Learn the basics of Internet Marketing

Online/Digital/Internet Marketing is marketing/advertising a product, concept or kind on  different platforms available in the exorbitant world of internet. Yes, that’s what online marketing is in simple lay man language. It is also referred as ‘e-marketing’. Sending E-Mails, Advertising, using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter come under e-marketing. The most widely used methods of online marketing are promotional ads. Such methods require an advertiser and publisher. The advertisers pay the publishers to post their ads on their websites, portals, directories etc. Being the most widely used method of online marketing, it is the most expensive method as well. Other methods that involve no investments include social media marketing and search engine optimization. People with a good knowledge of social media and search engines can market their websites online by doing some hard work.
Online marketing is the future. With every thing being digitalized, online marketing would be required for every product. When someone launches a business, the person appoints an ad agency to manage his ad campaigns for his budget. In a similar way, people who enter the digital network appoint online ad agencies who work for them and make their presence felt on the internet.  Image banners, textual ads, audio/video ads, email ads etc, are the implementations of online marketing.

Why is online marketing done?

Online Marketing is done to increase sales and business and making one’s presence felt on the internet. It helps the organization which maybe a website or a company to increase viewability, traffic and most importantly fetching more business opportunities and conversions in terms of remunerations.
It’s well understood that more customers imply more sales. In a similar way, more traffic to a website implies more income.

What are it’s sub-categories?

Online Marketing is itself a BIG arena wherein the marketer gets to promote his/her product through various platforms available. Online Marketing consists of:
Affiliate Marketing(AM) : Earning as affiliate agents. The publishers sell the products of advertisers and get to earn a good commission for every sale. Websites like ClickBank offer such programs where the publishers earn as high as 100$ per sale. Thus, in the end, the advertisers get their work done through the publishers.
Pay Per Click Marketing(PPC): Advertisers submit their ads, publishers post them on their websites. The advertisers pay their publishers for every UNIQUE click that they get on their ads. Thus, the publishers with a large traffic on their websites earn more through PPC.
Social Media Marketing(SMM): One of the most user-friendly methods of online marketing. Social Media marketing can be done by any individual who loves being on Social Media. Every new business should begin it’s advertising campaign through social media. Marketing on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Intagram etc is worth the effort. 50% of the traffic that howtoruleonline get’s is through Social Media.
Search Engine Optimization(SEO): Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the most ‘Organic’ ways to get traffic on your website. SEO experts optimize their websites for search engines like Google and Bing. SEO can bring you some good traffic. By good, I mean something HUGE!

The Roots of Online Marketing

Yahoo started marketing through their website first followed by Google in the year 2000 and today google earns 95% of it’s revenue from the latter.
The World Wide Web was the topic on which the first website was dedicated to information about and that went live on August 6, 1991.
The first banner ad ever was ran by Joe McCambley on October 1994 on HotWired.com and it promoted 7 art museums, sponsored by AT&T.
The first movie marketed online was ‘Blair Witch’, released in 1999 and grossed $250 Million. BlairWitch.com has more than 10 Million Page Views.

Some more facts:

Symbolics.com was the first domain name ever registered on March 15, 1985.

 The traffic on the internet whooped from 16 million to 2 billion between 1995 and 2010.

Ray Tomlinson was the man who sent an email to himself in 1971. “Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar,” he said.

Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the WWW)uploaded the first picture on the web posted on behalf of a comedy band called Les Horrible Cernettes.

Jack Dorsey the co-founder of Twitter wrote the first tweet on March 21, 2006.

‘Tere, kas sa kuuled mind?’ or “Hello, can you hear me?” in English, was the first sentence spoken on Skype.

Youtube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded the first YouTube video of the San Diego Zoo on April 23, 2005 and it has been watched nearly 10 million times.

Yahoo and Amazon were launched in mid 1990s, Google in 1998 and in 2004 Social Media boomed!

How to Give it a start?

Social Media: One can make use of Social Media platforms, namely Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Myspace and even Flickr. These websites have billions of users in total and may make you reach some of them.

Viral Marketing: Come up with something worth sharing. Something that may force someone to share. It can be a viral video(Like the Harlem Shake), or a viral tagline, competition etc. We call this ‘The word of mouse(mouth) ‘

Ads: If you have a good budget, using Google Adsense is one of the best methods to generate traffic on your Website.

Old is Gold: Marketing through Bulk-mails still remains the most used and effective method of internet marketing, provided the necessary precautions are taken.

Past V/S Future

Now, I’ll use ‘>’ to denote ‘Easier’

Having A Website >> Physical Office:
Having a website is anyday better that having a physical office. The latter incurs cost and involves more complicated procedures and formalities.
Online Adversiting >> Traditional Advertising:
Online Advertising is cheap and fresh. The results are seen fast. It can be done on a number of platforms and in a number of ways.
Web Analytics >>>> Surveys, Polls and Market Research:
Search Engines like Google provide some really good tools like Google Analytics, WebMasters, etc to enable the publishers to analyse their ad campaigns. This is FAR better than the traditioanl physical survey polls.
Sending E-Mails >>> Postal Mails:
Sending Emails is undoubtedly better than sending postal mails. It incurs no cost, is very fast and enables us to exchange different type of files online.

The biggest De-Merit of Online Marketing?

Rumours and Customer Dissatisfaction spreads quickly. The internet might help you marketing your website or your product, but it might also take things in the negative direction if given a negative push. So, think of marketing your product online if and only if you feel confident about your product or content.