What is Online Marketing? –The Strategy to Revolutionize Offline Marketing.

According to research, more than half of the dollars spent in US retail will be influenced by the web.

And how else will people know that these things exist on the web in the first place?

By doing something called Online Marketing of course!

Though the basic idea of marketing is to get your message across to as many people as you can, how we do it online is way different than traditional offline marketing.

To get a better understanding of this, let’s have a look at…

 

What is Online Marketing?

Better known as Internet Marketing, Online Marketing is as its name implies, is the practice of getting your message to people by the use of the internet.

For example, in the offline World we may use door-to-door marketing but online, you can just send a message to people on Facebook.

Basically any parts of the internet can be used to market something, even emails!

Instead of sending mails one-by-one, using an auto responder (A bulk email platform) can help you blast emails to thousands of people more professionally!

Take a look at this…

I’m sure anyone has received email newsletters from their favourite restaurants or gym or just about any place that they have ever given their emails to.

Believe it or not, these promotions work nicely in attracting people to come back to your business which is another benefit for email marketing which also leads back to online marketing.

 

Benefits of Online Marketing

You might be asking yourself, should I have a go at Online Marketing?

I was thinking about that myself as I am not a person who likes to socialize but for the sake of business, we just have to… except that we won’t be actually be meeting our prospects face-to face.

We just have to socialize online!

Here are some cool benefits to help give you the push you need if you’re still having doubts of its usefulness…

• Global reach – Compared to offline marketing which you can only promote to people living in the same area as you, doing promotions on the internet will give your business a greater international reach because your market are actually people who are using the internet.
• Save time- You don’t even need to go outside your house and move from place to place to market your product. Instead, you can let your message be heard to as many people as you can with a simple click of a button.
• Save cost – Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars on billboards and banners, you could reduce that cost to a mere hundreds for a greater reach.
• Easier to inform updates – have a slight change you want to make or any additions you may want to add? You surely can’t do that after you spent money printing your banners and brochures! But online, you can change any information with a simple click of a button.
• Room for improvement – How would you know if you can get a greater reach if you implement campaign A instead of campaign B? In Online Marketing, we have something called split-testing whereby you could start 2 different campaigns (Which you can track) promoting the same thing and after that, discover which methods are people reacting more to. This is perhaps one of the most powerful benefits you can get because offline, you would have to meet people one by one in order to get feedback.

 

Is Online Marketing Better than Offline Marketing?

In some cases, yes.

People don’t promote wholly on offline methods anymore, they rely on both and in most cases, some promote on the internet alone.

This is because the cost to promote offline with billboards and banners are much more expensive compared to promoting online which have just as much reach as offline, but at a cheaper cost.

For example, last month in January 2015, I was planning an event for eSports Malaysia.

We were promoting with banners and brochures but we only managed to get around 200 likes on Facebook.

But after that, we decided to apply Online Marketing as well, this is what happened…

We managed to get over 3,000 likes in JUST 4 days!

We didn’t do any aggressive marketing and certainly no billboards because that would cost more than $100,000 so we opted for Online Marketing.

To our surprise, media came pouring from nowhere!

We had NO idea as to where the media came from because we only approached 2 channels and used the internet to promote the entire event.

But on the event day itself, we had around 50 media channels coming over and asking our permission to have an interview session which was really amazing!

Most of them were Malaysian media channels such as Astro Awani but there were also several international representatives from Bloomberg and CNN which really made my day.

 

What are the 7 Most Favoured Methods of Online Marketing?

Now that we know just how powerful doing Online Marketing can be, you’re probably wondering just how exactly can you start implementing it in the first place, correct?

Lucky you, there are plenty of methods of which people promote their businesses online because it is after all, the internet.

But I’m going to save your time and show you the 5 most favourable methods of Online Marketing used for today…

Method #1 – Creating a blog

A lot of people want a blog to build popularity, to promote their business, to build your image and of course, to earn some money.

But don’t get confused between a blog and a website because they are both practically the same thing.

The reason why people call it a blog is because the idea was initially to produce regular blog posts which corporate companies do not like.

But since many people are preferring to read blogs rather than boring ole corporate websites which only aims to sell, many websites are considering to add a “blog” section to attract more readers.

Did you know that many people prefer buying from a website after reading a blog?

Nowadays people don’t just get excited as 10 years ago if a company doesn’t have a website, they now ‘expect’ businesses to have a website or blog so that they can Google it first.

So whatever business you are promoting, having a blog is important to increase sales and create an impact on readers.

Wanting to create a website of your own?

It’s actually easy! Here’s a quick video on how to do that in less than 30 seconds…

 Method #2 – Email marketing

Did you know that emails give you a higher ROI compared to other channels?

A lot of people check their emails every day, even me.

Using emails for marketing is a very powerful tool that every business should have.

In fact, did you know that Internet marketers can make money with just a blog and email marketing?

Most blogs have opt-in pages where you need to fill in your email to get the newsletters and that is how you can promote your offer by marketing.

Blogs are great to target your offer but emails are better to bring people to your offer.

Together, these two work wonders.

 Method #3 Search Engine optimization

Better known as SEO, this is by far the cheapest way to promote your business.

If you don’t know what SEO is about, it is basically the practice of getting to your website and its pages and posts on the first page of Google.

You might be wondering as to why getting your site up there is important and this is when I bore you with more statistics – Did you know that 60% of ALL organic clicks go to the top 3 sites that appear in Google search?

That is basically FREE traffic (Fancy name for website visitors) without you ever needing to pay for those people to come and who doesn’t want that!

Take a look at this…

Although I have not delved into Email Marketing yet, how my blog gives me business is by getting it on the first page of Google.

If you’re interested in starting a viable business stream online, I would recommend you to check out Wealthy Affiliate’s online business course here.

 Method #4 – Facebook ads

Really who doesn’t know FB?

According a study made by Social Bakers, 92% of marketers advertisers prefer to use Facebook compared to other social Medias out there.

This is because Facebook is the biggest social media out there with over 1.3 billion users, much more than Twitter or Pinterest.

People tend to spend more time on Facebook because it is so engaging and where I come from in Malaysia, we get into traffic jams which lasts about 3-4 hours each weekday which can only mean one thing – more Facebook!

I personally only use Facebook ads for all my events instead of Twitter as I find it more effective with higher reach from users.

 Method # 5 – Pay Per Clicks (PPC)

If you searched for something on a website, have you noticed that the first few links on top are ads?

PPC is a shortcut for you to get your website on top so that more people will click on it.

If you’re wondering how search engines like Google and Bing earns money, well now you know, because people pay to get their sites up there.

Don’t get confused between PPC and SEO though, because SEO is getting your blog up on the first page of Google the hard and legitimate way.

However most people want extra traffic and do not want to waste time doing boring old SEO so because of that, they opt to cheat their way to get their sites up there.

PPC works just as well as SEO but the only huge difference is that you have to pay for every click that you get which is why they call it Pay Per Click.

 

Final Thoughts

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The World of Online Marketing is vast and there are plenty of ways to get you the traffic you need.

To get the most of it, a blog should always be your first step because once you have that, you can drive traffic through whatever means you prefer be it Facebook ads, PPC or even SEO as that will boost any businesses you may have in a jiffy!

If you’re interested in learning more on how to build a viable business online, check out my #1 recommended program here.

Thanks for reading, don’t be afraid to share your thoughts below as I’ll be more than happy to reply 🙂 .