SEO

If you're starting a business venture nowadays, you're no doubt thinking about your online marketing strategy. Or, at least, you should be! Online marketing has been proven for the past few years to be much more cost effective than "normal" offline strategies. It only costs about $8 to buy a domain. You can get hosting for less than $10 per month. With a content management system like WordPress, you can have a great business website up and running in no time! Now, all you need is traffic!

Aye! There's the rub, as Shakespeare probably would have said, had he known about the Internet. You see, just because you have a killer website up and running doesn't mean anyone is coming to it. You need traffic. And there are three main ways to get it. You can create content on your website that people find when they search something. That's called Search Marketing. You can buy ads on a network like Google AdWords. Or, you can drive traffic to your site via Facebook and Twitter. That, my friends, is called social networking. Each of these has its pluses and minuses. Let's look at each, in turn.

Search marketing is probably the most cost effective of all three of these. Basically, what you do is figure out how people are already searching for content that has something to do with what your business is selling, then create laser targeted content for your site that will be found when someone does one of these searches. This takes research, and a great deal of writing, but actually once you get the hang of it, it's not that hard to do. The great thing about search marketing is once you get a page on your site ranked for a given search, it tends to stay there. So, you do the work once, and you reap the benefits for a long time. Not so with PPC, or pay per click.