Internet business advertising is all the efforts for directing potential customers to your website and converting them into paying customers.
If you’re a small business entrepreneur chances are you don’t have a lot of money for branding, display advertising. For this reason, you’ll have to find affordable methods of getting new customers.
A low-cost way to attract potential customers to visit your website is through search engines.
It starts with building a website that caters the needs of your target audience. Then, get people looking for what you have to offer to find your website while using a search engine like Google.
Here are some internet business advertising strategies you can use to find and attract potential clients for your small business website.
Strategies for Getting Potential Customers
1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
It involves all campaigns for improving your website visibility on search engine results.
You can do this by researching and picking a set of keywords that your prospects type in on the search engines and create website content pages with those phrases.
Once done, make sure you arrange links among the pages and get relevant backlinks or inbound links to your important web pages.
2. Search engine marketing (SEM)
If SEO drives organic free traffic from highly rank webpages, SEM gets paid visitors coming from pay-per-click listings.
Paid advertising like Google Adwords or Bing Ads can offer you two kinds of traffic. You can get visitors from their paid search results and contextual advertising placed on their network of publishers.
To make it works you will need to bid on a set of relevant keywords and direct the traffic to your sales or landing pages.
3. Social media marketing
Social networks like Facebook or Twitter are other sources of qualified prospects. These networks have lots of demographics and psychographics information of their users.
Using their paid advertising you can easily create a highly targeted advertising campaign for a specific target market. The social networks are also good for creating engagements with followers through sharing opinions, comments and reviews.
4. Email Marketing
Opt-in email advertising is one of the best ways to reach potential customers.
People who give you the permission to send them your email newsletter are prospects who like, or are eager to learn more about, your business or products. If you have some knowledge about the consumers you can segment them based on their needs.
This way you can customize your newsletter and send them automatically with autoresponder software.
5. Affiliate marketing
This internet business advertising is a good way to get qualified visitors to your site. You can create a good affiliate program–through an affiliate network or on your own — and attract affiliates to promote your products.
As a merchant you pay affiliates a specified amount for each lead, pay-per-lead, or a percentage of sale for each customer, pay-per-sale. So you only have to pay them based on their performance.
Other Internet Business Advertising Ideas
1. Classified ads
Online classified ad is a form of advertising that borrows the idea from newspaper classifieds. It lists promoted products or services within a set of categories. Learn how it works and how to write classified ads for the internet.
2. E-zine advertising
Ezine ads are one of the best ways to reach your target audience. Subscribers of niche-specific ezines are qualified prospects and they are more likely to respond to your ads.
3. Forum marketing
Participating in discussion forums that serve your target audience is a good strategy for building relationships with your prospects. Posting articles and messages to the boards can help drive traffic to your website and build your credibility.
4. Article submission
Submitting articles to article directories are a low-cost method for promoting your internet business. Even though this method is less effective than it was 2 or 3 years ago writing articles for article directories is a worth-trying strategy for getting potential customers.
These are some of the internet marketing strategies for your online business. To figure out how effective your marketing campaigns in converting prospects into paying customers you’ll need to monitor and measure the results.
Make sure also you choose internet business advertising campaigns that are proven effective and within your budget limit.