When you are to start an online business, or are already running an active online business (such as a website), you would know you need people to visit your site. To do that, you should rely on several useful internet marketing methods to penetrate your target local market. The methods can be placed in the following categories.
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Paid advertising (including paid search ads, display ads, and retargeting ads)
- Social media marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Video marketing
- Viral marketing
- Data/web analytics
To further break down the above methods (or traffic channels) into sources, you can go through the web traffic sources list.
Search engine optimization
In search engine optimization (SEO), one of the end goals is to get your web pages ranked higher up the search engine results pages. When this can be achieved for many keywords that are highly relevant to your niche and/or products, you are already more than half way successful with the implementation of your SEO strategy. In your strategy you would have broken down into executable steps or optimization techniques. The techniques are mainly in two categories i.e. on-page techniques, and off-page techniques. For example, you would always optimize the copy of page titles of all your web pages.
Paid advertising
Paid search usually mean you buy keyword ads through one or some of the paid search programs (i.e. Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc). To run display ads or banner ads, you would ask your designer to design some very interesting images. Before starting retargeting ads, the prerequisite is to first collect past visiting data (including some behavior data) of your website users. For example, if you have been running paid search and display ads through one advertising platform (such as Google Ads), before you run the ads you would set up your campaigns to segment the visitors and/or ad clickers depending on their specific behavior. Through this segmented data, you would start running your retargeting ads.
Social media marketing
In social media marketing, you are virtually creating and managing communities (i.e. groups in Facebook, etc). Sometimes you would feel you are practically running an online forum as a forum moderator in your niche, field of work or product. You always want to pull people (who are in your niche or are highly likely to buy your product now or later) into your community or social network groups.
Data/web analytics
Data analytics for websites would become web analytics. Web analytics is not exactly marketing. It is highly related to the success of overall digital marketing of your website (or business). The very basic step is to set up Google Analytics to measure the performance of all marketing channels and gather the user behavior data. The second stage involves optimization of your website and all the underperformed marketing channels based on the reported data.
