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What Is Internet Marketing

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Definition of Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is also referred to as online marketing. Internet marketing refers to advertising and marketing efforts as a process of promoting a brand, products or services over the Internet. Internet marketing is very broad in scope referring generally to promotional activities that are done via a digital medium or “online”. Internet marketing strategies are typically used in conjunction with traditional types of advertising such as radio, television, billboards, networking, newspapers and magazines. Internet marketing added complexity in consumer engagement moving away from a linear marketing approach with one-way brand communication to consumers to a newer non-linear marketing strategy referred to as Omni-channel. Omni-channel marketing moves beyond one-to-one information exchange to one-to-many or one-to-community information sharing.

internet marketingAn example of omni-channel internet marketing can be applied to a professional services vertical like legal. Legal consumers often research their legal options online well before contacting a law firm. These legal consumers are increasingly using the Internet to research into laws, legal resources, legal aid, and do-it-yourself options before researching the types of law firms that can help them. Once they understand their need is best served by hiring a law firm, these consumers then look up law firm rating and reviews, seek legal information from their social networks, compare local legal options, and search for law firms near them.

The Different Channels of Internet Marketing

Effective Internet marketing commonly deploys multiple channels to reach the most audience as possible. The objective is to place your brand and value proposition in front of many potential clients in the places where people spend their time online. There are multiple online marketing channels available in the legal space namely;

  • Display Advertising – Online Display Advertisement highlights promotional messages, value propositions, or ideas to the legal consumer on the Internet. Display advertising can be found on a wide range of digital properties like advertising blogs, interstitial ads, legal directories, and ads on the search engines.
  • Email Marketing – While email marketing in comparison to other forms of digital marketing is inexpensive, this channel of communication may be perceived by recipients to be intrusive and irritating especially to new or potential customers. This is an older channel for digital marketing.
  • Search Engine Marketing – also known as “pay-per-click” or PPC. This channel primarily focuses on text ads displayed along side relevant organic content. PPC can also include visual display, click to call, mobile ads, and local ad display within maps. When used in combination with social media and organic optimization, paid search can deliver effective results.
  • Social Media Marketing – social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, etc.) are closed ecosystems, users must proactively join and the information is usually only viewable when users are signed into one of these social networks. Users typically provide the content that makes the channel what it is. One example is Pinterest, which is an image channel known for food and fashion. People “PIN” (add) pictures of their favorite food or recipe and share it with others. The more content a user ads, the more engagement they drive to their page. Facebook and Twitter are prominent in the legal space. The ability to effectively create a user profile for paid promotional targeting is the primary reason social media is valuable.
  • Search Engine Optimization – also known as SEO is a method of optimizing content (text, images, voice) to improve relevance for search engines with the objective of having that content display more frequently and prominently is search engine results pages. Since SEO is process of refinement over time and the results do not require payment to a search engine, search engine optimization is considered free or “organic”. SEO is not free, the best SEO companies and services often bill thousands of dollars per month or more to firms that engage with their services to increase performance. The primary benefit of SEO is that each action (click) is not billable by the search engines, so once a web page is fully optimized, it can drive value for an extended time for no cost.
  • Press Releases – PR, or press release is a content marketing method of communication directed at members of the news media for the purpose of announcing something considerably newsworthy. A press release is typically written and delivered electronically via email, but can also be done as a video release.
  • Video Advertising – digital video is an increasingly popular medium for online marketing. The format is widely used in social media as well as stand-alone channels like YouTube because video is readily available to be shared by the viewers, adding to the attractiveness of this platform. Video can be a highly engaging format for brands, however the quality of the video and the style of the message are critical for success as this type of advertising is considered disruptive to normal viewership. Video advertising that has entertainment value is more likely to be shared, as pleasure is the strongest motivator to share videos.

The most successful online businesses use as many channels as possible to reach out to potential clients and customers. It is increasingly important that your business reach consumers where they are most often online, and Omni-channel marketing offers this opportunity, as it’s “always on, everywhere”. Businesses that seek this long term communication relationship by using multiple channels and using promotional strategies related to their target consumer as well as word-of mouth marketing are the one that will grow their presence and revenues.

The Digital Ecosystem

Without proactive Internet marketing, a website is not much more than a digital billboard in a desert. In today’s digital ecosystem, a website acts as a conversion platform, a place where you send your audience to view your value proposition and engage with your brand. By itself, a website is nothing more than passive marketing. In legal online marketing, a firm’s website acts as a validation of legal credentials and a list of potential legal services offered with multiple ways to communicate with the firm (via email, phone, chat, and social media). To reach the maximum audience, proactive marketing channels need to be used to drive traffic to the website.

digital-ecosystem

In the digital ecosystem audience acquisition can come from paid and organic channels in content marketing, premium publishers, social media, and traditional marketing. Content marketing examples include articles, press releases, or blogs posts. Premium publishers in the legal space include directories like FindLaw, Super Lawyers, AVVO, and state bar associations. Local includes chamber of commerce, better business bureau, local city and county bar associations. Social includes posts in Facebook, Tweets in Twitter, and paid social advertising. Paid includes PPC text and display ads, and inclusion in content networks. Traditional includes networking events, speaking engagements, radio, T.V., magazines and newspapers. Technical includes SEO, code platforms, https, semantic markup, and conversion rate optimization and page speed enhancements. The acquisition channels may vary, but the impact is measurable with website analytics.

While there are many ways to increase traffic to your website, the two principal ways to acquire and drive potential consumers to the website is with paid promotions or organic marketing. Both of these channels require investment of time, effort, and money, however organic traffic is more commonly viewed as a source for long term sustainable growth. In business verticals that are highly transactional in nature, paid search marketing is one of the best ways to ramp up business success online.

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Understanding The Internet

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Understanding the Internet

Paraphrasing the definition of the Internet; “The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

google-panda_google-penguinThere are two principal naming conventions on the Internet, the Internet Protocol Address (IP address) and the Domain Name System (DNS). The IP address links networks much like a phone number can reach another phone number. An IP address even looks like a phone number, for example; 69.167.6.95 is an IP address for a virtual private network. Domain names are designed for use by people to easily remember the “address” of an IP. In the example listed above, the domain name for the IP address is vyprvpn.com. Most web browsers display the uniform resource locator (URL) of a web page above the page in an address bar. URIs symbolically identifies the address of a web server or database. The URL is commonly referred to as the domain name of a website. A typical URL could look like (http://www.example.com/index.html), which indicates a protocol (http), a server hostname (www.example.com), and a web page or file name (index.html).

Internet Defined

Many people use the terms “Internet” and “World Wide Web” interchangeably, but the two terms are not synonymous. It is common for people to say they are “online” or use “the Internet” when they are actually using a web browser to view a website, which is a collection of web pages. The Internet is a global set of web pages, documents, images, computer data, including graphics, sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) or domain names.

With the advent of software tools readily available, publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial expense and many free services are also available. Most professional businesses require a web presence to succeed today. Publishing and maintaining large, professional websites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date information is remains a difficult and expensive proposition. With the high frequency of changes to search engines, the advent of mobile devices and the numerous code bases in use today, the most successful legal websites require daily updating and maintenance.

The Internet Is Bigger Than Google

Google as a search engine is at its base level nothing more than a database of people, places and things. In this digital space, the common technical term for people, places, and things is entities. Google is an entity library that currently uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide the best user experience. Even with the best design, the best graphics and the best content on a website, without pro-active Internet marketing, a website by itself is nothing more than a “book” on a shelf. If you think of a website as a “book” within the Google library, the objective of internet marketing is to move the “book” onto the best sellers list for that particular category. The website and the domain have no value until the site attracts an audience. Domain value increases as audience and authority grows over time. This is where Internet marketing comes into play.

Search Marketing Saturation

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Is Internet Marketing a Saturated Niche?

When you make the decision to try your hand at Internet marketing, the first idea may be to create an Internet marketing product!  This is common among newbie ‘net marketers, because they know they buy marketing info products, so others will, too.

Is it true that the Internet marketing niche is already too saturated?  In a way, yes.  Bu if you can create a unique slant on an old idea, then you can definitely prosper just as well as the others who dropped anchor in this niche years ago.

The World Wide Web is always changing, and new things are being created that give you an opportunity to break out onto the Internet marketing scene with a unique product that sells well despite the number of competitors in that niche.

You may also want to consider staying away from the Internet marketing niche and paving a path in another niche, such as dog care, parenting, or financial advice.  As long as there is traffic and interest, then a niche can be profitable.

What often happens is that the newbie ‘net marketer has a specialty in an area outside of Internet marketing, and once the launch a highly successful information product on it, they write a “tell-all” eBook showing other Internet marketers how to do what they did.

There’s really no way for a niche to become fully saturated.  As long as there is continued interest, there’s always a way to come up with a new slant for an old idea.  Print publications do this all the time.  Whenever a writer submits a story to a magazine, they have to take an old idea and convince an editor they can write about it in a fresh manner.

Many Internet marketers routinely try to convince others that their niche is, indeed saturated.  Why would they do this?  It’s because they don’t want the competition from you.

To determine if a niche is truly saturated, or better yet, if you have a shot at success, visit third party product sites such as ClickBank and see how many products are available for the idea you have as an Internet marketer.

If you see twenty eBooks on affiliate marketing, ask yourself, “Could I come up with a unique slant or a better way of doing things?”  Sometimes all it takes is having verifiable proof of your own success to position you as an expert in a particular niche.  It can’t hurt to give it a try – and you may find that you edge out all of your competitors for the sheer fact that the consumers want someone new to take the reins and spoon-feed them their information.

How to make your website meaningful to your visitors

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Keeping your website fresh and relevant to your visitors means more business for you. Check out these simple guidelines to help you make your website copy better.

1. Entice visitors. With an enticing headline on every page, make sure that the information is useful for your visitors. Will your content add value or offer a unique selling proposition? If not, consider using a website copywriter to strengthen your business message.

2. Hold your visitors’ attention. A good goal is to keep the visitor on your website for at least a few minutes so that they can read three or four of your main website pages. Informative and enticing website copy needs to be written to appeal to your target audience. Copy needs to be interesting, compelling and persuasive and you need strong calls to action on your website pages so that your visitors can easily contact you.

3. Keep them coming back. The majority of website visitors will compare your service and products to your competitors or take some time to consider their purchase before making a decision. Not all of your visitors will take action the first time they visit your website. Make sure that your website has enough compelling, informative and interesting content to make visitors return.