Marketing will be the lifeblood of any business. Marketing builds awareness. Awareness lets potential customers discover your product or service. Just as with a bricks and mortar business, marketing is important so that you can tell your friends your company offer exists.
Although the Web could be regarded as a media channel where prospects might find your copy every single day, the fact is that if you don't attract those prospects to your site first then your efforts are in vain.
The phrase 'World Wide Web' should certainly use a fourth word, 'Wilderness', because that's where any site begins and stays if no efforts are designed to attract visitors.
Any business that builds a store, as an example, must make efforts to draw custom to be able to succeed. The same principle applies online and just like within the offline world, the quantity of benefits reaped is proportional towards the quantity of effort place in.
So that you can maintain any kind of competitive advantage, sustained efforts must be created using a long term plan in mind.
In comparison to traditional offline ways of marketing, one of the distinct advantages of marketing online is the speed of which new marketing strategies can be used to test. For instance, a pay-per-click campaign could be launched and the results analysed all in a single day. Such campaigns can promote the smallest businesses among the largest industry relevant websites viewed by a large number of qualified prospects.
One of the best Internet marketing fallacies is those services offering automated submission to a huge selection of search engines like google as an effective means of search results promotion. When 80% of search results usage is completed using the three largest engines like google (Google, Yahoo! and MSN), the only others worth being contained in are those which are highly relevant and/or localised. Which means that automated submission services such as these can offer limited benefit and then and then those websites that do not already can be found in a search engine's listings.
The strength of these kind of automated and unspecific services quickly becomes diluted when they're made easily available to all.
For an effective Internet marketing that gives significant and measurable results, there's no alternative to a well-structured, customised approach making the perfect use of the technologies available.
Creating a successful Internet business begins with creating a website and continues with effective marketing.