Internet Marketing – The Complete Beginner’s Guide

2020
knowinternetmarketing.com/internet-marketing-the-complete-guide

Introduction

“Internet Marketing is the best way to grow your business, but it doesn’t work unless you
know enough about it.”

Well, you’ve just heard someone mention “Internet Marketing,” and you might want to
know. Don’t worry; I am going to explain everything about it with real facts and
examples.

Did you know that marketing leaders will spend 75% of their total marketing budget on
digital marketing rather than traditional marketing by 2021?

You might be surprised by the above fact, but let me tell you after reading this post you
will accept this for sure.

How? I will tell you, but before that let me ask you a question,

There are many effective ways to promote a product or service with the traditional
method through radio, television, newspapers, magazines and many other things, but
even though many people prefer the internet marketing. Why?

If you have any answer, please share below in the comments.

What is Internet Marketing?

Internet Marketing is a method to promote a business or brand and its products or
services through the internet. By using internet tools, we can drive traffic, leads, and
sales.

You can also call internet marketing as web advertising, digital marketing or online
advertising.
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The use of Internet Marketing has changed the way of promoting brand products or
services.

It not only helps in promoting but also allows for online customer support through 24/7
services.

There are many ways to promote a product or services like Email marketing, Affiliate
marketing, Paid Advertising, SEO, etc. which we will talk about that in detail.

Types of Internet Marketing

As I said before that online marketing is dominating the traditional one which consists
of a range of main tactics and strategies including,

1. Email Marketing
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Content Marketing
4. Social Media Marketing
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
6. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
7. Paid Advertising

So, these are the methods most widely used in today’s world.

Now you might ask a question of how these methods got replaced by the traditional
ones?

I have answer for that…. let’s see below,

Email Marketing

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First, let us understand what Email Marketing is all about?

Email Marketing is a method to develop relations with customers and to reach out to
more ones by using emails to promote products and services.

As the name itself indicates that the marketing is done with the help of emails.

After reading this, you may be curious to know how effective these emails are and how
these emails affect the psychology of customers, which helps in boosting sales?

Ok, I want to share some facts where you can estimate by yourself.

In 2019 alone, 293.6 billion emails were sent and received each day – (well, that’s
a massive one).
72% of consumers prefer email as their source of business communication. (here
you can observe that customer’s preference have more effect on emails)

Now let’s get back to the question, how effective are these emails?

It allows the recipient to read messages at their leisure and respond at their
convenience.
It is free and can be easily forwarded.
It can be used to communicate with the masses of people simultaneously.

I think these reasons are enough to prove that emails are very effective.

Now let’s talk about Affiliate Marketing, which is another type of Internet Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing

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Affiliate Marketing is a process of promoting (product or service) through links that are
posted on a website or any other medium in which the marketer gets a commission by
purchasing through that link.

This type of marketing is one of the best ways to grow your business because there are
4.54 billion people active on the internet as of April 2020.

So you can imagine the usage of websites in which you can also promote and earn
money.

You may ask me how this is possible? Let’s see.

It helps broaden your audience.

It can boost your reputation.
It’s Cost-effective.
Affiliates can rapidly scale your traffic and sales.
It doesn’t require a sizable investment on the part of an affiliate.
It can gain more customers without spending valuable time in search of them.

So you might have observed that in websites you visit will have a separate menu for
Affiliates.

What many people do is that they write a content/blog about that product and promote
it by putting up the link.

In this way, a customer enters into the link and purchases any product or service, which
makes the marketer earn some commission.

The main advantage of this Affiliate Marketing is that there is no limit to earn.
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Many of them build e-commerce websites and earn through commission.

The best affiliate program which is liked by most is Amazon Affiliate Program.

This process may sound easy, but you have to build trust among customers. Just
putting away the links doesn’t work.

My suggestion is not to spam people with links, which will be more annoying to the
people.

If you want to read more about Affiliate Marketing, then check this post: Affiliate
Marketing: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide 2020

Let us discuss another type of marketing called Content Marketing. Let us know what it
is all about.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is a method of creating and distributing consistent and valuable

content to attract a targeted audience.

This type of marketing is said to be the heart of the most successful digital marketing
campaigns. Because it is mainly focused on creating a valuate and relevant content that
really connects with the company’s audience.

But you may still be wondering why content marketing is important?

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So these are the reasons,

Great content helps influence conversions.

Creating great content is a cost-effective way to bring new leads.
Content enables your brand to showcase your subject matter expertise.
Good relationships can be built with great content.
Content Marketing helps you set yourself apart from your competitors.
Content helps support nearly every other digital marketing strategy.
Improves brand reputation by building trust through content marketing.

And the list goes on….

Now, I want to share some interesting facts about Content Marketing.

78% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads.
70% believe that organizations providing custom content are interesting in
building good relationships with them.

In this way, Content marketing is quickly becoming the best way to attract and convert
these customers.

There are also different types of content marketing including,

1. Blogging
2. Video
3. Podcast
4. Infographics
5. Email
6. E-books
7. Lead Magnets
8. Webinars, etc.

Now we will move on to Social Media Marketing – the popular type of marketing.

Social Media Marketing

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Social Media Marketing is a type of internet marketing where products or services are
promoted using Social media platforms.

Who doesn’t use social media these days? Well, everyone uses it.

When we think about social media then our brain recollects media like

But did you know that,

1. There are 3.725 billion active social media users.

2. The average daily time spent on Social media is 142 minutes a day.
3. 81% of all small and medium businesses use some kind of social platform.

Well, the main interesting fact is that this type of marketing started with publishing and
sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their website and generate
leads.

Now, I will share my views on what ways Companies get profits from these social media
by,

1. increasing brand awareness.

2. generating leads and boosting conversions.
3. making relationships with customers.
4. learning from competitors.

So, this is all about Social Media Marketing. Now we are going to discuss an interesting
and important topic called “SEO.”
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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

What is search engine optimization? It’s a question that is asked repeatedly by people
with a website.

It sounds REALLY important, but most people find themselves getting puzzled because
they don’t know where to start in getting their website optimized for search.

Generally, Search engine optimization consists of two processes. The first is getting a
website configured so a search engine like Google can index it correctly, and the second
is making sure your website is in the top search results when someone Googles your
products or brand names.

I can also define SEO as “the practice of increasing the organic traffic and making
exposure to your brand through search engine results.”

There are many types of SEO like,

1. Technical SEO
2. On-page SEO
3. Off-page SEO
4. Content SEO
5. Local SEO
6. Mobile SEO

For a better understanding, I will explain it with a simple example.

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Consider a scenario where you want to know about “SEO.” Then you will go to google
search engine and type SEO, and you will get some results.

From the above example, you can see a list of websites explaining SEO. Then, you will
read the meta description and check that link.

So what happened here is that Google arranged the websites in order by using some
algorithms.

The main question arises here that why google uses algorithms to keep websites in an
order?

I, too, got this doubt when I am learning about SEO. Then I got the answer. I will
explain it simply.

Imagine 100 sites are talking about SEO, but how can you decide which page to show to
the user?

To show the best results, it considers some keywords you type and match/compare it
with different webpages and displays the results.

Always remember that Google always tries to show the best results to the user’s needs.

This is the basic way to understand SEO.

Now let us know the facts of SEO.

Google’s search algorithm uses more than 200 factors to rank websites.
The average content length of the top position Google article contains 2,416
words.
High-quality content and link building are the two most important signals used by
Google to rank your website for search.
In 2019, 52% of all worldwide online traffic came from mobile, 45% from desktop.
Long-tail keyword searches have a click-through rate of 3% to 5% higher than
generic searches.
The top four ranking factors are website visits, time on site, pages per session, and
bounce rate.
Updating and republishing old blog posts with new content and images can
increase organic traffic by as much as 106%.

Don’t worry, you will learn these all later, but the main things to know are On-page and
Off-page SEO.

On-page is the practice of improving the design code, functionality, and navigation
structure of the website to give the user an easy way to navigate your website.

Many things come under On-page SEO like,

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 1. Keywords
2. Content
3. Page Titles
4. Meta Description
5. URL Structure, etc.

Whereas Off-page consists of all the activities of link building to build high-quality
backlinks from various websites.

Now, what are these backlinks? What is the importance of it?

Well, backlinks are those links that are referred by other websites.

For example, you wrote a blog post about Email marketing, and someone read your post
and got impressed with that.

Of course, he/she does is that they refer/share your post by posting your link into their
website.

So what happens when you get backlinks to your blog or website?

Get quality traffic to your blog post.

SEO rankings increase for sure.

You can use free SEO tools in Moz, which is the best SEO website in terms of software,
resources, guides, and many more things. Click Here

You can also use Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest, which is also free keywords checker. Click
Here

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

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Many people get confused between SEO and SEM. Why? Because they sound similar.

Search engine marketing is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of
websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages primarily through
paid advertising.

Search Engine Marketing is a big category in Internet Marketing where SEO lies in it.

SEM mainly consists of SEO and Paid search. If we further analyze they are divided into
many types like,

Paid Search Ads

PPC (pay per click)
CPC (Cost per click)
CPM (Cost per thousand impressions)

You may notice that these things are similar to SEO. In further, you will read about Paid
Advertising, which is also similar to SEM because, as you that they all belong to SEM.

Well, these are some amazing facts of SEM,

48% spent their budget on Google Display Ads.

27% Google+ pages.
22% spent part of their budget on remarketing.
20% used YouTube ads.
20% Google Display Network.
13% click to call.
12% contextual targeting.
8% mobile and site links.
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Paid Advertising

Paid Advertising is a method of getting organic traffic to the ads and getting indexed top
results by paying some amount to the search engine.

The advertiser should pay the publisher (search engine) each time someone clicks
through the link.

Pay-per-click (PPC) started out as the placement of small text ads in the search engines
in the year 2002.

Then later, Bing started to place the ads later in the year 2006.

For a better understanding, look at the below picture.

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From the above picture, you can see that ads are displayed first and indexed above the
sites.

Let us understand what is PPC, CPC, and CPM?

PPC – stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing in which advertisers

pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked.
CPC – stands for Cost per click. It is the amount you pay for each click on one of
your PPC ads in platforms such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads.

Your Cost per click is determined by several factors, including your maximum bid, your
Quality Score, and the ad rank of other advertisers bidding for the same keyword.

CPM – stands for Cost per thousand impressions. Cost per thousand also called
Cost per mille, is a marketing term used to denote the price of 1,000
advertisement impressions on one webpage.

If a website publisher charges $2.00 CPM, that means an advertiser must pay $2.00 for
every 1,000 impressions of its ad.

How are these ads determined by the costs? Let’s see.

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So, the Cost depends on the demand for the keyword. If the demand is high, you will
have to pay more to display ads.

History of Internet Marketing

After reading about Internet Marketing, you might feel surprised by thinking how much
big concept it is?

I also felt the same when I understood About Internet Marketing and some questions
raised like how these all started? How was it before?

Here is the story back in 1960, where for the first time, the term appeared.

It was difficult because there were very little interaction and no communities.

The first banner advertising started in 1993, and the first web crawler (called
WebCrawler) was created in 1994 – this was the beginning of search engine
optimization (SEO).

During those days, social media was not even a dream. But at this point, it shows just
how far we have come in a short time.

At first, the internet was used for only exchanging information and emails. But, within a
short time, the marketers thought that these tools might help to grow their business.

Email started to appear in 1979, CompuServe (the first major U.S. commercial Online
Service) offered email and other technical services to the personal computer users.

Till then, it was used to share information, and then business owners started to reveal
the marketing advantages to the email service.

Later Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990, which was the first web
browser.
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The National Science Foundation has been credited for creating ‘the first internet.’

Then in the year 1991, when the foundation opened the use of its internet for the
business purpose, business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce gained popularity.

Then Amazon, the leading online seller in the world, started its journey in 1995.

Once Google started to grow at pace, and Blogger was launched in 1999, the modern
internet age began. Blackberry, a brand not connected with innovation anymore,
launched mobile email, and Myspace appeared.

Myspace was the true beginning of social media as we define it today. Still, it was not as
successful as it could have been from a user experience perspective and lead to
downfall.

Thus, Internet marketing began to grow since 1996. The acceptance of internet
marketing is growing day by day as it can offer an incredible opportunity to people who
would prefer to launch their own business on the internet.

The history of Internet marketing tells that it is a new marketing technique; it has
brought a marketing revolution in history faster than any other marketing technique.

Traditional vs Digital Marketing

Let us have a quick comparison of Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing.

Traditional Marketing
Advantages: –

1. Reach local target audience easily.

2. Easy to understand.
3. It can save hard copies like magazine ads, flyers, etc.

Disadvantages: –

1. It is less engaging.
2. It is more expensive.
3. It is difficult to measure ROI (return of investment).

Digital Marketing
Advantages: –

1. It can target a vast audience.

2. It is more engaging.
3. It is Cost-effective.
4. Instant Publicity and results.
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 5. Easy to measure ROI.
6. Brand Building.
7. Suitable across Industries

Disadvantages: –

1. Visible negative comments.

2. Regulation by search engines.

Conclusion

I want to conclude that internet marketing has tremendously changed the way of
promoting products and services.

In this digital era, digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing
plans.

It is the most inexpensive way to reach your target market, regardless of the size of your
business

It also helps you to promote your brand and attract a vast majority of the audience
quickly.

Traditional Marketing is good for a business, but if you want to engage a worldwide
audience, then using Digital Marketing is a better choice. It’s completely upon you.

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The whole post is not about comparing the two different marketing; it just understands
past and future development/changes that took place.

Before taking any step, study the market and analyze it before you make any mistake.

I am sure that you understood everything about Internet Marketing and its types which
I mentioned in this post.

So, what is your view on marketing? Do you use Internet Marketing to promote your
brand? Comment below.

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