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Mar 25

Internet marketing, adhering to its name, refers to advertising, promoting or selling your product/ services through the internet. Internet marketing involves usage of web sites and e-mails for all promotional communications. It includes search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, blogs, e-mail marketing and more.

Thus, successful internet marketing would mean increased traffic and return of investment (ROI) on your website. Strategically planned internet marketing ideally involves good search engine and social media optimization.

Benefits of Internet Marketing

  • Overcomes geographical limitations: Internet knows no boundaries; your product/service is available to all, increasing the number of potential customers across the world.
  • 24 X 7: Your website is available at any given time; this flexibility in time increases its accessibility as compared to a normal store.
  • Usage of different advertising media: You can integrate audio, video, blogs and make advertising more interactive unlike in print or television/radio.
  • Cost effective: Web services being the only requirement, internet marketing becomes more cost-effective; you save on travel and other advertising gimmicks like trade fairs, hoardings etc.
  • Complete display of information: No constraint of time and space allows you to display robust and diverse information.
  • Greater return on investment (ROI): A search engine/social media optimized website attracts huge prospective customers increasing the traffic and eventually accrue conversions. This builds up the return on investment, making Internet Marketing a lucrative choice.
  • Attracts wider audience: Internet marketing attracts a range of audience who demand diversified services from your website. These services not only include buying of product but also information for research, job search, new business leads, capital investment plans etc.

Different types of Internet Marketing

As the new age marketing tool, Internet Marketing is a cheaper way of publicity even for small scale industries. Some internet marketing methods are-

  • Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Marketing (SEM) includes managing pay per click campaigns and banner ads by increasing the web page ranking and optimizing the website content to make it crawler friendly.
  • Pay-per-Click Advertising: In pay per click (PPC), the advertiser pays some amount to the search engine for his ad to be displayed if a keyword related to his business is searched for. These clicks and eventual transactions become the revenue earners.
  • Social Media Marketing: A new method of internet marketing; it allows you to use various social networks like Facebook and MySpace for all promotional activities. This informal approach has a wider reach providing a new leap to the business prospects.
  • E-mail Marketing: The website owner maintains a subscriber database and uses that to send personalized newsletter thus creating a one-to-one bonding with a prospective customer.

Internet-Marketing Boosters

In today’s competitive market, a constant strive towards betterment is the business strategy motto. A few key energizers to successful online marketing could be-

  • Creating online blogs which could include guest and community blogging
  • Improving the quality content with good emphasis on real life implications
  • Promotional contests like quizzes or e-book circulation
  • Effective press releases with updated reviews
  • Posting client testimony as a polite declaration of the successful venture
  • Prospective customer/ visitor feedback; it acts as an intelligent input for improvising the marketing effort

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Mar 21

Social Media Optimization

What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

Social media optimization (SMO) is a technique of marketing in which you market your website in various social networking sites like MySpace, Youtube, Digg etc. Also known as Web 2.0 marketing, SMO acts as a powerful tool to increase the traffic and page ranking of your website. It engages a wider audience through excessive promotion via the public portals. The success of SMO lies in its interactive content sharing through mediums like blogs, video files and more.

Why use Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

Social media optimization, sometimes referred as social book-marking, is about building a relationship between your website and a wide group of potential customer. Social media if effectively used can consistently direct a substantial amount of traffic. Some of its advantages are

  • Increased traffic to your website
  • Increased public awareness of your site and product
  • Increased brand value
  • Increased inbound link
  • Increased ranking due to increased inbound and back links

Thus, social media optimization promotes your business by increasing high user awareness through social sites. This subsequently acts as the marketing strategy for incremental promotion of your product translating into increased conversion.

What are the parameters used by Social media optimization (SMO)?

Social media optimization follows the newer version of the ‘word of mouth’ technique where people have been replaced by social networking sites. The content is spread in the form of pictures, movie clips, blogs and more. This technique is known as viral marketing where user awareness of the site spreads across different community site. Some methodologies/functionalities used by SMO are

  • Social book-marking using buttons like ‘Digg this’
  • Using YouTube videos
  • Interaction through social network sites like Hi5 and Facebook
  • Sharing audio and picture files
  • Blogging
  • Frequently updating data using RSS feed
  • Promotion through news groups, newsletters, e-mails and forums

What is Social Media Optimization service?

Social media optimization (SMO) service customizes a complete social media website with optimized pages for the network socialite and search engine. The SMO activity would ideally involve the following steps:

  • Increasing the site linkability by making it social media friendly
  • Creating awareness through viral marketing
  • Using free/paid advertisements as a promotional tool
  • Customizing application to geographical locations
  • Creating brand awareness by integrating blogs, newsgroups etc
  • Community building

How is Social Media Optimization (SMO) advantageous than Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SMO and SEO both have a substantial influence on the web traffic. While SEO focuses on website content, links, structure etc to increase the page ranking, SMO is more about networking through social media. Though SEO is equally effective, SMO is more popular due to the following

  • Easy to implement and needs no expert
  • Result can be seen immediately
  • Good profiling leads to heavy traffic
  • No fee charged
  • Structure of the website not so important
  • Internet community functionalities can be effectively used
  • Gains maximum exposure
  • Encourages online participation by the audience
  • Visual presentation is more important than the content

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