Business has only two functions marketing and innovation. Milan Kundera
To most people, online marketing is a convoluted world filled with intricacies and nuances that are simply too much to grasp or consume. In fact, those people are kind of right. From the outside looking in, online marketing is confusing. Its complex and perplexing at the same time.
Yet, as confusing as it might seem or be, without a clear understanding of what online marketing is and what it isnt, significant progress cant be made on the web. In fact, if youve struggled to get the proverbial word out regarding your business, then you likely know just how frustrating it can be to market or sell anything on the internet.
Not only is the industry itself so vast and clutteredwith a never-ending demand of aptly-diverseskill sets that need to be masteredto achieve success, but its also overwhelming. To put it bluntly, online marketing is scary. Yes. Absolutely scary. In fact, I used to be frightened by the daunting thought of having to go it alone.
I know that Im not alone in this feeling. Most people out there, especially those whoare busy building up their businesses, are intimidated by online marketing. With all the facets involved, and just how pressed most of us are for time on any given day, its easy to see why most people tend to feelthat way.
However, online marketing, for all intents and purposes, doesnt have to be that overwhelming. In fact, anyone can master the art of marketing anything on the internet as long as they adhere to a few fundamental principles. In this guide, not only am I going to convey those principles to you, but Im also going to give you an in-depth look at what makes the industry tick.
Still, before even diving into anything like that, youve likely come to this page, not just to learn about this often-confusing field, but also to digest and understand it, able to wield a variety of disciplines to get the word out. This isnt just about driving more traffic to your website. Traffic is great. But once trafficarrives, if you dont know what to do with it, your efforts will be largely wasted.
Online marketing is simply any form of advertising done on the internet. It can take on many shapes and forms. It can be done organically for free. Or it can be paid for. Either approach features a number of effective strategies and methods to move the proverbial needle in the right direction.
The termonline marketing is often confused withdigital marketing. While at first glance they might seem to be one and the same, digital marketing also refers to display advertising and other digital means that might not be directly connected to the internet.
Online marketing covers a variety of topics. In particular, there are seven distinct segments that comprise the online marketing industry. Search engine optimization (SEO), is one such organic method for boosting your visibility on search engines like Google. In turn, leveraging an ad platform such as Adwords, on the same search engine, would be another way to target identical keywords through paid advertising means, also known as search engine marketing (SEM).
Another form of marketing on the internet is known as, content marketing. Content is marketed by spreading your message through a variety oflayers (i.e. articles, infographics, social, etc) but requires some level of expertise and precision throughout the execution of the strategy. As simple or straightforward as it might sound, if its not done the right way, its largely a waste of your time.
All of these are means to the same end. The goal? Get the word out. Get people informed about whatever product, service or information youre offering. And, ultimately, boost your visibility. Whether youre ranking or advertising on search engines, or youre leveraging the power of social media marketing through platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, its all for the purpose of achieving the same results.
Today, online marketers mostly salivate over organic traffic and building large followers on social media platforms. Or, similarly, creating a massive following on video platforms like YouTube. Clearly, we all know why its such a big draw. This type of marketing is free and unfettered, not costing you a single red cent.
What does cost you, however, is the time in executing any of these tactics. We all know that SEO is hard. But when it comes to online marketing, that sweat equity pays off over time. When traffic is coming unencumbered to your website in the form of thousands of free and highly-targeted visitors per day, you ultimately realize that all those long hours you put in were worth something.
Now, if youre the type of person thats acutely interested in placing ads, and youre well aware of how the ad networks operate, you could opt to market your business online through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Every time your ad is clicked on, you get charged a fee, also known as your bid. Bids can range anywhere from a few cents upwards to $5, $10 or even $50 dollars and higher for some of the more competitive keyword searches.
Another form of online marketing is what we call affiliate marketing. Affiliates generally dont market products of their own, instead opting to market products for other companies or individuals, either directly on their website or through some means of email marketing.
Affiliates receive a commission for every product they sell and sometimes for every lead that they send towards a company. However, affiliate marketing is no easy measure. Unless you have a massive following or a big list, succeeding as an affiliate marketer is downright difficult.
Clearly, when it comes to email marketing, unless youve already built a substantial and very targeted list, youre faced with major hurdles and difficulties. Even if you attempt to build your list through solo-ad providers, youll likely find the costs for any semblance of quality to be exorbitant.
For those that have built a large subscriber base over the years, the money most certainly is in the list.
One of the most important segments of online marketing is SEO. However, SEO is a behemoth on its own. The fact is that it takes a considerable amount of effort to understand just whats involved in SEO. The fact that there are over 200 different ranking factors that go into Googles current search algorithm certainly dont make things easy whatsoever.
Still, SEO can be better understood by breaking it down into its three fundamental components based on the core concept of trust. Trust is at the heart of SEO. If Google doesnt already trust you, then no matter what you do, youre going to find it difficult to rank.
The question then becomes, how do you build Googles trust?
Were talking about Google because it has such an enormous share of thesearch market. According to one study, it dominates at nearly 80% of the search share in the United States. Thats enormous. Around the world? Were talking more like 70%, which is still huge.
So when it comes to SEO, we need to worry about building up Googles trust. But how does that work?
Googles trust is founded on three separate concepts and over 200+ ranking algorithm factors (rules) that are divvied up into those three separate concepts.
In the image, youll notice that trust is equal to the age, authority and content of a website or webpage. I say website or webpage since this trust factor is evaluated against both webpages and websites. So you have a websites total aggregate trust and also a webpages standalone trust.
This is important when attempting to understand the rank and position of authority content. Authority content is simply content thats created away from your website, whereas anchor content is content thats created directly on your website or blog.
The age of your website doesnt refer to the date it was originally registered. Were talking about the indexed age, or the date that Google first found or indexed your site. The age of a webpage itself is a little bit different as it refers to the freshness of the content. If the content is outdated, it will rank lower. If the content is what we call evergreen content, that page will rank a little bit higher depending on its age.
However, dont get me wrong. If Google simply found your website a few years back and you did nothing with it since then, it wont help you much. Indexed age is also rolled into what happened during that period between the first indexing and now. This relates to things like link velocity and content curation over time. Its highly complex and involved.
Ive seen many people dispute the fact that age has something to do with ranking. Well, it does. But its not just the indexed age; its what happened since the indexing. Be sure to keep that in mind. You cant simply work on a blog or website for a couple of months, then forget about it and expect to rank very high. Google demands constant attention to your content when related to the indexed age.
Yes, it can seem confusing at first, but think about a regular business for a moment. If a business opens a store, then simply forgets to update things like its prices or product descriptions or anything else related to its core business, it wouldnt be so reliable would it? If it changed its hours and forgot to tell customers, people arriving at specific times might get upset.
Authority relates to the importance of a website. Plain and simple. But not so simple, in fact. What makes a website important? Is it the quantity of the links? Is it the amount of content?
Well, it is, in fact, derived from a number of factors. But here is the basis of how it works.
Authority is derived not only from the quantity of the links, but also the quality of the links. Where are the links coming from? Are they coming from relevant content? Are the linkscoming throughorganically or are they being paid for? Paying for links is a huge violation of Googles rules and you absolutely should never do that.
Another thing to consider about a sites authority is not only the quality and quantity of the links, nor just how relevant the content is that theyre coming from, but also the velocity and diversity of those links. Are they constantly coming from the same websites or blogs, or is there a wide variety? And justhow quickly are those links being created (aka whats the velocity)?
When Google sees natural and organic links being created quickly, and that number is increasing month to month, then the velocity is rising. This healthy garnering of links doesnt happen by itself. You need great content if you want the links to keep coming in. But you also want links coming in from everywhere. This is called IP diversification.
Google knows that links coming in from all over the world means that the content is very good. If links are naturally being created from relevant content and this is happening in countries everywhere, it means you have amazing content and your authority will naturally rise over time. Not overnight. Nothing happens overnight with Google.
When we talk about authority websites, were talking about websites that have high authority. This can be quantified. Googles core original algorithm for quantifying the importance of any webpage is called PageRank. However, other companies have stepped in and performed their own analyses.
One example is MozBar, which was created by a leading SEO company called Moz, provides a nifty search tool that analyzes both the Domain Authority (DA) and the Page Authority (PA). You can download the free Chrome extension hereor the FireFox plugin here.
The original PageRank formula was ranked out of 10 with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. The MozBar DA and PA ranking factors are ranked out of 100, with 0 being the lowest and 100 being the highest. Either way you look at it, none of these factors are completely transparent or indicative of the current rank. They are simply estimations by forecasters.
They might be close to the actual number, but you should never assume that the number is concrete. When you run a test a of a search while turning on the MozBar for example, youll get a small toolbar that appears beneath each search along with a link that you can click to check a deeper link analysis of the factors related to each item.
The search you see in the image is actually for the term make money online, which is arguably one of the most competitive search terms on the internet. Youll notice that my article for Forbes ranks #1 here. However, youll notice that, although the DA outranks the listing #2 and #3, the PA does not. So how is that my result outranks the others?
That has very much to do with the quality of the content and the value that it delivers, which is the next component of trust that well discuss here briefly. I would suggest looking at the article to determine just how it differs from the other results that appear beneath it.
This is similar to the SEOQuake toolbar that I used to recommend using. It gives you a sort of x-ray lens into Googles search results, allowing you to see something similar to what those hungry search spiders are seeing when they crawl around the web and organize the worlds information.
If you take a close look at the search done for daily goal setting with SEOQuake being active, youll notice that I rank #1 for this search. However, where authority is somewhat skewed is that SEOQuake doesnt recognize a whole lot of links for my site. In fact, only 200 total as opposed to Life Hacks (#2 on the list) 134k links. Thats a fairly wide difference.
Yet, I still rank #1, effectively outranking a very popular authority site like Life Hack. That goes to show you that while authority does count, there are other factors when it comes to online marketing that are weighted more heavily for this result set to be achieved. So dont instantly think you wont be able to rank in the #1 sport without massive amounts of authority.
Content is king. It always has been and it always will be. For those that have mastered the art of content curation and storytelling, the online marketing world truly is their oyster. In fact, the worlds most talented digital sleuths know precisely how to slay with a story, effectively driving massive amounts of leads and sales.
When it comes to optimizing content, there are loads of rules to follow. Today, you need to build your content more for human visitors than for search engines. Dont concern yourself with a specific keyword density or ensuring that youve stuff the right keywords into your article. It doesnt quite work that way anymore.
Today, your content needs to be good. Very good. Excellent, in fact. It needs to be engaging enough so that your audience is compelled to share it. And it needs to deliver an enormous value-punch so that you quite literally knock the socks off both the search engines and the humans visiting your page.
It sounds complex. How are you supposed to setup your content to optimize it to rank at the top of Google? Well, for starters, it cant be thin. If youre serious about ranking #1 on Google, go all out with your content. Ensure its well-researched and that your sources are all cited, relevantly linking to external URLs that make sense.
The more time you take with your content, the more likely youll be to rank at the top of a particular keyword search.
Search engine marketing offers up a stark contrast to its counterpart, search engine optimization. Unlike SEO where the focus is on ranking organically, SEM revolves around paid advertising. However, its also important to note that SEM can incorporate SEO into its fold, but its primarily done for the purposes of placing paid ads.
For example, a professional SEM might do some keyword research and competitive analysis using tools like Adwords, Ahrefs, SEMRush, but it would mainly be for the purposes of checking out the best keywords to place ads for and also seeing just what the competition is doing.
However, if youre not a big spender on Adwords, dont expect to get detailed and accurate results on search volumes when searching through keywords to bid on. Google has since obfuscated much of those results for the newcomers in an effort to blur the waters for those looking for a competitive edge.
Every time you conduct a search on Google, youll see ads that display along the top. They used to display on the side and on the top, but Google has since altered that strategy, moving them solely to the top of its SERPs. Those ads can cost anywhere from 5 cents to upwards of $50.
The image displayed above is for the same search,make money online, but displaying the top results that appear through paid marketing before the organic results begin. If you have the budget, this is a great way to get exposure fast for whatever it is that youre offering, but it needs to be done the right way.
If you arent tracking your conversions using conversion pixels, then youre largely wasting your time. Both Facebook and Google provide you with the opportunity to really understand your search traffic and to find out there they dropped off or what leads resulted in sales, which areimportant parts of the equation when youre spending money to drive traffic.
With Facebook, their conversion pixels will help you to, not only track conversions of sales, but also can help with other events related to actions done on your website. Here are the events you can use to track your visitors from Facebook using the Facebook pixel with event tracking:
Can you see how useful this information can be for both segmenting and discovering what your advertising traffic is doing once it arrives to your website? Google also offers conversion trackingthrough its Adwords system with a somewhat similar event tracking. However, Google calls thisinclude in conversions.
Content marketing is a behemoth. Its one of the more involved types of marketing that you can do online and it actually serves to compliment your SEO strategies and tactics. Content marketing is also my go-to strategy when it comes to ranking anything on Google. Literally anything.
The way that content marketing works is rather straightforward, but the implementation is far more difficult. Why? It takes a considerable amount of sweat equity to wield this strategy. Not only do you need to write unique anchor content on your website or blog, but you need to write unique content to market that anchor content via authority sites.
Its not easy whatsoever. I have spent well over a thousand hours engaged in content marketing. Its not pretty whatsoever, especially when youre pressed for time and have a million other things to do. But its a necessary evil. That single strategy has helped me drive the most traffic to my websites over time.
How does it work?
I discuss this strategy in one of my SEO courses, which I would highly suggest you checking out if youre serious about learning how SEO and content marketing truly works. But heres the breakdown for you. In the image below, youll see two types of content marketing. You have the single-tier strategy and the double-tier strategy.
When youre pressed for time, the single-tier strategy is still effective. But its not as powerful as the double-tier strategy. Heres a breakdown of how this works:
The first step is to create the anchor content on your website. It has to be keyword-centric but not keyword-stuffed. It has to be engaging and relevant to your audience as well. Further, it cant be what we call thin content. Thin content is content thats basically filler content, which doesnt actually engage your audience.
What does engaging mean? It means that people spend time actually reading the content. Google knows the difference between engaging content and content thats thin or simply veers off onto tangents because people that read engaging content stay on the page long enough to read the whole thing.
When they stay there for that long, it means that your average time on the page is very high. Thats important to Google. Its also important to be engaging because whoever reads that content will want to share it. Shares and engagement levels play a big role in your ability to rank on search engines like Google.
In the image by Noah Kagan of OkDork, youll see the average shares by content length. Longer content, especially the type of longer content thats useful, gets shared more often. Those shares are important. They build authority and increase your level of trust with Google.
When it comes to content marketing, your content has to be lengthy. Especially the anchor content, which is the content that resides on your site or blog. You have to put a considerable amount of time into it. Make sure there are no errors in spelling or grammar, and ensure that there are high-quality images and videos that help to further explain your point or arguments.
You also need to cite your sources. If you find a study somewhere, be sure to link to it and give credit. Dont simply mention a study without linking to it. People are keenly interested in this type of data so dont hold back. In the following image by serpIQ, youll also notice that lengthier content ranks better and is far more likely to be in the top few results.
The second step in content marketing is to create authority content. That authority content needs to be similar to the original piece of content in question, but must also be absolutely unique. You should draw unique conclusions in the authority content and approach the topic from a unique perspective.
However, in the authority site content, ensure that you link to the original piece of content with a relevant keyword. All you need is that single keyword, which creates the bridge between the two pieces of content. The authority site content needs to be engaging as well.
You can use sites like Medium.com, Quora.com, LinkedIns publishing platform, YouTube and other sitesto create this kind of content. Its a process and it takes time. You simply have to put in the work. If youre serious about leveraging content marketing, then you need to do this process repeatedly.
For example, the more authority site content that directly links to your primary anchor content, the better. If I do a post on Wanderlust Worker, then I link to it from several authority sites with great content, each one of those drives up the visibility and authority of the primary anchor content.
The third step in the content marketing cycle is to share the authority site content. Why the authority site content? Simply put, its because of the power of juice transferal theory. Juice, which effectively refers to the power of links, is what makes content marketing so viable and effective.
Because authority sites are so popular, youre essentially getting all the link-juice built up from those sites over time when theres a link back to your relevant webpage. Now, even though the page you create is new, theres still link-juice there from the root domain of the authority site, but its not the same thing as a page on that site that already exists, has age and lots of authority independent of the root domain.
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The Definitive Guide to Online Marketing: Step-by-Step ...