Apple Girl

What is Internet Marketing?

Depending on whom you ask, the term Internet marketing can mean a variety of things. At one time, Internet marketing consisted mostly of having a website or placing banner ads on other websites. On the other end of the spectrum, there are loads of companies telling you that you can make a fortune overnight on the Internet and who try to sell you some form of "Internet marketing program".

Today, Internet marketing is evolving into a broader mix of components a company can use as a means of increasing sales - even if your business is done completely online, partly online, or completely offline. The decision to use Internet marketing as part of a company's overall marketing strategy is strictly up to the company of course, but as a rule, Internet marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of nearly every company's marketing mix. For some online businesses, it is the only form of marketing being practiced.

Internet Marketing Objectives

Essentially, Internet marketing is using the Internet to do one or more of the following:

• Communicate a company's message about itself, its products, or its services.
• Conduct research as to the nature (demographics, preferences, and needs) of existing and potential customers.
• Sell goods, services, or advertising space over the Internet.

Internet Marketing Components

Components of Internet marketing (also referred to as online marketing) may include:

• A website, consisting of text, images and possibly audio and video elements used to convey the company's message, to inform existing and potential customers of the features and benefits of the company's products and/or services. The website may or may not include the ability to capture leads on potential customers or directly sell a product or service online. A website can be the offline equivalent of a brochure or a mail order catalog and is a great way to establish your business identity.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which is marketing a website via search engines, either by improving the site's natural (organic) ranking through search engine optimization (SEO), buying pay-per-click (PPC) ads with search engines which are based on selected keywords and then displayed on search engine results pages when those keywords are used in a search, and/or on other websites whose content includes the keywords specified, pay-for-inclusion (PFI) listings in website directories. PFI listings are similar to offline yellow page listings.
• Email marketing, which is a method of distributing information about a product or service or for soliciting feedback from customers about a product or service through Email. Email addresses of customers and prospective customers may be collected or purchased. Various methods are used, such as the regular distribution of newsletters or mass mailing of offers related to the company's product or services. Email marketing is essentially the online equivalent of direct mail marketing.
• Banner advertising, which is the placement of ads on a website for a fee. Offline this would be similar to traditional advertising in newspapers or magazines.
• Online promotion, including press release distribution, which involves placing a newsworthy story about a company, its website, its people, and/or its products/services with on online wire service, or blog (web log) activity, which is the act of posting comments, expressing opinions or making announcements in a discussion forum. Blog marketing can be accomplished in blogs either by hosting your own blog or by posting comments and/or URLs in other blogs related to your product or service.

Internet Marketing and Home Business

Of all of the components of Internet marketing, prospective customers and clients expect a business to have a website. In fact, not having one could raise a red flag to a prospect. Online usage has become so pervasive today, many prospects might easily choose to do business with a company that they can get up-to-date information on 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Even a business that only has very local customers, such as a single location restaurant or shoe store can benefit from having a Web site. And, those businesses whose customers are not restricted to a geographical area might have a difficult time finding an alternate method of attracting customers that offers the reasonably low expense and worldwide reach of a Web presence.

Because of the "virtual" nature of most home businesses, websites, if not an absolute necessity, can certainly provide benefits to a home business operator. Since most home-based businesses don't have a physical location, a website provides an inexpensive means for prospects to get to know what you do or what you sell and can even be a "storefront" for selling goods and services directly.

The Internet has greatly enabled home businesses to prosper because of the reasonably low cost to start and maintain a web presence. Therefore, Internet marketing should be part of your business plan and your marketing strategy.

Finding the Right Internet Marketing Mix

How much of your marketing strategy should be handled online, which Internet marketing elements you use, and the importance you should give to your Web site, depends on the nature of your business, your budget, and, to some extent, your personal traits.

Unless you transact business only online, for example if you are an eBay reseller, you will probably want to include some traditional offline marketing elements in your strategy. Even those who conduct business only online might consider placing traditional ads in newspapers or magazines to bring prospects to their website to transact business. Perfect examples of this are Expedia, Travelocity and Monster.com. While they are online businesses, they invest heavily in traditional advertising, including radio and TV advertising, to draw traffic to their sites where the actual business is conducted.

If you have a personal distaste for "spam", which most of us do, you may not want to include Email marketing in your Internet marketing strategy. However, Email marketing doesn't have to mean just sending out unsolicited messages to every email address you can gather. If you include a visitor registration form on your website, for example, or if you exhibit at trade shows, you have the vehicles needed to collect email addresses of interested prospects. You might consider creating a newsletter and sending it to these prospects on a regular basis. Or, you might just set up a schedule where you periodically send an email to your interested prospects to see how they're doing, if you can be of assistance to them, or if their needs have changed since you last talked.

Of course, your budget will also determine the components you use in your Internet marketing strategy. A website will require you to register a domain name and to purchase web hosting services for your website. Both items are deeply discounted, in fact I recently saw an offer for domain name registration for only $1.99 per year - provided you also purchase other services, like hosting, which is now also available for less than $10 per month.

Once that's done, you'll need a design and content for your website, which you'll either need to provide yourself or pay to have a web content professional and/or web designer handle it for you.

Once your content and design are in place, you'll want your site to be found, so you'll want to either learn about search engine optimization (SEO) or pay an SEO contractor to do it for you. Depending on your budget, you should also research which directories are available and how much they cost for a paid listing (PFI).

Ideally, if you pay to have web content written for you, that content should be optimized when it's written. Likewise, you or your web designer should know something about SEO because how your site is designed can enhance or limit your site traffic. In both cases, you may pay a bit more, but you'll save time in the long run. Once the site is up and running, you'll either need to maintain it yourself or outsource the duties to an independent Webmaster to do it for you.

Pay-per-click advertising, like Google AdWords can be easy on your budget because you can specify how much you're willing to pay when someone clicks your ad and how much you're willing to pay per day. You can also specify whether you want to include your ad only on search pages or on other websites related to your keywords. Plus, they're fairly easy to activate, disable, rack, and update. You can also use images with PPC advertising, which may be more cost effective than placing banner ads on other Web sites.

On the other side of the coin, you can use pay per click ads to make money with your website, through programs like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher or Microsoft AdCenter.

Tracking Results

Let's face it: the average home business operator is not awash in cash. If you're going to be spending money on Internet marketing you need to track its effectiveness. As you do so, you'll discover what works and what doesn't work for your business. And, you cam learn from the mistakes you make in your Internet advertising campaign to become an Internet advertising success. Knowing what's worth spending money on and what isn't is critical for your business success.

Keep in mind, in most cases patience is a true virtue. Search engines aren't likely to find you overnight and your Internet marketing campaign and search engine marketing programs may not generate a bundle of revenue right away. Because you'll have literally millions of competitors on the Internet, it will behoove you to keep up to date and keep on your toes. However, some knowledge, some capable assistance, and a well-managed Internet marketing strategy can increase your chances for home business success. Who knows, you may even want to start a new home business offering Internet marketing services!

Paid Surveys, How You Can Make Top Dollar!

Paid Surveys Do you know that you no longer have to pay survey sites in order to make a little extra cash. Well, its true, there are a number of survey sites that will allow you to sign up and make money for free. Paid surveys are good for everyone, but they are really good for stay at home mom, college students who are looking for extra cash to pay for tuition or books, and hobbies.

How much can you make?

The amount of money you can earn depends on the paid surveys and the amount of paid surveys you participate in. Some surveys pay $2-$20 per survey and others pay $10-$100 per survey. Some surveys sites make you take a pre survey to see if you qualify for the big survey. For example, if you were to take a number of surveys, you would earn points, and when you accumulate enough points you can convert it to cash. The best way to make good money with paid surveys is to sign up with as many paid surveys as possible. In less than a month you will receive more surveys than you can handle. The more surveys that you participate in, the more paid surveys you will receive.

Why would people pay you for your opinion?

Easy, when a new product is produced, big companies want to know how this product would sell before it hit's the market place. So they put out surveys for you and I to participate in and give our opinion on the product. These companies are willing to pay big money for people's opinions on these products.

What type of surveys are there?

There are all types of paid surveys. The ones that I am familiar with are the surveys on products and TV. ads. I have taken surveys on beer commercials and new television series that are now out in the market place. I even had product such as food sent to my home for me to eat and give an opinion on the taste.

Why take paid surveys?

Because it is at great way to make extra cash and to see what new products are coming to the market place.

Campaigner

Products and services

Campaigner offers a full range of email marketing applications and online marketing tools and services to meet the needs of small and medium businesses or large enterprise customers. These products offer different levels of functionality at different price points to ensure that no matter the customers' requirements or budget a solution is available to meet their email marketing requirements.

Customers we serve

Campaigner provides technology to Microsoft, Yahoo! and Salesforce.com; solutions to large corporate clients such as AT&T, GlaxoSmithKline, Speedo and PriceWaterhouseCoopers; and services thousands of small and medium-sized businesses.

Why you should pick us

We offer a full range of email marketing applications and online marketing tools to meet the needs of small and medium businesses or large enterprise customers.

Campaigner: is an affordable, self-serve email marketing tool that helps users boost sales, generate leads, build brand awareness and increase website traffic using email.

CampaignerPro: is a feature rich, highly scalable email marketing application that meets the communications needs of any organization. It offers advanced email marketing functions including list management, segmentation, personalization, dynamic message assembly, and real-time results tracking. Organizations use CampaignerPro to communicate with customers in a highly targeted way that enhances their experience and builds profitable long-term relationships.

A next generation email marketing application, CampaignerPro's powerful features allow for the creation of multi-phase, event- and time-triggered email promotions, newsletters and campaigns. Leveraging a rich repository of real-time behavior, demographic data and advanced segmentation features, organizations can deliver personalized, one-to-one communications to customers.

Campaigner for Salesforce: an advanced yet affordable email marketing application that leverages your Salesforce CRM data to deliver targeted, highly-personalized automated campaigns to your Leads and Contacts. Automate Lead and Contact imports and send campaigns "On Behalf Of" the Lead Owner - Campaign results are automatically logged in the Activity History.

These products offer different levels of functionality at different price points to ensure that no matter the customers' requirements or budget a solution is available to meet their email marketing requirements. Then, as their sophistication and requirements grow, Campaigner can continue to work with them and offer more advanced technology to meet their evolving needs.

E-mail marketing

Email marketing is, as the name suggests, the use of email in marketing communications.

What sort of email?

In its broadest sense, the term covers every email you ever send to a customer, potential customer or public venue. In general, though, it's used to refer to:

• Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again
• Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship
• Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people

Give me an analogy...

You can think of these three main forms of email marketing as the electronic equivalent of:

• Direct mail
• Sending people a print newsletter
• Placing advertisements in subscription magazines and newspapers

There is, however, one extremely important difference - the issue of permission (see later).

Why is email marketing so popular?

Email marketing is so popular because:

• sending email is much cheaper than most other forms of communication
• email lets you deliver your message to the people (unlike a website, where the people have to come to your message)
• email marketing has proven very successful for those who do it right

For more information, see the article Why do email marketing?.

Let's briefly review the three types of email marketing:

1. Direct email

Direct email involves sending a promotional message in the form of an email. It might be an announcement of a special offer, for example. Just as you might have a list of customer or prospect postal addresses to send your promotions too, so you can collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses.

You can also rent lists of email addresses from service companies. They'll let you send your message to their own address lists. These services can usually let you target your message according to, for example, the interests or geographical location of the owners of the email address.

2. Retention email

Instead of promotional email designed only to encourage the recipient to take action (buy something, sign-up for something, etc.), you might send out retention emails.

These usually take the form of regular emails known as newsletters. A newsletter may carry promotional messages or advertisements, but will aim at developing a long-term impact on the readers. It should provide the readers with value, which means more than just sales messages. It should contain information which informs, entertains or otherwise benefits the readers.

3. Advertising in other people's emails

Instead of producing your own newsletter, you can find newsletters published by others and pay them to put your advertisement in the emails they send their subscribers. Indeed, there are many email newsletters that are created for just this purpose - to sell advertising space to others.

Where's the catch?

This all sounds great of course. Imagine how much cheaper it is to send a message to thousands of email addresses, rather than thousands of postal addresses!

It's not that simple, unfortunately. Quite apart from the complexities of designing and delivering email messages to the right people, getting them to actually read and respond to your message, and measuring and analysing the results, there is the issue of permission.

What's "permission"?

Responsible email marketing is based on the idea of permission. This is a complex issue and the subject of intense debate in the marketing community.

Essentially, you need an email address owner's permission before you can send them a commercial email. If you don't have this permission, then the recipients of your mail may well regard your message as spam; unsolicited commercial (bulk) email.

You do not want to send spam!

If you are accused of sending spam, then you may find your email accounts closed down, your website shut off, and your reputation in tatters. In some parts of the world, you may even be breaking the law.

Quite apart from these practical considerations, there is also a strong argument which says that long-term successful email marketing relationships with customers and others can only work anyway if they're permission based.

The big question, of course, is what constitutes permission...and that is the main subject of debate. It's important to remember that it's not your views, or even the views of the majority, that count, but the views of those receiving your emails and those responsible for administering the infrastructure of the Internet.

An example of permission is when your customer buys something from your online store and also ticks a box marked "please send me news about product updates via email". You now have "permission" to send that person product updates by email, provided you also give them the opportunity to rescind that permission at any time.

Educate yourself

It's important to stress that anyone considering email marketing must read up on the subject of permission and spam. If you don't understand the importance of permission and the risks of ignoring it, then you could be heading for commercial disaster.