Many businesses think that they can just launch an online store, and magically, customers will flock to their site. While there is some truth to this strategy, it usually takes a lot of effort and some trial and error to find the right balance of online marketing strategies to bring in the most revenue for your business.

If you’re looking to take your business online, it may be time to reassess your strategy. Instead of just throwing up a store and expecting customers to come to you, why not consider learning more about the strategies that work best for online marketing?

Here’s a look at the various ways you can market your business online, and which ones may be right for you.

Affiliate Marketing

When someone clicks a product or service link (or otherwise lands on your site) and makes a purchase within the next few hours or days, you’ll earn a commission. You don’t need a huge following to get started with affiliate marketing – some of the top affiliate marketers in the world make their money with just a few hundred followers.

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to invest in expensive ads or paid placements to get results. While you’re not going against the company, you’re effectively helping them by showing their products or services to potential customers.

Depending on how you structure your affiliate agreements with companies, you can also earn a commission when someone clicks a product link that leads to a product that they’ve already purchased. This is called “referral marketing,” and it’s an extremely effective strategy.

The key takeaway from all of this is that while it’s important to build a brand for your business, it’s also important to consider the various ways in which others can help you with promotion. If you’re looking to take your business online, you have many options for monetizing your efforts.

Display Advertising

If you’ve ever shopped online, you may have seen a pop-up ad or a full-screen ad that encourages you to visit a certain site. These are known as display ads, and they’re generally the best-performing type of internet marketing for traffic generation.

You place ads on relevant sites to target the audience that is most likely to engage with your product or service, and you’ll earn money when they click on the links or make a purchase.

You can also run paid search ads to get in front of the right audience.

Display ads work well with brand awareness and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, which we’ll discuss in more detail below. For now, it’s important to know that you don’t necessarily need to have a website to participate in display advertising.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of improving the ranking of your website or blog in search engines like Google. The higher your ranking, the more visible your blog posts are going to be in search results when someone types in a query.

In order to achieve top search engine rankings, you need to do the following:

• Create unique, content-rich blog posts that are relevant to your target audience.
• Make sure that these posts stay fresh and valuable to your audience.
• Curate a schedule of blog posts and maintain consistency.
• Incorporate keywords into your content where appropriate.
• Use anchor texts (the words that appear directly under the links) properly.
• Interlink your content within your blog.

SEO can be tricky, especially if you’re not used to working with these kinds of technologies. The great thing about SEO is that you can find experts that can help you get started for a modest fee. Don’t be afraid to spend money on SEO if it means that you can finally generate the organic traffic that you’ve been missing out on since you’ve been operating without a strategy!

Social Media Marketing

If you’ve been paying attention to the internet over the past decade, you’ll notice that social media has taken over. Over half of the world’s population now uses social media in some way to connect with others, share information, and get updates about the things that matter to them.

As a business owner or manager, it’s important that you figure out how to use social media to promote your company.

When someone likes or interacts with your content, you’ll earn a reward (known as “social media points”) that is usually deposited into your account. These points can then be converted into cash that you can use to fund your marketing efforts.

The great thing about social media is that it’s free. You don’t need to spend a penny to get started. Simply find an account that suits your needs, set up your profile, and start engaging with your followers.

If you’re not sure how to use social media to grow your business, you can always find bloggers, journalists, and other content creators who can help you get started. Alternatively, you can hire an expert to do it for you. Just remember: Social media won’t work if you don’t use it properly – be active in creating content that is valuable and interesting to your followers, and eventually, you’ll start to see results.

Online Branding

Instead of just marketing your products online, you can brand yourself online as a way to gain credibility with customers. When people see your name next to a product or service, they’re more likely to believe that you’ve vetted the product or service and found it to be of good quality, or that you’ve endorsed it.

As a business owner or manager, you can use your own name, brand, blog, or any other form of online presence to build credibility for your company. The better you are at establishing your online brand, the more easily you can promote your products.

If you’re looking to take your business to the next level, consider how you can best use the internet to increase your clout. While affiliate marketing, SEO, and social media offer great opportunities for growth, brand awareness, and engagement, nothing replaces the power of a good old-fashioned website.