Everybody says Online Marketing Online Marketing. What does Online Marketing mean? Explained with Examples

When you hear about people like Steven Bransfield who made $196,000 in a month from his business, the first question comes in mind that, what does he do?

He replies with an answer as “Online Marketing“.

Again, you ask Shaqir Hussyin, who made 4 Million+ USD in 3 years, what do you do?

His answer is the same, “Online Marketing”.

I have also shared another success story of an Indian earning 55K+ USD every month from online marketing.

After hearing lot many success stories about people making money from online marketing, you may start thinking about getting started with the same business, right? And the first question comes thereafter as, What is Online Marketing? What does it mean?

When you search for the definition of Online Marketing on Google, you may find an answer like this,

…Also called as Internet Marketing and Online Advertisement is any tool, strategy or method of getting the company name out to the public. The advertisements can take many different forms and some strategies focus on subtle messages rather than clear-cut advertisements.

Well this definition doesn’t clarify the exact nature of the work that you need to do under Online Marketing. I will try to put it simply and more specific,

Online Marketing is a strategy or effort to get people see or visit your property (company, product or person) using Internet.

The effort may involve paid advertisement or free strategies to get traffic and eyeballs.

Types of Online Marketing

There are various types or sub categories of online marketing to achieve results. Most popular sub-categories are,

• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
• PPC (Pay Per Click) Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing

Content marketing involves getting traffic by producing different types of content on the Internet. Writing blog with helpful articles is one type of content to get traffic. Producing videos and posting it on portals like YouTube, Vimeo etc. is another good source of traffic through content.

Images like Infographic, screenshots, architecture design etc. are also a type of content produced to help getting more traffic.

Social Media Marketing is to utilize the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. to gain traffic and eye balls on the property. By joining community groups like Reddit or Facebook groups and sharing the articles may pull good amount of visitors to the webpage or landing page. One can achieve good results by sharing content or utilizing these platforms as per their purpose. For example, sharing good images attached with a good content can bring traffic from Pinterest. Discussing something on Reddit may bring targeted traffic and so on.

SEO is about getting organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing etc. In this marketing technique, you need to learn about the SEO parameters for on-page and off-page SEO. On-page SEO involves changes made on the website to make it more search engine friendly and keyword dense.

Off-page SEO is the work done outside the website to improve page ranking. For example, getting back-link from other domains or getting links from proper or targeted keyword and so on.

SEM is the paid marketing done to buy traffic from search engines. Like using Google Adwords to buy traffic on targeted keyword search.

PPC is like SEM but not only restricted to the search engines. You can use Facebook Ads, Reddit Ads along with Google Ads to get the traffic. This is also a paid marketing technique where you need to pay for every click made on your ad.

Email is the best form of communication. Marketers use this form to communicate about their product or services or to promote affiliate products. Email marketing involves getting email IDs of visitors and then auto scheduling the emails to their inbox. Aweber and Mailchimp are the most popular platforms used for Email Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is about getting a commission on every sale made by your unique link. You become an affiliate or a partner of a popular product site and start promoting their product via website, email marketing or PPC. If anyone buys the product using your unique link, you get a commission between 20 – 90% of the purchase value. Popular affiliate products are Amazon, Hosting service providers like GoDaddy etc.

Content Marketing

Blog is the best form of content marketing apart from the videos. Running a blog with good content brings huge amount of traffic to your website.

Elegant Themes, a popular WordPress theme club with mind-blowing Divi WordPress Theme, is a good success story of content marketing.

Before releasing Divi Front-end Builder along with Divi 3.0, they started Divi 100 Marathon. It was for 100 days countdown to the release of Divi 3.0 and everyday they were releasing premium quality content helpful for Divi users.

As a result of releasing regular content on daily basis for more than 3 months, the blog’s traffic saw huge spike.

Divi team released an update video after Divi 100 Marathon and highlighted the benefits of producing high quality content for 3+ months.

Similarly, a YouTube channel with good quality videos is very helpful in converting traffic. After Google, YouTube is the largest search engine which means you can expect huge traffic from there.

If a video is seeing 1 Million views, at least 3% people will click on the link in description. Now that converts to 30,000 targeted visitors. And if the context of the video is on niche and explained well, the click rate may go up to 7 – 8%.

Social Media Marketing

There are more than 2.7 billion active social media users worldwide. Facebook alone is having more than 1.8 billion active users. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram are other major players in the industry with more than 300 million users available on each platform.

These numbers show the potential of targeted traffic a marketers can get from these sources. There are few techniques which allow you to gain traffic.

Share good content ion your Facebook timeline as well as share that on Facebook page, relevant groups etc. If you are having people from the same niche in your friend list, they are more likely to like the post and share that. But that is not going to help a lot.

You need to let other people, your visitors share the post on their timeline.

Make it easier to share the blog post by providing easy sharing options like share button. You can either use ready script to embed sharing button or use WordPress plugin to do that.

Optimize Content for Social Media

Optimize the blog page for social media sharing so that it looks good and engaging when shared.

Yoast SEO plugin which is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress comes with an option to optimize every blog post for Facebook sharing. Rather than picking the featured image or any image from your blog, you can set a big image specially for Facebook sharing. The option is available under Advance Setting tab of Yoast plugin.

Schedule Updates

To get most out of the social media sites, you need to post engaging content every hour. It doesn’t matter even if you post the same content again and again, as it is difficult to get noticed there. Actually, it is helpful to repeat the content.

Posting every hour manually is a difficult and time consuming task. Scheduling an update is a great option.

Paid services like Buffer, Hootsuite allows you to schedule an update for multiple social media platforms. They also offer free plans for individuals with limited platforms. Another service named OnlyWire is good choice for posting at multiple platforms without any assistance.

Free scheduling services are also available and they are,

• TweetDeck for Twitter
• Postify for Facebook, Linkedin

I would suggest to keep the scheduled posts in queue for at least a week. In between, you can manually share some posts or text too.

Images See More Eyeballs

Visuals are more eye catching than the text and it is true on social media too.

Tweets with image receive 1.5X more retweets and likes than tweets without images.

Try to put images in 6 out of 10 updates and pick the images which are catchy.

These simple changes help in getting more traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

Organic traffic is the best traffic and there is no doubt about it. Somebody was searching for it and he finds your page. It is the most targeted and converting traffic.

Search engine like Google serves result by showing top 10 results on the first page and allows visitors to move to the next page. Well, the No. #1 result on the first page of Google gets 4X more clicks than the #2 result. Similarly, the No. #2 result on the first page get 10X more clicks than #10 result on the same page.

The click through ratio drastically drops at every stage on the search result page (SERP).

To get most of the traffic for the searched keyword, your website’s page should appear at the top of the search results page.

To reach there, you need to optimize the page and follow lot many other techniques. Well, learning those techniques or getting it done by experts is worth as organic traffic is for free.

I would recommend to get the free SEO report for your website and try to fix the problems suggested over there. I am sure that the changes will help in SEO.

Search Engine Marketing

You must have seen some “Ads” appearing above or below the search results on Google SERP. Those are paid ads running to showcase on a particular keyword.

Many marketers use paid ads to get traffic from search results page. As organic traffic is the most targeted traffic, they utilize the paid ad option (Google Adwords in case of Google) to appear on top of the result page.

Similar paid ad option is also available for Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertisement

PPC is similar to SEM as in both cases, you need to pay for every click made on your link. PPC is more generic term and it applies to other ad network as well. For example, you can run PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign on Facebook and target 1.8 billion users over there.

It is important that the landing page where the visitors will go after clicking on the ad link is having call to action button. As you are paying for every click, you should either send traffic to product’s sale page or collect email ID or other action item.

I have seen marketers running PPC campaign with wrong URL or on pages with no action item. As they are paying for every click, if there is no action item, they are definitely going to lose money over there.

Use PPC only if you have proper sales funnel ready.

Email Marketing

Marketer’s main challenge is to reach to the potential buyer and catch his/her attention. Email is the best form of communication to reach to the potential buyer. If you can reach to the inbox of the user, chances are very high that you may convert that into a customer.

Email marketing is all about reaching to the potential buyer’s inbox and communicating regularly.

With the help of tools like Aweber (my personal favorite), you can put opt-in forms on the website and ask visitors to fill up the form with name and email ID.

There is no meaning in just asking them to fill up the details as nobody will care about doing so. To increase or boost the opt-ins, you need to bribe them. You need to offer them something like free eBook, Report etc. and ask them to fill up the form. You will see a huge jump in opt-ins.

Now go to the Aweber dashboard and create messages to build a followup series. I just love this feature there.

With Followup series, you can schedule the messages to go at defined interval. For example, the first message with free report or eBook download link will go after subscription, as promised. The second message will go next day automatically. 3’rd message will go after 3 days of the 2’nd message and so on. You can change the interval as per your choice.

These regular messages help in building a relationship and at the same time you are also promoting the products or helping thorough the regular communication.

Email marketing is very helpful and many marketers are making 5 figures monthly income by just doing this form of marketing.

Affiliate Marketing

One day you went to a sports shop and purchased a cricket bat. You started using the bat and it feels good to you. Now your teammates saw the bat and they liked it very much. Some of them decided to purchase the same bat, so they asked for the address of the shop.

Your teammates went to the shop and told the shop owner about you and asked for the same bat. Finally they purchased the bat.

Now the shop owner came to you and said that your friends came last night and told me your name. They said you referred them to my shop. Last night they purchased 5 bats worth $50 each, so I made total $250 sale because of your referral. I like to offer you 10% of that sale amount i.e. $25 as you referred them.

Well, you just earned $25 as affiliate amount and the work that you did is affiliate marketing.

You don’t have to worry about the after sale support for that bat. If anything goes wrong with the purchased bat of any of your friend, they need to go to the shop and not you.

There are many websites where you can find such offers.

Pick a good offer and start promoting it via different mediums explained earlier in this article. You may run a blog and try to get free traffic from search engine and social media or you can run paid campaigns too.

You can also explore multiple offers at single platform like Clickbank and ShareASale. You will find products priced at $90 and offering up to 70% affiliate amount. It means if you sale a single product, you will get $63 as commission.

Apart from that, I recommend high ticket affiliate program where you get commission as much as $1,250, $3,000, $5,500 and more from single purchase. Join my MTTB team to promote and earn six figure income from high ticket sale.

Conclusion

Online marketing is a vast term but the process is very simple. You have to create an offer page and get as much traffic as possible. That’s it.

There are various ways to get traffic as explained above. It is important to note that you need to learn new things all the time as sources change their algorithm and parameters without any notification. You need to stay up to date and always on your toes to get the best out of online marketing.