Internet Marketing Works Wonders For Your Small Business

When most people think about internet marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is one of the thousands of businesses on the internet that promise to make you a millionaire in the next thirty days or one of the many Multilevel Marketing companies that seem to crop up every month. But the make money at home network marketing niche is a very small percentage of the marketing that goes on online.

It seems that in today’s digital age everyone has a website. From the mom and pop storefront business to large corporations, if you don’t have a website that drives people to your business, you are leaving money on the table; whether it sells products online or simply advertises your store.

Print advertising seems to be taking a back seat to the internet marketing. Case in point, my mother, who is 68 years old, no longer consults the yellow pages. When she is looking for a product or service, the first thing she does is type in what she wants into the Google search bar. So for people like her, if you are not online, you probably won’t get her business.
 
But it’s not enough to just have a website. Cyberspace is a huge vacuum filled with millions of websites and web pages. So, just putting a website up and expecting people to find it is kind of like putting your business on a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific ocean. You know it’s there, but nobody else does. And no matter how great your product or service is, if no one can find it, no one can buy it.

The key to getting found on the internet is internet marketing. Simply put internet marketing is marketing your product or service using the internet. Large firms with seemingly unlimited advertising budgets can pay marketing firms to craft effective internet marketing campaigns.

But if you have a small or nonexistent advertising budget, it is not difficult to build your own campaign.

Keep in mind that on or off the internet, money makes the world go round. You can drive traffic to your website very quickly if you are willing and able to pay for it. But if you prefer free methods, it will take a little more of your time. In the long run though, I believe the old adage that “time is money”.

If you have an advertising budget you can pay companies to send targeted traffic to your website. By targeted traffic I mean people that have expressed and interest in a product or service like yours. You can also advertise on Google, Yahoo, MSN and any number of smaller search engines using pay-per-click advertising. Be warned that this is a strategy that you may want to get some training on before you jump in, because you can lose a lot of money if you don’t know what you are doing. There are also services that will do search engine optimization for you for a nominal fee.

For those of us who have a minimal advertising budget, there are free and low cost methods of marketing your business online. You can utilize free classifieds such as US Free Ads, Craig list or even Back page. if you have a flair for writing, you can write and submit articles and press releases relating to your product or service. There are any number of social platforms that you can utilize to drive traffic to your website, like Squidoo and Hub pages. If you can’t write go a Google search for a ghostwriter and have someone write your content for you.

There are any number of ways to advertise your business on the internet. You just have to learn how to dip your ladle into the internet soup and get your share of the billions of people looking for things on the internet. Learning internet marketing can put you on the fast track to success.