Online Marketing Tools

There are a number of ways to market your company online. From online networking sites, including social and business networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Biznik (tagline: Business networking doesn't suck) to email marketing, where companies have the opportunity to showcase their creativity, increase their visibility and build credibility. This is an effective way for companies to distinguish themselves from the competition and drive traffic to their website.

Case studies are often included in email marketing and are a good way to show how you've helped clients solve their problems, addressed their specific challenges and lays out the work you've done. If done properly, email can create the kind of back-and-forth relationship a marketer would want with their clients.

It is of course critical that each company has a presence online. Then of course, you must determine where your prospective clients go to find suppliers and/or service providers and then create a presence there.

Blogs are websites in journal style and tend to focus on one specific topic. Photoblogs, sketchblogs, vlogs (video blogs) and podcasts (audio blogs). Blogs are more of a 'pull' in the sense that users have to find them, like them and return to them. While email marketing is more of a 'push' in the sense that you're pushing everything out. Blogs are also less formal than websites, and more conversational.

Because blogs are less formal and offer new, fresh content on a regular basis, they can often be a major traffic driver to a website. After all, unless somebody is looking to purchase something they usually won't visit an ecommerce site. But if that ecommerce site has a great blog, which offers lots of informative content, or is entertaining, people are more likely to form a trusting opinion about that brand, visit their website more often and buy their products.

Similarly, email campaigns with links to a company's blog, can drive a lot of traffic to the blog. While blogs can indirectly be affective marketing tools, companies shouldn't expect to get work from their blog, although it is possible.

SEO: SEO and PPC stand for Search Engine Optimisation and Pay-Per-Click, respectively. They are both tools used to generate traffic to a website via search engines. SEO is organic, which means that non-promotional content needs to be distributed throughout the web, which links back to your website. In SEO article writing, the hyperlinks are associated with a keyword the company is being optimised for. In web copy, keywords are inserted into a percentage of the text to help improve the site's search engine ranking for that particular keyword.

Another, more social, way to optimise your site is by commenting on other people's blogs. People leaving a comment on someone's blog generally have to sign in, which involves leaving their name, company name, email address and URL. If people reading the blog appreciate what you have to say in your comments, it's not difficult for them to find you to learn more about who you are and what you do.

Within each of these frameworks there are tons of online marketing tools, these are just the basics to get you started.