What Is Internet Marketing Anyway?

Internet marketing uses a combination of methods to sell items in the global marketplace through the power of the World Wide Web. While the most common method is through an attractive website that ranks high on the first page of results from popular search engines, internet marketing strategies have expanded into other areas in the cyber world including social media sites and smart phone applications. Because the global marketplace continues to grow at a rapid pace, the modern business model can't ignore the advantages of internet marketing.

Search Engines
Most internet users rely on powerful search engines to retrieve relevant information from the internet. Usually, they will make a choice from the first few selections on the initial page of the search results and look no further. If an internet marketing plan can ensure that a website is listed on the first page of Google, it is almost guaranteed to sell a product. Many people use a technique called Search Engine Optimization in an attempt to rank high with the search engines. This free, internet marketing method uses keywords that internet surfers frequently search on for prominent placement on a result page. Another way to rank high is to pay a fee to a specific search engine to become a preferred site for a list of keywords. This can ensure that you are near the top of the page on relevant searches.

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing involves compensating others to provide internet marketing services for a product. In return for promoting the product, the affiliate marketer receives a commission if a purchase is made from their site. They will use a variety of search engine optimization techniques, blogging, emails, social networking, forum campaigns, and anything else that they can think of to sell an item or a service. These motivated individuals usually know all of the most effective, cutting-edge internet marketing strategies. To start an affiliate marketing program, a company can contract with a third party or start their own program from their main website.

Social Networking Sites
This is one of the most effective ways to use internet marketing to date. Many internet users are virtually addicted to MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and large corporations are taking full advantage of this fact. On almost every corporate website, icons for all three of the major social networking sites are displayed in a prominent location. While social networking members are busy meeting people from around the world, they are also exposed to advertisements and offers from the ever-growing global marketplace. One of the fastest growing online occupations is the social networking marketer. Companies hire these experts to leverage the power of social networking sites in addition to creating specialized blogs with frequent updates.

The New Yahoo and Online Success

Today an article in the Business section talked about the new Yahoo. In order to close the gap between Yahoo search and Google, Yahoo has been seeking a parnership with Microsoft. Essentially, Microsoft will handle the hardware and software for Yahoo while Yahoo focuses on the "front end" experience.

What is going to be so different about Yahoo's new front end experience? Well over the next 15 months Yahoo is launching a global branding campaign that will highlight the best elements. However, if you are a regular reader of this blog, then you know we can give you some insights into it before the traditional media catches up.

Yahoo is known for its search, email, instant messanging, and other popular applications. What thay are doing is comes from a multidisciplined appraoch to keep surfers and searchers on thier network as long as possible. In other words, they want to increase stickiness.

What they've done is hire a team of social scientists of different fields to work with their computer scientists to improve their search features. So soon you will see the top ten results as would now but with some changes. You will see content networks like CNN, Discovery Channel, etc. displayed on the left side of your search results that have links to content related to your query.

This is huge for online success. Recently, we have been seeing greater ROI on campaigns that do both paid search and display advertising. In the next 15 months Yahoo is going to be promoting content display networks even more heavily. Thus, this proven combination is taking over the world of Internet Marketing.

What can you do to take advantage of this? You need to start advertising now to beat your competition to the top positions. As we know the longer you've been advetising online, the better positioning you earn as a reward for your loyalty with the Search Engines. Also, as this starts to roll out prices are going to be lower for display. But in a short time competition will drive the prices up making it harder to get started.

As the world leader in Online Marketing we at WSI recommend you to not procrastinate on this opportunity. We advise a proactive approach in integrating this strategy into your current marketing efforts so that you get in on the ground floor. Contact us today and let us show you how this is the best time to to take on this great opportunity.

It's Pay-Per-Click, Not Paper Clip!

Just getting the name right can be hard, not to mention running a successful campaign for your business. Many small business advertisers, with their DIY modus operandi, believe they can drive traffic to their website with an inefficient budget of $50 bidding on one or two keywords. During my time as an Internet Consultant I've met many of these guys who complain," Why don't I ever see my ads and how come I never see any traffic from them?"

The answer is that they are not properly using the Three Core Elements of a Paid Search Campaign.

1. Keyword Research
2. Keyword Bidding Strategy
3. Text Ad Creation

These elements are critical to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) success. Let's breifly review each one. If you would like to learn them in more detail, contact us at www.wsimagicweb.com to reach our expert Internet Consultants.

Step 1: Keyword Research

If you are considering managing your own campaign, take the time to extensively research the search terms that would be best for your business. Free tools such as WordTracker help you to find keywords that are popular but not competitive, A.K.A. keywords with a high KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index).

Another tool called SEMRush allows you to see what keywords your competition is bidding on and for how much! Finding keywords with high KEI is great, but you also need to be found where your competition is, so you can compete with them directly. Combining the data and advertising on all the keywords you've found from both tools will start to get you ahead of the game.

Are you starting to see why a DIY campaign of two keywords and an inefficient budget does not work?

Step 2: Keyword Bidding Strategy

Manually managed PPC campaigns have a simple but time consuming keyword bidding strategy.

• Keyword research
• Bid on new keywords
• Outbid competition

In the mind of the DIY advertiser," I will do my keyword research when I have time away from running my business, then bid on my new and current keywords when I have the time and the budget to implement it." Well, that's not good enough. Keyword research results change all the time as behaviors of Searchers and their search patterns are constantly in flux. Your average, busy business owner/ manager will be constantly behind the competition.

However, they can fix this problem by hiring a salaried employee to do it, or they can go the economical route and hire a professional Internet Consultant. WSI Internet Consultants have simplified PPC marketing for you. We do not charge an hourly rate, making it less expensive than hiring a person to work in-house.

WSI PPC keyword bidding strategy is different, because we

• Do the Keyword Research for you daily.
• Bid on hundreds of related keywords for you daily.
• Combine expert professionals with intelligent technology to keep your campaign optimized daily.
• Are managing thousands of campaigns for local businesses like yours.
• Are partners with all the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, AOL, etc.).

Watch a brief video of our PPC strategy on YouTube. You only need to pay a small management fee plus your ad spend, we will take care of the rest.

Step 3: Text Ad Creation

First of all there are rules. Google, Yahoo and the other major Search Engines have rules about what can and cannot be displayed in the text ads. Exclamations are right out. Offer lines are only so many characters long which count spaces and punctuation. Another is that you cannot say you are the "best" if it cannot be verified by a reputable third party. Copyrighted terms like brand names may need special permissions from the copyright holders.

Second, your ads need to be compelling. Try to stand out from your competition with an engaging offer and use strong calls-to-action. "10% off" or "call us today for a special discount" are statements that will grab traffic in the buying phase of the online purchasing cycle. Be sure your ad links directly to the page on your website with the stated offer/ coupon.

Third, you should be AB testing your text ads. That's right, you should have two or more text ads running to learn which offers are more effective for which keywords. You may have to run multiple campaigns to do this. This entails doing keyword research and bidding for each campaign for each Search Engine on which you are advertising.

Does this seem like a lot of work?

Unless you are a business owner with lots of time on your hands, this is too much work. Even your Webmaster does not have this kind of time, because he's busy building websites. Your WSI Internet Consultant will make Pay-Per-Click marketing easy and profitable for you.

We do not need to make changes to your website which means no messy code work for you. We recommend an efficient budget appropriate for your business. We manage your campaign with our expert professionals and our intelligent proprietary software (nobody else can do this). We exclusively optimize and report on your campaigns daily for free! You will always know what your campaign is doing and what your Return on Investment is, which is something the DIY advertiser cannot do themselves.

Call 1-866-690-4249 today or contact us through our Website to speak with a WSI Internet Consultant about starting a successful Pay-Per-Click Marketing campaign.