Some of the current trends in E-marketing are referral marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, content or article marketing and web directory listing.

Referral Marketing

Referral marketing is a marketing strategy based on referrals where products and/or services are introduced to a new set of customers through referrals.

Social Media Marketing

Internet marketing that makes use of social media websites such as Twitter (www.twitter.com), YouTube (www.youtube.com), LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), Google Plus (www.google.com/plus), and Facebook (www.facebook.com) for bringing more web traffic is termed as ‘Social Media Marketing’. By using Twitter you may post ‘tweets’ about your products and services to a wide online audience while YouTube allows you to launch promotional videos of your products and services online. LinkedIn allows you to create a business page for your business and also allows you to have direct access to millions of professionals worldwide from your chosen field of profession. Currently Facebook is the leading social media site worldwide with billions of subscribers and having a Facebook account for your business is worth the effort on all accounts. Google Plus, comparatively a new entrant in the social media circle, is slowly garnering strength as a powerful social networking site.

E-Mail Marketing

Email marketing is a direct marketing strategy where a commercial message is popularised among a group of people, normally registered customers, using electronic mail. E-mail has now become a powerful communication media and is being commercially exploited as a cost-effective marketing tool by many digital firms. Mass e-mail sending campaigns has now become as common as newspaper ad inserts. Another area where e-mail power is being used is in sending mass newsletters to the customers. Sending personalised newsletter is also considered as an efficient customer contact program. Another important advantage of e-mail marketing is that a strong customer database can be built up through newsletters and mass e-mail sending campaigns over a period of time. This customer database serves as the strong foundation of your E-Business. So when you launch your E-business, please don’t forget to send out weekly or monthly newsletters on a regular basis to the registered members so that they keep informed about latest developments with respect to your online business activities.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

The software application that is used for searching information over the internet is known as a ‘Search Engine’. Top search engines in the world are Google (www.google.com), Yahoo (www.yahoo.com), Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com), and Bing (www.bing.com). The first and foremost principle of ‘Search Engine Marketing’ (SEM) that is to be applied while creating a website is to make it search engine friendly at the time of web designing itself. This can be done by choosing the right keywords (sometimes ‘keywords’ are referred as ‘tags’) for writing the website content. Providing an appropriate title for each web page based on the content displayed on that page also makes it search engine friendly.

Second principle of SEM that is applicable here is listing of the website with all popular search engines available over the internet. As a part of online marketing campaign, a website needs to be registered with all popular search engines. If the website is targeted by the local customers, then it needs to be registered with the local search engines also. Third principle of SEM is ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO). If you want your website’s content to be appeared in search result pages of popular search engines, then your website must be optimized for search engine visibility. There are certain set of rules to be followed while creating/designing a website. For more information, ‘Google Webmaster Tools’ may be referred.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Websites can increase their web traffic by registering their URLs on search engines and through search engine optimization (SEO).  The most important objective of SEO is to bring more traffic to your website by increasing your website’s visibility in search engines.

Marketing via Online Advertisements and Affiliate Programs

Online advertising strategies such as contextual advertising and advertising based on customer behaviour are the best and the most cost-effective ad choices for an E-business. There are a plethora of online advertisement options available on the internet. However, ‘Google Adwords’ program, an online advertisement program run by Google Inc., is one of the best in the industry.

Internet giants such as amazon.com, godaddy.com, google.com and many other reputed ‘dot com’ businesses offer ‘affiliate marketing programs’ for interested parties whereby affiliates are supposed to sell their products and/or services online. Almost all of them follow a commission-based revenue model where the affiliate business gets a per cent of the total transaction value as commission when a transaction is carried out through the affiliate business/website.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a marketing strategy based on the creation and sharing of quality content with potential customers. Two types of content marketing are article marketing and blog marketing. Major objectives of content marketing are to generate leads, to increase sales by driving more web traffic to the target website, and to improve customer relations.

Article Marketing and Blog Marketing

Marketing your products and services online by writing high-quality articles and then publishing them with leading article directories is called article marketing. In blog marketing, marketers write blogs on related subjects and post them in popular blog directories. While choosing article or blog directories, remember to choose only those directories with a high Page Rank. Many free software applications are available online to check the page rank of a website. Article/blog marketing is essential for bringing in much needed website traffic for the target website. You may employ some staff exclusively for writing blogs and articles for your online business.

Web Directory Listing

Listing your website with reputed web directories is another web strategy that webmasters all over the world are using to increase their web traffic as well as to build their website’s reputation. There are a number of web directories available on the internet where listing may be done either for free or for a fee. You may choose either only free listing services or both free and paid listing services as per your business requirements. However make sure that you go for only the best web directories such as Dmoz (www.dmoz.org). Another web directory that is quite popular among e-marketers is Yahoo directory.

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