Just as physical advertising has trends, there are internet marketing trends that can, if taken advantage of, make you hundreds of dollars whilst increasing your customer base. But just like real world trends, if you don’t jump on these online trends quickly enough, you’ll find yourself left behind.
One of the biggest marketing trends going on right now involves social networks such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, and Facebook. These networks are all fairly similar; users sign up for a free profile and can post information about themselves, their likes, what they do for a living, etc. Most let users also post pictures and videos. Once they’ve made their profile, they can search for other people and add them as their friends.
The whole point of these networking sites is to get in contact with friends, family, and, sometimes, total strangers. It’s the total stranger’s part that really interests us. By creating a profile for your business and adding people as your friends, you can get the word out there to millions.
Some of these sites, like MySpace, even include special profiles for bands, authors, and filmmakers. This makes it even easier for people to find your profile and add you as their friend. It’s great when people add you, but when you invite people to be your friend, beware of looking like spam. There are enough fake spam profiles on these sites that they’ve all cracked down on people sending out mass invites. Be sure the people you invite want to see what you have to offer.
Another of the internet marketing trends is the use of keywords. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is something everyone wants these days. It involves using keywords, or words that describe your site and your products/services, a certain number of times on your website and in your site’s titles and metadata.
By using these keywords so often, your site will be much more appealing to search engines like Google and Yahoo. The theory here is that if your site is listed on the first page of search results, you’ll get more views and more business than if your page was listed on the third or fourth page. Of course, this isn’t always true. If your page doesn’t include what the user is looking for, they aren’t going to buy anything from you. Still, there is merit to the part of the theory that says you’ll get more traffic.
You can optimize your website yourself after studying a bit about SEO, but there are many companies out there ready to do it for you. Be careful here: you don’t want someone writing text for your page that is nothing but keywords. If your page doesn’t sound natural to a human reader, chances are they will pass it by in favour of one that does.
Taking advantage of both social networks and SEO practices can result in your website getting many more hits. While, as stated earlier, hits don’t necessarily convert to dollars, it is important to get people to your website. Following current internet marketing trends is one way to increase your hits which, in turn, often do result in more business.