The Best Internet Marketing Strategy is a Mix

© 2009, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

Which Internet marketing strategy is right for your company? Where should you focus your time, energy and money? Which techniques will bring the best results relative to the cost?

These are common questions for business owner who are taking their marketing program online. Finding the answer is not always easy, because there are dozens of Internet marketing strategies to choose from. So in this post, I’d like offer some tips for choosing the right strategy for your business. And let me start by saying this…

The best Internet marketing strategy is usually a combination of different strategies.

It’s rare for a company to achieve its marketing goals through one technique alone. In most cases, a mix of strategies will bring the best results. This opens up a couple of logical questions: How many Internet marketing strategies are there, and which ones are best suited for my business. Let’s take these questions one at a time.

Here are some of the techniques you can use to grow your business online:

• Business Blogging
• Search engine optimization
• Social media marketing
• Pay-per-click / sponsored search
• Online public relations
• Article marketing
• Email marketing w/ newsletters
• Online networking
• Online videos

This is just a partial list of online marketing strategies, and some of the items on this list overlap with other items. So now we get to the next logical question. Which type of Internet marketing strategy is right for my business?

The only way you can answer this is through experimentation. Nobody can tell you which techniques are going to work for you, or which ones should be avoided. In fact, this kind of advice is dangerous. Everyone has an opinion on which Internet strategy is the most effective, but in truth they can only say what has worked for them. In other words, you could very well succeed where others have failed, or vice versa. You must experiment with different Internet marketing strategies before you can “land” on a chosen few. There is no way around this.

An Internet Strategy That Always Works

With all of this being said, there is one strategy I would recommend using, regardless of what type of business you are in — and that’s search engine optimization (SEO). Every business can benefit from good search engine rankings, so SEO is one strategy you should implement from day one.

Search engine optimization also ties into some of the other strategies on the list above. For example, blogging is a great way to increase your search engine visibility for a wide variety of key phrases. This is a great example of Internet marketing strategies that overlap.

Article marketing and online PR are two more marketing strategies that go hand in hand. If you have the ability to create quality articles on a subject related to your business, you could publish them onto other websites. Publishers and journalists are always looking for great content. So this is a way to use articles to generate website traffic and awareness. And if those articles include links to your website, this strategy helps with your search engine optimization at the same time.

So let’s sum things up here. The best Internet marketing strategy is one that (A) involves a mix of different strategies and (B) comes from your own experimentation. If you need help implementing any of the techniques discussed in this article, feel free to schedule a consultation call.