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What You Need to Know About Internet Marketing

Your business now has an online presence. How do you drive more traffic your way? How do you go about the web of Internet marketing? What are the options and how do you find the right one for your business?

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are essentially organized groups of businesses that create ads to appear on websites of complimentary businesses. For each click generated for abc.com from xyz.com, ABC Company might pay four cents and XYZ Company might be paid three cents. The remaining penny is given to the affiliate program managers.

The benefit of affiliate programs is the low cost. Clicks are usually only a few cents each, so they don’t make severe cuts into profits. Look for an affiliate program that offers bidding on keywords so you can choose how much you’re willing to pay for each click based on a specific keyword. Some also offer budgeting tools so you can set a budget cap daily, weekly, or monthly.

Email Marketing

Land-based businesses send direct mailers to their potential customers. Online businesses can send email marketing mailers. To create an effective email marketing campaign, follow these quick tips:

• Address recipients by name
• Write the email in a professional tone – avoid $$$, WOW! and other terms you wouldn’t use in an email to the president of a company
• Don’t waste time sending solicitations during the holidays
• Call your customers to action. They need a reason to visit your site right now. Why do they need your product or service immediately?
• Make sure your email marketing campaign design flows with your corporate design and website.

E-Newsletter Marketing

Offer a free weekly or monthly e-newsletter. Fill it with interesting facts about your industry and related businesses. If you are a real estate agent, include articles about recent changes in property taxes and increased prices for water taps. Add an invitation to an upcoming open house.

Offer freebies to customers who read your newsletter. Add a link to a sweepstakes page in your newsletter, encouraging readers to visit your website and enter to win something for free. Consider a book on the industry or something else of value.

You can also include reader questions and a call for more questions. Anytime a user contacts you is another chance at a sell.

Find a template you like and use it consistently. Familiarity with your newsletter will help your users look forward to receiving your emails because they won’t have to search for what they want. They’ll know exactly where you place the comic and where your tip-of-the-week will be.

Post Articles on your Website

The more information – and the greater variety – you have on your business website, the more it will be crawled by search engines. And the more it’s crawled, the higher up your relevancy will go. That means your site will work its way up search results, without additional cost (like pay-per-click programs.)

Either hire a writer who is savvy to the SEO (search engine optimization) rules and has experience writing keyword inclusion articles or look for SEO articles available for purchase. The more original the content, the better it will score with the search engines. If you don’t want to hire a writer, look for content available for full-rights purchase. Full rights, or exclusive rights, guarantee the content will be yours alone.

Search Engine Submission

Besides having your site crawled whenever they feel like it, you can submit your website to search engines for priority crawling. Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and most of the hundreds of little-known search engines offer search engine submissions. This takes just a minute or two and should be done every time you add new content.

Other Internet marketing options include hosting online events and promotions, adding blogs and forums for user comments, and swapping links with other businesses. There are a multitude of Internet marketing options available depending on your budget and scope of campaign.