Internet Marketing Explained Part 3 - Marketing Tools For Your Online Business

So you have decided what your online business model will be. So now the question is, how are you going to get your business in front of consumers? The answer is the ever so talked about, internet marketing. The word internet marketing covers quite a bit of ground. So in this article I want to break down a few things that are all considered internet or online marketing. This is not the how-to, rather it is the what-can be done with internet marketing. Some of the things we are going to cover will work as supporting internet marketing tools, while other can function as a complete business for those who only do internet marketing like affiliate marketers for example. In part 4 of this article we will go into building traffic to your site, we will also discuss other aspects of internet marketing in parts 5, 6, 7 and 8.If you are ready to start looking at doing some internet marketing for your business you should have already done all the basic research. Your site should be up with all the basic marketing tools on them, and you will know what your target market is. Since I am going to assume that you do not have the marketing tools on there yet, I will go over a few of them as well.So what internet marketing tools are available for you to use, both on your site and as additional support. The basic ones that you should be aware of and hopefully have on your site is either a newsletter or auto-responder. This requires an opt-in form somewhere on your page that allows you to get a persons email address if nothing else. Most will ask for both a name and email since it allows you to personalize your correspondence with the user. Some other basic tools are of course your copy, images and other content that you can have on your site, but that is pretty much a given. Other tools that can be used on your website as part of internet marketing are for example auctions, coupons, membership areas and of course informational pages. Even though you are not selling the information, it can still be a very valuable tool. Another thing you can do on your site as part of your internet marketing is offer an affiliate program, which of course only works if you are selling something and you are not an affiliate marketer yourself.The next thing I want to mention as part of internet marketing is SEO. This is what makes the search engines deliver your website as a result when people do specific searches. SEO is a big part of generating traffic to you website, or should we say, it can be a big part if you do it right. SEO has two aspects that are both important and need to be done right in order for your internet marketing to be effective. The two aspects of SEO are on-site and off-site optimization. If you approach your marketing on the internet in a well thought out way, you will automatically be doing off-site optimization, but the on-site will require your direct attention, research and work. SEO does not happen over night and is an ongoing process on your behalf to make sure that your site is steadily climbing up the results on the search engines. If you do your research and understand SEO you will not need to focus specifically on it, rather it is something that is built along side your online business.Now here is a brief look at some tools that you can use that are not directly related to your website, or on your website. These are the internet marketing tools you can use in combination with your website in order to increase traffic, exposure, brand recognition and if done right you can use some of these tools to increase your turn over rate of lookers to buyers. A few marketing tool you can use are of course the obvious ones like plain advertisements. This can be PPC, PPM or banner advertisements. In addition you can use classifieds, paid registration with directories and local business registration with some of the search engines. This type of internet marketing can vary extremely in price and depending on what kind of investments you are willing to make, may be over your internet marketing budget. This form on internet marketing is extremely effective, if of course they are done right.Some other forms of internet marketing you can use are things like squeeze pages, social media marketing and email marketing. Squeeze pages are becoming very popular with internet marketers, because you can use them in several ways. This includes using them on your website and/or setting them up to work as a stand alone tool in your internet marketing campaign. A squeeze page or opt-in page as they are also known as is a fundamental tool that requires the use of either a newsletter or auto-responder. Without either of those a squeeze page is useless, because a squeeze page or opt-in page is really nothing more than a tool used to "harvest" names and email addresses of your users. This is done so that you can start utilizing email marketing and establish a relationship with your users, both those who did not buy and those who did buy. Another form of email marketing is buying an email campaign. This can be a very effective way to give your internet marketing campaign a boost. There are vendors out there that offer to do email marketing. This service is provided by companies that normally have spent years building an opt-in list of users that are interested in certain products or services. Email marketing campaigns are normally sold by millions of emails sent and have a pretty good response rate. This means that you can create an email that will be sent to several million users at a time, so if you only get a small fraction of people clicking through to your website it could potentially mean that you get several thousand users to take a look. The last part we want to briefly touch on is a phenomenon that had been up and coming over the last few years. Social media marketing has started to become an internet marketing field of it's own, with companies often spending quite a bit of the marketing funds focusing on social media marketing. Social media marketing is the term used for internet marketing done on all social networks. A social network is anything that allows users to interact, either in writing, with videos or audio, so as you can guess the term covers almost just as much ground as the them internet marketing does.All of the terms and the tools we have covered in this part are extremely valuable tools. Even though this list is not complete and does not cover all of the tools available for internet marketers, an internet marketing campaign will consist of a combination of these tools. There are several variations that you can use in order to maximize your marketing efforts and I suggest that you educate yourself about how these tools can be used effectively. Once you learn how to use these internet marketing tools in an effective way, you could be the next internet success story.