Business & Investing

For today’s internet marketing advertising business owners there is a growing complexity as to what are the best ways to advertise their goods and services. With all the many marketing options out there today it can become rather confusing when it comes to selecting the top on and offline marketing systems.

Also it seems to be much more difficult to make a comfortable income these days, with the drastic changes to our economy these last few years. I’m sure the small business internet marketing community can attest to this.

What I would like to accomplish with this article is to give some solid marketing advice to internet business owners so they can move forward with their marketing strategies with confidence. At the same time I would like to introduce an easy way for each internet business to earn a sizeable income by showing others this easy-to-implement marketing system.

Here are some of today’s most common marketing practices and the problems associated with them.

1. PPC Marketing : This is also referred to as pay-per-click advertising. This is when the small business owner advertises their goods and services on search networks. The most common being: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Facebook, Etc. This can be a very quick way to place your company’s ads in front of your target market. Essentially, you determine the proper demographics for whatever is is you’re selling. This way you are only showing your ad to those that are likely buyers. Unfortunately, the search engines like Google can ban you whenever they want to. Like they did back on December, 2009. And they change their algorithms quite often as well. Making it very difficult to maintain a top search ranking.

2. Social marketing, A.K.A. web 2.0 marketing: This is where you create accounts at places such as: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, Hubpages, etc. and create a profile of yourself and what it is that you do. The great thing about this type of marketing is that you’re creating relationships with prospects. The difficult part is creating a profile that is optimized for the various sites. Not only that, but you are spending tremendous amounts of time trying to get a bunch of followers so you can eventually sell them something. Also it seems that once you develop followers it can be hard to keep them by attrition. I.E. fads come and go and right now it seems Twitter is the in fad, but how much longer will it last?

3. Classified ads can be placed on sites like: Gumdrop, Kijiji, Backpage, etc. You’ll have to spend hours placing enough ads to earn anything though. and often the people that frequent these sites have some type of product or service they want to sell you. So, unless you enjoy being reverse-marketed to. I suggest staying away from these internet marketing advertising sites.

4. Offline Advertising Methods: You place your ads that are usually not targeted very well in Magazines, on TV, in Newspapers, on Billboards, etc. Your ad is typically shown to a wide demographic at a rather ad cost. This can work if you offer a good or service that’s needed by a large percentage of society. However, if you need to zero in on a target market your ad will usually have a low conversion rate. These types of ad placements can also be very expensive and take a long time to produce substantial results.

Now that we’ve reviewed some of the more common offline and web marketing methods, I feel it best to move on to some relatively unknown marketing strategies that can produce results that are both rapid and lucrative.

1. Broadcasting with a Fax: You can send out fax broadcasts to many targeted prospects for very little expense. The fax can produce rapid results.

2. Postcard mailing: With most all businesses advertising on the internet today, most have forgotten that direct mailing of postcards, when sent to a targeted list, can be the best way to connect with your target market in a low-cost way. Not only that, but your competition is low and prospects love having something in their hands.

3. Email Marketing: Due to the 2003 Can Spam Act this marketing method has lost some of it’s sizzle in recent years. Especially for those that don’t know how to do correctly. You see, if you broadcast your message to a large, annonymous audience you most likely will end up with little if any results. However, if you send out a smaller broadcast to a list of people that have requested information on whatever it is you’re selling. You will be astounded at the high level of response.

About the author: Wayne Hinrichs has ran a profitable small business internet marketing company for the last 5 years. He enjoys assisting others with this complex task. web marketing is the most important factor in determining a companies profitability. As an owner knows how to get their ideas out to their target market, the other parts of the business becomes rather easy.