Everything now revolves around the Internet be it in terms of communication, learning, entertainment, shopping, and business. The number of people using the internet worldwide is increasing in almost every second. This fact presents an unbelievable opportunity to make money online.
Do you want to enter the world of internet marketing but don’t know just where to begin? Internet marketing involves marketing activities which are conducted online which encompasses a very wide range of tactics and strategies like search engine optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, and pay-per-click.
7 Types of Internet Marketing
Business internet marketing can be overwhelming for those that are just getting started. It is challenging to reach buying audiences online but with the right strategy, it is not impossible to do so. The following are the 7 types of internet marketing that you must be familiar with:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Organic search or SEO remains the top growth channel for almost all cases today. Though it takes the most effort and time, it has a long-term value if you can execute well. SEO is the process of effectively optimizing the website and its contents to have high search engine rankings. SEO maximizes the number of visitors to a certain webpage. Google is the most popular and powerful search engine in the digital world – with a 79.77% of market share (1).
Search engines have “crawler bots” used to crawl the whole internet and build an index of all the contents that are available online. When someone searches a particular keyword, the search engine will provide the most relevant and useful results. SEO has 2 sides:
- On-page SEO – it is when the content and website is optimized through targeted keywords/phrases. This includes: increasing the website speed, including targeted keywords, using a structured data markup, etc.
- Off-page SEO – it is when the website and content are optimized through methods outside the website or content itself. This includes external signals such as brand mentions and social media presence. The most influential part of Off-page SEO is the so-called backlinks wherein other websites link to your website/content. You can generate more backlinks by producing high-quality contents that more people are likely to share. You can also create a dedicated content for another website called “guest posting”. If you can’t do SEO yourself you can hire a SEO Virtual assistant. Remember without visitors your website don’t create any value.
2. Paid Advertising
It is a type where advertisers pay to show their adverts on search engines and online platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram. The 2 biggest digital advertising platforms are Facebook and Google. The advertisers will pay each time a user clicks their ads (pay-per-click or PPC). Other platforms charge differently depending on the marketing objective. The following are other ways how platforms charge other than PPC:
- Cost-per-thousand-impressions (cost-per-mille or CPM) – charge each time the ad is viewed 1,000 times
- Cost-per-View (CPV) – charge each view your video receives
- Cost-per-Action (Cost-per-Acquisition or CPA) – charge each time a user converts into a customer
3. Influencer marketing
An influencer is someone with a relatively huge online following such as mainstream celebrities, industry experts and micro-influencers (those with less than a hundred thousand followers).
Influencer marketing involves working with an influencer to promote a certain product or service through their social media accounts to their online following.
4. Content Marketing
A good content helps in building brand awareness, trust, likability and more. Content marketing involves creating, distributing and promoting online contents that are strategically designed to engage, attract and convert a target audience into customers.
There are many forms of content marketing that businesses use such as blog posts, eBooks, videos, podcasts, emails, webinars, case studies, etc. Content marketing works closely with the other types of internet marketing – most especially SEO and social media marketing as they all aim to get higher ranking in search engines.
5. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
This involves acquiring sales and attention through the use of different social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Social media is all about connecting with people whenever and wherever they are. This type of marketing can be split into two categories:
- Organic/free – this focuses on building a particular community and deepening the website’s relationships with its consumers to induce their loyalty and interest.
- b. Paid – There are many ways to promote your business through paid social media platforms and each has a suite of paid promotional options. Most of these social media marketing platforms are referred to as “pay-per-click”.
6. Affiliate Marketing
It is mainly about online referral marketing where a business will set up its program and then pay commissions to external individuals or website for the sales or traffic that they generate. Affiliate marketing allows influencers and internet marketers to earn money by promoting another company’s products or services.
This particular type of marketing is deeply intertwined with content marketing, social media marketing, and influencer marketing because most of the affiliate links are being promoted in contents or on social media by the influencers.
7. Email Marketing
Email is one of the most effective acquisition channels nowadays as it is one of the world’s biggest social network. Email marketing is all about using email to send direct marketing messages to an online audience to retain existing customers and gain new ones. This works in partnership with the other types of marketing such as content and social media marketing.
Email marketing involves using lead magnet or “baits” such as a discount coupon or a desirable piece of content like eBook to get the audience’s email address by engaging them to sign-up. After getting their addresses, you can now nurture the email subscribers with giveaways, useful content, early access to your new products, etc.
Marketers always go for something where they connect with a lot of people to promote the products and services they offer and the internet can be the place to do that. The 7 types of internet marketing can be interrelated and can be used in partnerships. Internet marketing is now a trend because it instantly reaches many people around the globe with so much ease.
