In the fast moving Internet arena, it is easy to jump from marketing effort to marketing effort, trying to keep up with new techniques and technologies online. Some of us get fatigued by the pressure and information overload.

Here are a few ways to get into Internet Marketing, and build a long term Internet Marketing portfolio.   

Affiliate Marketing

Engaging in affiliate marketing is almost by default a long term marketing practice. Your affiliates function as your sales force, or lead generation representatives, and you pay them on the performance they deliver to you. As long as you set up the right commission model, you won’t be paying commission unless you are making money. It’s a win-win model for everyone, where the customer finds your product, you get the sale and your affiliate gets a percentage commission for generating the sale.

Join 2-3 affiliate networks in each market you are in. Use a tool to compare all of them on the KPIs that are important to you. Run a test period of three to six months, then evaluate which affiliate network works best in each market. You can use one network across all markets, however I would only advise that if you are short on resources. The more suboptimization you can allocate per market, the better. If you use an MRM tool to keep track of all markets, you don’t need to use the same affiliate network cross-markets, regardless of what affiliate networks tell you.

Search Engine Optimization

There are many techniques, tricks and hacks to get pages listed high in search engines. If you ask an SEO consultant, you can easily get the impression that SEO can make or break your business. Well, it’s partly true, since you can generate a whole lot of traffic if you rank high on search engines, but if your website does not perform in terms of usability and delivers value to your visitors, you will not benefit in the long term.

If you are in it for the long term, there is an easy way to boil down SEO to three focus areas, for the long term benefit.

1. Make sure your technical structure (html) on your website is readable by search engines. I use a 100+ point evaluation scorecard to optimize websites, but in essence, all you have to do is make sure it is readable in a text-only browser.
2. Write theme-based content – keep all your content on the same theme, and subpages on your website keyword-optimized for one phrase each in the same theme.
3. Build links to your website from authoritative sources. It not only helps search rankings, but also adds to the number of places where your customers can find you.

That is long term and you can do it yourself. If you have the resources for it, hire a consultant or SEO professional in your marketing department to work for you, but make sure you have covered the first three steps on your own.

Internet Advertising Campaigns

Essentially a switch-on, switch-off type of marketing, with fixed budgets and/or a fixed time frame, campaigns are do not get the long term focus from a lot of marketers. A lot of times it’s about burning the last of a budget for a period or testing out various media. For larger corporations, giving total responsibility to media agencies lets the marketing staff wash their hands of the responsibility and just allocate (often considerable) budgets for media spend. That is not long term, that is blindfolding yourself.

However, there is a way to make campaigns long term. Through measuring results from each channel and media provider, you can identify the ones that perform well, even though you don’t pay them on performance. Using a Web Analytics, an EMM or MRM system, you can measure the revenue, sales and/or leads generated by each campaign channel.

Measure a lot of campaign channels to test their performance, keeping your ROI in focus on each of them. Out of all the ones you test, you will have some with negative and some with positive ROI. Select the ones with positive ROI and rank them based on KPIs like generated sales/leads, margin or revenue. Stick with the good ones, and put as much into these channels as you can, depending on your budget. If you can see that a campaign channel is generating a lot of sales and you still have a positive ROI, keep putting money into it.

Search Engine Marketing

Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and the like. Closely related to SEO, SEM campaigns can help you identify which keywords to optimize for and add credibility to your organic search results. Since you generally pay per click, you need to keep a close eye on the performance of each keyword, remove poor performers and add new keywords as you go. The long term SEM plan requires resources to monitor performance on sometimes thousands of ads, so you’ll need a professional dedicated to that administration. Hire the right people, and they will more than likely pay for themselves through sales generated through SEM.

News and Offers Marketing

In this case your own newsletters and RSS feeds – not e-mail advertising campaigns (for that, see Internet Advertising Campaigns). Leverage the power of your database of collected e-mail addresses from opt-in subscribers, members and customers. Send out offers every week or month that is highly relevant to your user base. You can evaluate relevance on simple things like CTR, or use advances KPIs in your web analytics tool. The long term effect occurs when you have built a considerable subscriber base that generate a lot of revenue – and it won’t cost you a cent (other than perhaps a little for your e-mail system).

Social Media Marketing

There are two strategies for marketing through social media. One is to place (more or less) relevant banners and ads on pages where your target audience is browsing (the Facebook model). This model has not worked very well for most advertisers, so far. The other is to actually get engaged in conversations and contribute to discussions online, in blogs, social networks, and through social utilities. In SMM, there is no substitute for manpower and time. However, it is easy to learn, and you can probably hire someone straight out of school, that is already deeply immersed in SMM techniques in his or her free time.

Social Media Marketing is long term, in the way that you are building your company’s image through the people that are engaging in social media conversations online. Integrate SMM with your website, and you will have a powerful advantage over your competitors.

The Key to Long Term

The key to reaching long term results in Internet Marketing is measurement. Always keep your eye on the KPI.

The way to measure results online (on external websites, your websites, RSS feeds and your newsletters) is through adding tracking codes to measure the amount of times any of your content (news, banners, text ads, web pages, videos, and other content) was displayed, how many times it was clicked on, and what results came out of it. Use a tool that lets you compare channels side by side – even though each requires unique administration, you can still compare them on the revenue they generate.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing
Tags:Affiliate Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Internet Advertising Campaigns, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing