Yossaphat Chawla

Now that you are well in to 2012, you are probably feeling like the time to roll your sleeves up for your business is now. You’re right. There are millions and millions of websites out there, and many of them are in direct competition within the niche that you have chosen for your company. If you want to know how to beat them all, then you are going to have to employ the best Internet marketing tactics that you can. While many companies will try to mystify the process, it is actually pretty simple in theory. But that doesn’t mean it is going to take minimal effort. In fact, if done right, this one technique will leave you feeling pretty exhausted, but the rewards will be more than worth it to your business’s bottom line.

So what is the best Internet marketing strategy for 2012? It is relationship building, one customer at a time. The Internet has made it possible to do this without the huge monetary cost that pre-Internet days required. Thanks to highly powerful (and free) tools, such as social networking sites, you can get to know the people, who are most likely to want, crave and need your product. Social networking sites like Twitter and Google+ make it very easy to find potential followers and friends through simple search engine optimization searches within the web page itself. From there, you can send a request, and get the conversation started.

When utilizing social networking, it is important to remember that people do not wish to be sold to. The days of aggressive sales tactics are over. It is simply too easy to un-friend or un-follow a pushy marketer. So you’ve got to be more creative with the people that you meet on social networking sites. You have to engage them in the conversation and do everything you can to build trust. Doing so may mean engaging in conversations that don’t even pertain to your business. By showing an interest in the people you are approaching, then they are more likely to keep you in mind when the time comes that they need your services for something.

Whether that means they buy your book or hire you to tackle a plumbing job at their house, it is a win for you. Now this means that you are going to have to be friendlier, more sincere, and more attentive than you have ever been before. But once you find enough people, who are willing to trust in what you have to say, it becomes easier to build word of mouth. And with word of mouth comes true marketing – and sales – success, that will have your business booming for years to come.

The internet is a vast place where you can earn a lot of money with. But the money won’t just magically appear. You have to put your work in and market to your prospects and customers on a daily basis. But if you feel that it’s just too hard to get people to buy from you, then maybe it’s because of the lack of traffic that you’re getting to your website.

When it comes to traffic generation, there are a lot of ways to get traffic. The bottom line is that you have 2 fields of marketing: free marketing, and paid marketing. Today’s lesson will focus on paid advertising, since a lot of beginners tend to gravitate towards this field when getting started in their internet business.

Now if you’ve heard all the craze about Google AdWords and how much money it can make you, then you should know that this kind of talk usually comes from people who are investing thousands of dollars in advertising each month. If you don’t have the advertising budget of this size, but you still want to use AdWords – you will see results, but just not breakthrough results.

It all depends on your goals. Are you trying to incorporate pay per click advertising as a mixture to your free marketing efforts, or are you trying to make it your sole traffic provider? I personally think that you shouldn’t heavily put your eggs into one basket when it comes to traffic getting traffic. Because once that source dries up or goes away… you have no front end business. Hopefully you will have a backend business that still makes money for you everyday.

Now there are many different pay per click advertising companies out there. For the sake of this conversation (and your money), you should stick to only 2 PPC companies. They are: Google AdWords, and Microsoft Adcenter. Microsoft Adcenter recently joined forces with Yahoo’s PPC program, and have created one super pay per click program that is just phenomenal. I currently am using Microsoft Adcenter with great success.

If you want to win big with pay per click, you need a strategy. The ad that you create for your campaign needs to align with the keywords that you are bidding on. If you don’t know how PPC search engines work, you will want to research it real quick to see the pros and cons of using it.

Now I mentioned that your ad needs to match your keyword selection. Along with that, your click through rate (CTR) needs to be high. With AdWords, if your CTR is really low, your ads won’t show as much as others. So far with Microsoft Adcenter, they strive to make sure that your ad is in alignment with the keywords that you choose – but so far they haven’t had any penalties for a low CTR.

Paid advertising can work for you if you know how to use it correctly. Pay per click is just one advertising source that can work well for you – but there are many others. You will want to test these other sources of advertising out, and see if they can earn you any money.