21 Online Marketing Channels To Play
Internet marketing has grown into a powerhouse. You have so many marketing channels available to you online now that it’s difficult to keep up with them all. Some of them might be for you and others won’t be, but it’s nice to know what’s available. Here are 21 online marketing channels you can use to market your business today.
- Your blog and website – I’m assuming they’re one entity. Your blog can be on the same domain as your website, but if yours has its own domain, then that’s two channels.
- Search engine organic listings
- Article directories
- Knol pages
- HubPages
- Squidoo lenses
- Pay per click ads
- Google+
- YouTube – Video marketing has reached its time.
- Article directories
- Foursquare
- Google Places
- Bing Maps
- Groupon
- Forums
- Niche online communities
- Website and blog directories
- Mobile apps
Not all of these marketing channels will be for you, but you can certainly find a dozen or so that you can employ effectively for your business. Your first step to finding the right online marketing channels is to analyze your business and determine where your customers are. Where you’ll find your customers, that’a good place to start.
Get a consultation with a Web marketing expert today. Discover the best online marketing channels for you.
Why Pay Per Click Is Still A Good Choice
In an overly saturated Web marketing playing field, it can sometimes be a bit discouraging to know that your e-mail marketing, blog or other marketing tools are just as good as the next company’s but not a great deal better. The Web seems to be saturated with marketing messages and no matter how super duper your product and service is, if it just falls in line with the hundreds of other messages that consumers are ignoring then it can be a bit discouraging.
Pay per click advertising, however, is the sensible alternative.
With pay per click advertising, if someone ignores your message then they aren’t right for you. You don’t want to spend money talking to them anyway. But if you get a click from someone who found your ad then there’s a real high chance that the person is the right customer for you.
I’d rather spend money getting the right customer than to spend less money chasing the wrong customer, wouldn’t you?
That’s the difference between PPC and other forms of Web marketing. The right customer comes to you, but with e-mail marketing and other forms of marketing you have to reach out to them and many times you are reaching out to people who will not buy from you.
If you want to reach the right market for the right money, try pay per click advertising.
Pay Per Click Is The Bedrock Of Web Marketing
A lot can be said of organic SEO and I’ll have to admit, you can’t really run a Web business without it. The lion’s share of Web traffic, even today, comes from organic SEO. It’s a necessary component to Web success.
However, PPC is the bedrock of Web marketing. Not SEO.
Why do I say that? Because pay per click marketing is a pay now-buy now model. When you operate a successful pay per click marketing campaign you know you are getting good traffic. You know it from the results. You paid for the traffic, but you paid for traffic that responds and it happens quickly. With SEO, you could wait for months to see your results. With PPC, it’s instantaneous.
Well, almost.
Rarely will you find great PPC keywords by running an organic SEO campaign. If you did, it would take months to figure it out. But webmasters do use PPC to find new keywords for their organic SEO campaigns all the time.
Another reason I can say that PPC is the bedrock of Web marketing is because it can also be used as a basis for determining website valuation. Cost per click is an important metric that domainers use to value Web properties they are interested in. They know that if a website can command a high cost per click on a pay per click campaign then it is in a competitive niche. Niches garner that kind of competition in only one way – there’s money to be made. It’s a profitable niche.
So when you think about how you want to conduct your next marketing campaign online. Think about combining your SEO and PPC efforts. That’s how you should be doing it anyway.
A Sign Social Media Optimization Is The Future Of Marketing
When a major international political power lays off aging workers because they don’t understand social media, that’s a sign. Of course, we already knew that social media optimization was the future of Web marketing, but this kind of reinforces that message for us.
Why? Why, you might ask, is espionage social media habits a sign that this is the way of the future?
Well, here’s the way I see it. If the spy agencies rely on social media and they are doing it undercover, how much so should those of us with nothing to hide (literally and figuratively) be open to the power of this new technology?
The devil, as they say, is in the details. But social media marketing is still a new form of marketing and is virtually untapped. I see other important agencies the world over going the way of MI5 and migrating its work force to social media marketing and social media operations, including social media optimization. Social media is not just for marketers any more. It’s for all of us.