. Because of the tight competition of businesses online, companies are bound to make use of a little black hat SEO trick once in a while, but probably not to the extent that they are risking being banned from search engines.

The most common form of article marketing today makes use of gray hat SEO strategies, which is a well balanced scheme which considers both the human readers and the search engine spiders.

Email marketing ethics

If you are personally annoyed at spam mails, then you might immediately want to cross email marketing off your list. You should not do this just yet. Email marketing is an effective Internet marketing strategy if you know how to do it right.

Sending out advertisements and newsletters to a random number of email addresses will not help you gain customers. Instead, you will be putting all your hard work in the trash bin of someone’s email. Think about your target audience instead. Do not simply blast your advertisements everywhere.

What you are looking for here is a list that is more focused on quality, not quantity. A targeted list of 20 clients, or prospective clients, is more effective than 200 strangers who might just see your unsolicited newsletter as an annoyance.

Getting the list right

Targeted lists can be formed from databases in your website. People who visit your website could simply drop a line, and voluntarily give out their email addresses where you can send product catalogues, newsletters, and whatnot that is related to your product.

If you are a traditional business who also trades offline, you can collect emails during tradeshows. If you have a shop somewhere in the city, you can ask your clients to fill out a small survey form, which also asks for their email addresses. It can be a simple line at the bottom saying: “Would you like to be updated about out latest products? Tell us where we can find you in cyberspace so we can drop a line.”