Internet Marketing has grown phenomenally over the last few years but the shift has quite clearly moved to a market that is driven by the consumer and that is no longer dictated by journalists and corporates. Social and search marketing is clearly leading the way together with email & mobile marketing, website optimisation and Web PR strategies. Online consumers are responding more favourably to non-intrusive, relevant and socially attractive campaigns and have quite frankly had enough of intrusive, forced online advertising campaigns.
The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:
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Optimise your website’s content
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Create a content development strategy for your website
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Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
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Publicise your website through article marketing
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Develop a social media marketing strategy
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Create a Company Blog
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Experiment with video marketing
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Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
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Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
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Create an effective email marketing strategy
1. Optimise your website’s content
First and foremost, get your website content right. Make sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines. An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing. To ensure that the content is being indexed correctly by search engines, it is essential that a number of variables are applied correctly to each article, press release, media announcement, promotional copy or information content that is placed on the website. SEO copywriting techniques should be applied to all content.
Benefit of Optimised Content:-
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Ensures that your website is identified as a subject matter expert
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Creates unique, relevant and superior content
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Prevents duplicate content
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Encourages correct page architecture
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Ensures correct theme alignment of related content
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Increases Search Engines Rankings for targeted keywords
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Increases traffic to the website
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Increases customers
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Increases turnover
2. Create a content development strategy for your website
In addition to optimising the existing content on your website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to continuously increase your website’s content on an ongoing basis. All new content should be written specifically with the web reader in mind and should also be optimised for the search engines. A website should acquire an adequate number of pages related to the specific subject matter in order to be seen as an expert in the specific industry. The more frequently the website’s content is updated, the more frequently search engines will be able to spider and index the website appropriately and apply a suitable ranking to the websites individual pages of content.
Benefits of Increasing Website Pages:-
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Ensures that the company is identified as a subject matter expert
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Encourages more frequent spidering by Search Engines
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Creates more opportunities (pages) for Search Engines to rank
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Increases content offered to visitors
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Creates additional content for theme alignment
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Improves inbound linking strategy
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Offers additional opportunities for internal and external linking
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your advertisements that are being advertised on search engines, this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising. Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the products or services that you promote and sell on your website. Paid search advertising is particularly beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on search engines through natural search.
Benefits of Paid Search Advertising:-
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Can achieve top ranking through paid search if not ranking through natural search
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It’s non-intrusive as you are reaching people when they are actively looking for information about your products and services online
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Send targeted visitors directly to your offering on your website
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Increases brand awareness
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Keeps your competitors off the pages
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It’s scalable and controllable and you only pay when people click on your
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You can appear on search engines almost immediately
4. Publicise your website through article marketing
Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts as one of the most effective promotional methods to publicise your website and to increase the number of back links (incoming links) to your website content. To ensure ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable article directories, content publishers, article announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds). Prior to submitting articles the content should optimised for search engines. By submitting different versions of the article there is far more chance that pages displaying your article will avoid relegation, will maintain and grow Page Rank, and maintain the status of a high-quality non-duplicated content page. Each article should be published on your own website first and should include a bookmark button to encourage social bookmarking.
Benefit of Article Marketing:-
- The more articles you write, the more web sites will choose to publish your articles online, the more inbound links your site will receive
- More back links from articles increases the value, meaning that ranking in search
- Published pages have a higher Page Rank
- Generates long-term traffic directly as well as boosts your search engine rankings
- Enhances your reputation and credibility as a subject matter expert
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top global companies will have had some form of social media marketing strategy in place. Corporates and small business owners should create a clear social media marketing strategy as part of an integrated communications and marketing strategy. Social Media has become an essential component of online marketing and search engines are adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation. SMO will continue to get broader use from marketers interested in building traffic and buzz online, moving far beyond linking strategy and smart SEO into the marketing mainstream.
One of the effects of the social media revolution is an exponential increase in the amount of content online. This will continue to lead online users to search beyond the algorithm for new ways of finding information. A key method for this is where people are sorting content on the web, creating their own groupings and sharing that with others. It is important that you continuously engage with social communities through reaching out to social communities to bring attention to your company or brand. It is an effective means of off-site optimisation for your company’s website and ensures that your website is optimised for a broad range of content in every applicable media or vertical niche.
Benefit of Social Media Marketing:-
- Brings attention to your brand
- Creates instant exposure
- More visibility for your company
- Encourages repeat visitors and shared content
- Improves search engine rankings
- Strengthens your brand within a targeted or niche community
- Increases back links to your website
- Drives additional traffic to the website
6. Create a Company Blog
In the past, corporates have been focusing marketing and communications efforts on becoming faceless. This has changes significantly. Where the online consumer has become very much in control, companies will no longer be able to connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality. More and more companies are starting to realise the significance of establishing a company personality and we are starting to see more Corporate Blogs coming alive. Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight. Companies should focus more time on establishing new touch points for customers to interact with the true personality of a brand. Allowing your employees to Blog on your company Blog has many advantageous.
Benefits of a Company Blog:-
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Blogs are search engine traffic magnets
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Positions your company to be a thought leader in your industry
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Gives you the power to publish at an instant making it a very powerful update tool and great for crisis handling
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Helps to build relationships with customers by engaging in conversation with them
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Provides an avenue for your to solicit feedback from your customers
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Puts a human voice to the company
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Encourages you to find out what others are saying about your company
7. Experiment with video marketing
There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of YouTube’s traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet Television websites, streaming video is dominating the international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to capitalize on this exciting channel. Although South African companies still struggle with the bandwidth issue, globally video sharing has become increasingly popular. Companies that provide the ability to syndicate your viral videos to Video Sharing websites will grow in popularity.
As companies seek to simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more interactive which could have huge implications for Affiliate marketing. As broadband penetrations increases in South Africa, streaming video will start to become a very popular marketing tool. Whether a B2B or B2C marketer, video is an enormous opportunity to engage, educate and entertain. Many brands are producing instructional videos to help customers install or use their product or service. Others create pure entertainment, hoping to build brand affinity or drive traffic to their website.
Benefits of a Video Marketing:-
- It is usually free to post video’s to video sharing websites
- Video’s are included in search engine results and usually receive high rankings
- Provides you with an opportunity to engage with your customer in an entertaining manner
- You are able to show the benefits of your products or service through visual education
- Increases the viral marketing potential for your business
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted marketing technique in recent months. Many new Blog oriented services are launching Widgets providing businesses with the opportunity quickly introduce their services and new products to audiences. Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for businesses advertising online. Audiences are becoming immersed in websites that provide cool and interactive marketing messages and companies have to find innovative ways to engage with these consumers.
Web Widget Marketing will help companies keep up with its audiences and stay abreast of consumers, or at least stay ahead of competitors. Web widgets cannot simply deliver an advertising message; it has to be a practical extension of the company’s brand. It should provide a highly usefully application that is able to demonstrate the brand’s unique offering and can deliver on that promise.
Benefits of Web Widget Marketing:-
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Widgets are cool, slick and playful
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They spread quickly on Blogs and social network profiles
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Combines the power of brand propagation with interactive content and transactions
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Provides a platform for companies to introduce new products or services to an audience
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Creates an online connection with customers
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Can provide unprecedented access to hard-to-reach targets
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Offers branded entertainment to an audience
9. Discover the benefits of mobile media marketing
Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric pace as many web companies recognise the huge potential in mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard websites are converted to ones can easily be accessed by mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that there websites are mobile-friendly. The mobile phone is a device on which we find all the traditional forms of advertising such as print, image and voice, wrapped into one small but widely used device. This leads the way for new and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with improved brand and marketing experiences.
Benefits of Mobile Marketing:-
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Mobile campaigns are relatively easy to create and fast to execute
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Delivery of SMS messages to mobile phones is almost guaranteed
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You can market your messages to consumer mobile devices anytime and anywhere
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Text messages or personalised content is targeted to individuals who have opted to receive them
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Encourages viral marketing with the built-in tools for forwarding of the messages to the existing social networks
10. Create an effective email marketing strategy
Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing customer base and to expand your client base significantly through permission marketing and regular targeted communications. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success. By combining technological advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future still looks bright for email marketers.
You should focus on developing a strategy that combines a highly functional website with the power of direct-to-consumer email communications. It is important to develop a close-loop strategy that incorporates careful planning, testing, execution and measurement of the success of your email marketing campaigns.
Benefits of Email Marketing:-
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Increases lead generation and cross selling
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Increases customer lifetime value
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Low cost, instantaneous channel for sending messages
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Opens up a two-way dialogue with customers and prospects
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Hypercharges your existing marketing messages
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Instant, measurable results
To conquer commercial combat, a significantly powerful Internet presence, supported by a brilliant E-Marketing Strategy, is paramount to ensuring that you remain competitive, increase revenue and magnetise your customers!
Written by: Camilla Patten of 
