Online Advertising and Marketing Options

While the transformative and paradigm-shifting nature of the Internet is difficult to quantify this early in the game, the invention of the World Wide Web has forever changed how people communicate and do business. It's difficult to see into the future as to where all this is headed, but for the present time the Internet is the ultimate barrier breaker as far as commerce and entrepreneurship is concerned. As the traditional models of big media, advertising and marketing break down and become less relevant a new force of decentralized networking emerges whereby the average user can influence opinions and shape consumer tastes.

So what does all that seeming pseudo-babble even mean and how does it affect you? In simple terms, the world as we know it has in many ways shifted from a “client-server” model to a “peer-to-peer” model. When you look for advice on what restaurant to dine at tonight, chances are you check out Yelp.com. If you need a new PC, you probably go to Amazon.com, compare prices and look at user reviews to see what others are saying about a particular model. In the old days of a few major national television networks, a small number of people controlled the overall message that everyone else received and largely believed in.

Those days are gone, and thankfully won't be back. Broadcasting a message on the Internet as far as marketing and advertising is far more egalitarian and plays on a far more level field. “Street cred” and reputation matter far more than dollars in the populist world of the web. When it comes to advertising on the web for anything, the social network is king. You can buy publicity and face time, but you can't buy legitimacy. The two aren't mutually exclusive, however. The two main categories of Internet marketing then are paid ads, or PPC, and organic web advertising, involving SEO, or Search Engine Optimization techniques.

As far as paid ads are concerned, the focus is on grabbing attention from the get go. Consider it as marketing to those who have a short attention span or are in a big hurry. Pay Per Click advertisements appear next to the Search Engine Results Pages whenever someone enters a query in major search engines like Yahoo, Google or Bing. Advertisers bid on keywords that users search for, with the more popular search terms costing more than the niche terms that are less in demand. It works on an Ebay, bidding type model with all the betting psychology that entails. It is, quite frankly, fairly complicated and requires a lot of statistical analysis and research to be effective.

While paying for advertising is an immediate and supremely effective way to drive traffic to any site or web space, it is not for the faint of heart and requires constant attention to achieve a favorable ROI on the upfront costs of advertising. A more organic, yet slower way to obtain traffic and exposure is through so-called article marketing and social networking. This approach relies far more on quality content and “word of mouth” than PPC. It involves posting helpful, unique articles on blogs, websites and social news networks to let people know about your sites without being too forward or artificial.

There are a number of ways to go about organic, SEO based marketing and advertising that are more long lasting but also more labor intensive than PPC. Aside from blogs and other feeder websites that lead to the ultimate destination of a sale-focused landing page, there is the ultimate goal of social news aggregation site recognition. This can significantly boost traffic and is often referred to as the “Digg” or “Twiter” effect. Essentially, it's a Hail Mary shot at a profile boosting post on such sites that may lead to a large number of people visiting your site based on one solid post or submission. It rarely works, but when it does the leverage of such large sites and the potential visitor volume can be game changing.

At the end of the day, both PPC and organic, legwork intensive article and SEO-based content marketing have their place. They both have their own strengths and weaknesses and the major focus of your own advertising and marketing efforts will depend on your own specific goals and how fast you want to achieve them. The new force of decentralized networking emerging on the Internet allows the “little guy” to leverage the awesome power of the web to market products, influence consumer tastes and create profits through online advertising and affiliate sales. Either way you slice it, online marketing is a totally different game than traditional marketing and requires both smarts and creativity to stay on top.