INTERNET MARKETING: SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Internet marketing consists of many different types and styles even different strategies.  Depending on your business and your goals your approach to marketing online will vary.  Some will choose Social Media, while other businesses find video marketing or pay per click to be the optimal strategy.  At the base of all these marketing types is SEO.  This one we probably hear the most about, yet unfortunately know the least of.  Yes it is true, most of the techniques and SEO strategies are gathered from a lot of trial and error and the results derived from those trials.  Let’s face it Google is not going to offer up information that could land you a number one spot undeserved, or because you paid some marketing company a fortune to get you there.

Google’s number one goal is to deliver the best results related a particular search.  They have become very good at this exercise too since rarely do I find the top spots held by inactive, poorly maintained sites.  The top spots appear to be held by very active, well maintained, credible sites.

As the internet is flooded with more sites and businesses trying to make a buck our competition in the search results gets more difficult.  As such using only SEO as a marketing strategy will become less and less effective.  Even Google is looking elsewhere like twitter posts as a way to deliver more immediate information to the public.  No amount of SEO good or bad can compete with this.

The best way to be successful on the internet is to maintain a steady flow of activity.  Simply creating content that resides on a blog, however helpful, is not enough.  Your footprint on Social media sites and within social circles is imperative to your overall success on the internet, including SEO.  If you have ever wondered how search engines successfully place the most popular sites at the top of the results, this is how.  Crawling the internet is a search engines job.  The more times they are crawling over offsite content traced back to your site, or stumble upon bits of dialogue that have your name attached to it, the higher your score.  Today your success in any form of marketing online is about visibility.  This is defined as: showing up in as many places as you can, or having a visible presence that is easily found.  Social media should have been called “visibility marketing.”  It probably would have made more sense to a lot of people.

Do I think Social Media is important?  It is not only important, it is imperative to your success in SEO.  SEO, alone, could land you a top spot in search results, but it will not keep you there for long.

Additionally, internet marketing is a combined effort of several different approaches that all work together to strengthen the effect and success of each single strategy.  Using only one strategy and relying on it to bring you success online is wishful thinking.  Many find that although they earn a top spot in the search results this has little to no effect on their success overall.  Sure it increases the traffic to their site, but very few actually converted into a sale or measurable profit.  Being able to engage with your market is a much more viable sale than relying on just your website to do it for you.