Ultimate Online Marketing Guide For [N-O-O-B-S]

I never thought today I would be living a lifestyle of an Internet Marketer. In this journey I’ve faced lot of failures and success, and only with the experience of Marketing online you can learn some inner secrets and ideas.

Today I honestly wanted to share some of the inside secrets of Internet Marketing. For people who wanted to start with Internet marketing can use this guide and learn how internet marketing works and will get some ideas too.

• You may have noticed many internet marketers and internet marketing niche gurus claiming they make huge money by selling eBooks but the true fact is, you can only make millions when you make money out of selling your own products. Keeping it aside, to be really successful in online marketing, you really need to know how to plan things to do in your business. You must have a marketing plan. So what does an Internet marketer do? What are the ways to do online marketing? This is purely a noob guide and will be helpful to people who wanted to start with Internet marketing.
• Internet Marketing or Online marketing will consist of marketing the product through Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Organic (SEO/SEM), Conversion Rate Optimization, Analytics, Content Marketing and Pay Per Click (PPC). Today we are going to learn how to do marketing under these topics.

Social Media Marketing

What is social media marketing? Marketing your products on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc. First thing is to claim your brand name. Only when you claim your brand name, you can market the product effectively. Next is setting up twitter, Facebook accounts. On Twitter, make use of full resources like Twitter handles, background image (this acts as a social landing page), bio space etc. On Facebook, create a conversion oriented Facebook page.

• Before marketing your product to zero fans, seed some 50-100 fans on your Facebook page. On Twitter, consistency is very important. If you don’t find time daily, schedule your tweets.
• If you have a blog, connect your blog to Facebook and Twitter. You can even send all your tweets to Facebook page. Once you schedule tweets to send it later, you can connect your Facebook page to your twitter account. So when you push the tweets, it publishes them to Facebook page. If you have blog, you can connect your blog to Twitter using Feedburner socialize service or third party sites like twitterfeed.com. To connect your blog to Facebook, you can use Facebook apps like RSS Graftti.
• Build a following on Twitter and have something to say. You must either be a creator or curator. Apart from Facebook and Twitter, you can start networking on LinkedIn. Leave twitter open in live tabs to catch up with @mentions. You can even interact with people who talk about your products. Use Search function effectively to catch up what people are talking about your product and develop a well efficient digital marketing team to assist people querying about your products.
• Conduct viral Social Media contests once a while. Only then you can make more people to follow you and let them know about your product when you time your tweets, match with your audience hours. There are best times to tweet. 9AM PST is a great one. Align the time with your customers for maximum retweet potential. To schedule tweets you can use tools like Hootsuite.
• Only if you convert more fans to like your page, the more traffic Facebook will create for you when you make announcements there. Recently, Facebook has launched the sponsored element where you can make your announcement to reach large audience by making it as sponsored one. You need to buy some credits and turn the update into a sponsored one.
• While creating social contest, make sure the first rule to enter into the contest is sharing the information on social networking sites. You can vastly increase your reach and the chances of a contest going viral by using right social media widgets.
• Every Business has to do a market research before investing in social media marketing. Certain business may be effective when they market more on Facebook, for some Twitter may work. So let’s analyze what Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are good at and at what way it can boost up your business.
• If it’s all about customer communication and brand exposure, Facebook is what you need to target. A central and open communication portal, Facebook is the hub through which businesses want to drive social interaction. Positive or negative, companies can use Facebook to get their messages out and to receive customer feedback. One live example is Flipkart.com.
• When I posted a query on my order with my order ID, I got a call from their customer executive. Facebook can also be used for brand exposure. If you’re using pages as a persona allows companies to position their brands on their relevant pages. If you wanted to drive traffic to your website using Facebook, only few had achieved this. Certain post gets viral and may drive traffic to your site, but driving a steady flow of traffic to every message or post is not so good.
• Similarly, Twitter can also be targeted for customer communication and brand exposure. LinkedIn is not so good for customer communication, but great tool for personal branding and showing professional prowess in your organization. Encourage employees to maintain complete profiles to show off your solid team. LinkedIn is very poor in driving traffic to your website and low SEO values.
• Even Facebook and Twitter has low SEO values because Google doesn’t want Facebook to be part of their ranking algorithm which is based on social signal. They have Google+ for it. Twitter links are nofollow but the social component is real and expected to become more prominent over time.
• If you want greater SEO values, YouTube is the place. It is good for building links back to your site because the videos rank very well. YouTube channels are great way to send some really good exposure and SEO back to your brand.
• Before I end on Social media marketing, social media is the key for businesses small and large when using the internet to drive success to their both online and offline businesses. I would like mention few stats – 53% of people on twitter suggest companies and or products in their tweets with 48% delivering on their intention to buy.
• 61% use social media to identify and attract new customers. 61% of companies use social media for customer engagement.  75% of small businesses have a company page on a social networking site. The social media adoption by small business has doubled from 12% to 24% in the last year.

Email Marketing

The second most Internet marketing method is Email Marketing. In short, what is email marketing? It is directly marketing a specific product to a set of people through email as a medium. It can be send to cold lists or customer database.

• To start with email marketing, first you need to choose an online email provider. Do not choose outlook. Some of the best choices are iContact, Pinpointe etc. Be careful in selecting the email marketing tool for creating emails campaigns and tracking their progress. If you’re using any third party services to collect email addresses, you can use this email marketing tool to import the contacts and push them your email.
• Second step after choosing the right email provider is creating a branded email template. Check out some of the templates at themeforest to get an idea how to design your own template. If you find relevant templates on the web, don’t hesitate to purchase. A professional template will convert more for sure.
• Use a drip campaign for education and retention. If you’re new to drip campaigns, what are they? The drip campaign is the term for one or more emails you can automatically have sent to your subscribers based on certain rules. Based on certain triggers, these emails sent to each new subscriber after they sign up to a list or perform certain actions.
• You need to create a series of emails to help lead people through your sales process. For example, let people opt in to receive daily tips or new feature updates. This article will explain you clearly on drip campaigns.
• When you’re collecting email lists, segment your customers by creating separate lists. You must A/B split test your emails to polish your messaging and open rates. Well planned A/B testing can create a huge impact on your business.
• Most of the email campaign softwares will have inbuilt tools for A/B testing. You just need to split the list into two and send them two different versions of your campaign and compare them manually to check the better one. Mainly the click through rate and conversion rates are to be noticed. It is best to test out simultaneously and often for the better results. I would like to write about it in detail explaining the do’s and don’ts of A/B testing in another post.
• Other things to concentrate in Online marketing for an upcoming product is to gather emails for a product launch by adding a form to the coming soon page. Giving away something in return for customer data like giving away some paid resource for free in exchange for email etc.
• If you giveaway something with great value and you will get word of mouth and viral traffic. Answer the questions about your upcoming product on various forums.  Establish yourself as an expert in your field of business by answering questions in detail. The better the answer, the more likely people will be to seek out your product or service on your site.

Content Marketing

Great content can drive high traffic. All you need to do is start a corporate blog and giveaway free knowledge. Start your marketing on day 1 and you will build a target for future marketing efforts and organic search. Don’t be afraid to giveaway your secrets. Establish yourself as a thought leader and you will build a loyal following that will become advocates. Unique content with catchy titles can create a buzz and traffic when you submit your post to sites like reddit and stumbleupon.

• Bookmark your contents on delicious and other social platforms. Researchers use delicious, stumbleupon to find new content. Make sure you have plenty of content to be found. You will also get repeat traffic from people who bookmark you to come back later.
• Create an editorial calendar and stick to it. Enable social sharing buttons for your blog post. People will be more inclined to share your content if you make it really easy for them. You also gain the extra benefit of social proof when your share counts hit high numbers.
• Guest Post on big blogs can provide massive traffic spikes. Try to make them epic and engaging every comment you receive on the post. Write blog posts that mention other relevant tools and companies. They will likely share it with their audience and may return the favor in future. These are few ways of content marketing.

Google Analytics

Also you should setup Google analytics and add your site to track conversion goals and funnels. You can also annotate important events in Google analytics. You can even add important custom reports to your dashboard. Google analytics is very much important to online marketing. This helps you to discover underperforming areas of your site.

USEFUL: 15+ Uses Of Google Analytics You Might Not Know

Google Webmaster Tools

Likewise, a Google webmaster tool is one great resource for online marketing. Setup webmaster tools account, add and verify your website. Research and define your core organic search keywords and then architect your site for SEO by choosing targeted categories. You can use tools like SEOmoz campaigns to optimize for search. Never forget, link building is great way to get some traffic. Producing great content will get people to link back to your site bringing new visitors. Contact link authors to suggest better anchor text.

Google Adwords

Finally Create a Google Adwords account with free coupon, run a test PPC campaign using landing pages, use one landing page for each ad group, work on your message match to improve quality score and improve your campaigns with some expert services. There are Pro PPC services like Boost CTR that guarantee to make your ads work better. More traffic will result. You will get an instant spike in traffic by running a PPC campaign. Try targeting cheaper long tail keywords to make your budget last longer.