What is the best way to market your company online? The answer is not as clear cut as you would think. Many factors play into your online marketing strategy such as target audience, budget, market strategy and internal resources available. First lets start with the basics. Do you have a good website that properly conveys your product or business's marketing message? If the answer is no then we have a little bit of work to do before jumping into Internet Marketing. If your website is not up to par, then most your efforts and resources spent on Internet Marketing would be a complete waste of time and money.

Once you are satisfied with your website then it's time to shout the message. You can have a great website but without the proper mixture of marketing your website and ultimately your marketing message will go unseen. So what are the options available for Internet Marketing?

• Blogging: Setting up a company blog is a great informal way to communnicate with your target audience. Although you still need to have your marketing message in mind, the way in which you can deliver that message is far more informal. You can blog about the benefits of your product or service and let others interact with your blog and leave comments. You can create a blog that reviews your products and explains in great detail the pros of using your product. Whatever your message is, the main point with a blog is you want to provide useful original content for your target audience. Many times we tell our customers to blog about common questions they get from their customers on a daily basis.

• Pay Per Click: Pay Per Click marketing is a very common practice and if managed properly can be a cost effective way to generate traffic to your website. There are many popular choices for Pay Per Click such as Google Adwords, Yahoo, MSN and Live.com. Many times it's best to experiment with each of the different providers to find out where your customers are coming from. For example, if you where an High Tech company then you might find your target audience is more prone to searching on Google than some of the other ones. Regardless of your choice you need to determine and stick to a budget. Let me say this again because this is really important. Come up with a Pay Per Click budget and stick to it. Adjusting your campaigns on a daily basis will just create a chaotic environment where tracking costs and conversion rates will become impossible.

• Organic Search Marketing: Although blogging fits into this category, Organic Search Marketing can really be viewed as traffic that comes to your website from other means than Pay Per Click. This can simply just be a well ranked website within the search engine result pages (SERPS) but it doesn't really just stop there. There are many new ways to market your website and each of these methods falls under what we would call Organic Search Marketing.

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    • A content rich website website that is ranked
    • Google Local and other Local Listing Providers
    • Viral Marketing like product review videos on You Tube
    • Social Networking sites like Linked In 

There are many new ways to market your company on the Internet and a good mixture of the tactics listed above will help your company shine on the Internet. To find out more about marketing your company on the Internet please contact Cogent Media Group (317.423.3526) or use the contact button located at the top of your screen.