If you are reading this, it’s probably because you are the “Web Marketer” for your company and are in charge of Internet Marketing Promotion. This article is to help guide you in your choices and give you an overview of your options. Below are the most common forms of Internet Marketing Promotion and lists of some of their pros and cons.

Social Media Optimization: This is when you use a website that is typically for socializing such as myspace.com. You can create several usernames and try to gather as many “friends” as possible and you expand your network of people to market directly to.

• Pros: This can be beneficial as a cheap way to gain visibility because it’s free. If done properly, you can greatly increase your overall traffic and conversions.
  

• Cons: People don’t trust marketing messages in social networks. They feel like the marketer is cheating and using a system that wasn’t provided for them so it has the potential to diminish the value of your brand.
  

Pay per Click or PPC: This is when you pay per click in advertising. The name is a self describing. There are multiple outlets to spend money in PPC which include Google, Yahoo, MSN and many others. Google also has a content network which is the Google advertising you may see on someone’s website. Google’s PPC program is called Adwords. You can sign up for both content and search network. If you are the one who displays the advertising on your website, it’s called Adsense.

• Pros: You get what you pay for. You determine the number of leads by you budget. You won’t ever spend more than 20% more than what your budget is so it’s easy to keep track of. Another Pro is it is fast. As soon as you sign up, you can start receiving leads.
  

• Cons: It’s not free. In order to develop a good campaign, you have to constantly review data and make adjustments. It can be time consuming, almost like a never ending task. Another Con is that as soon as you cut your budget, you loose your leads. It does not have any “shelf life”.
  

Search Engine Optimization: This is when your website shows up naturally in the search engine results pages for keywords your target market may use to find you.

• Pros: If you know what you are doing, it doesn’t cost anything. If you don’t, a good SEO expert can be quite expensive. SEO typically has a very high return on investment because of the amount of targeted traffic it can generate. You also have the ability to focus your website to reach your exact target market. You have a lot of control over what your website gets found for. Another pro is that search engine optimization (also known as SEO), has a very long shelf life. If done properly, SEO can last years or until you’re your site is outdated.
  

• Cons: The shelf life has diminishing returns. The less time you spend, the less return you will get. SEO also takes a long time to take effect. Sometimes it can take months to your site to begin to rank and can take even longer depending on the competitive nature of your industry. Can be costly to redesign your site if it does not have SEO capabilities or needs major work in order to get it ready to be optimized.
  

Email Marketing: This is when you deliver your marketing message via email. You can either buy or rent an email list and send communications as much as you want.

• Pros: You can target your marketing message through many demographic specifications meaning pretty close to your target market. You have full control over your marketing message and when it is delivered. The campains can be fairly effective with a 1-2% conversion rate, depending on what you consider a conversion… This could vary greatly. Another pro is that you can keep your brand in front of your target market consistently over any length of time. There are also analytics available so you can constantly refine your message and strategy and improve your effectiveness over time.
  

• Cons: People hate spam mail. Renting a list can be expensive and buying one can be even more expensive. Most of the time your marketing message ends up being deleted.
  

Blogging: this is when you attempt to control online communication about your company by creating the environment it takes place at.

• Pros: You can deliver a non-invasive message to people that want to read. It adds a bit of personality to your company and gives you the opportunity to remove the typical “faceless” corporate attitude. It also allows you to be in control of an additional referral source for your real website.
  

• Cons: They can take A LOT of time to do right. You had better get used to writing a lot because you will be spending a chunk of your day working on it. You have to consistently update your blog, and moderate it. You could spend your entire day dealing with it.
  

Spamming: This has many variations and I will go over a couple of them. This is when you put links to your website anywhere and everywhere in order to get as many people as possible to your website, regardless of relevance. This can also be very similar to the email marketing by blasting thousands of emails to people filling up their in-boxes with stuff they could careless about. It can also take on malicious forms such as hijacking and injection attacks which is when your site is hacked and filled with bad links.

• Pros: Generates traffic.

• Cons: Can get you banned from Search engines, Can discredit your brand, Can piss everyone off!
  

Viral Marketing: This is when you create something that will catch people’s attention and put it in a place that it can generate traction. If people like what you got, they will tell others and it spreads like a virus generating boat loads of traffic to your site.

• Pros: It can deliver very high volumes of traffic to your website. It can also increase people’s perception of your brand which can have a big impact on the success of your business.
  

• Cons: Very difficult to accomplish. You can spend so much time trying to create the right “hook” and fail over and over due to the number of cool things on the internet.

That is my short list of Internet Marketing Promotion avenues. This is a very rough list and I plan on writing detailed sections of each of the mediums above but wanted to create a starting point. Eventually each section above will be linked to the more detailed area. If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to send me an email at bhenry at beacontec.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.