sugiex asked:


With the advent of Internet, marketing has evolved from its tradition avatar into more robust and dynamic forms. Internet marketing has developed as a fast growing industry in itself. Owing to its fast growth, it has also opened up immense job opportunities for youngsters looking to get into a marketing job but are not interested in the regular marketing stuff. Jobs in Internet marketing are quite different as compared to normal marketing jobs. While the purpose remains the same, the approach differs as Internet audience behaves and reacts in a different manner.

Also, those aspiring for Internet marketing jobs have to be passionate about technology and keep themselves abreast with the latest tech advancements in the field. Thus, the basic skills that you require for an Internet marketing job are: thorough knowledge of the Internet space, a technical bend of mind, knowledge of marketing basics and loads of creativity. Since Internet domain is fast developing and the competition is also rising increasingly, one has to be on one’s feet all the time to be successful in this domain. Since Internet is a very powerful medium of communication, it needs an especially designed strategy to sell ideas to people.

Since Internet is a democratic domain, it rewards those who have done enough to ensure that apart from the worth of the product or service offered, the site is seen and marketed well to the users in this domain. The Internet audience is not bound by time or location. It was a world-wide audience. So, Internet Marketing requires talking to your customer wherever he/she may be. Once the traffic to the site builds up, it features prominently on the search pages and that is from where more traffic comes. Also, banner advertising on various other sites is on way of Internet Marketing. Then, there are text ads that are run on various sites. There are ad networks that handle such advertisements and place the ads on selected relevant locations. There is a whole industry dedicated to carry out and think of creative and innovative ways to promote things on the Internet. Even offline products are promoted online.

To get a job in Internet Marketing, one doesn’t really require a formal degree. MBAs, engineers, math graduates, and many others can do it equally well with practice. It pays to be creative and quick in this domain. The field is relatively new and is ever changing. Thus, there is scope of a lot of innovations and taking it to the next level. There area certain set practices following which one can enter the industry and once the nuances are learnt, one can look at any revolutionary idea.

There are basically three types of websites that carry out businesses on the internet. Firstly, there are customer to customer websites that enable communication of the consumers. They allow users to interact with each other and then benefit from their experiences for various pursuits. These would include networking sites, matrimonial sites etc. Then there are business to business websites where businesses link up with each other. This is primarily done for transactions and buying and selling of products and services. Then, there are business to customer websites where consumers of the products or the services being provided can directly come to the site. Internet marketing is the most efficient for such sites.

For a person in the Internet Marketing space, it is important to have a deep and clear understanding of all the types of sites and the mentality of the users coming to those sites. It is only when one understands the relevant audience that one can market any thing to them. They have to be spoken to in their language. Of course, creativity is important but it should not be ambiguous. Since the attention space of the Internet users is very less, it is better to keep the communication direct and crisp. Then, ranking up in the search engines is one sure way of targeting the relevant audience and getting the right traffic to the site. There are various practices to achieve this and these practices are an imminent part of successful Internet Marketing. Any product or service on offer should very clearly be able to state its advantages to the users and make them come to the site that is being marketed.

Most companies in the internet space do a lot of spending on Internet marketing and there are various job opportunities in such companies. Other than that, even offline companies hire agencies to do Internet marketing for them. These agencies also have good jobs on offer. One looking to pursue a career in this field can look at starting his/her career from either of these and then go on to learn and carve a successful career here.

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Marketing Guy asked:


Not two weeks ago I had a chat with someone (an SEO) about some online media buying and although the figures made an infinite amount of sense (6 figure monthly page views – prime location banner purchase for less than £90 per month!), he said, “but there is no SEO value from the banner link” (it was JavaScript)! Astonished, I spent the next hour arguing the case for buying the coverage, but it would seem that the majority of SEOs just don’t see the value of applying traditional marketing techniques to the web – they just don’t “fit” into the SEO mindset.

What is really bizarre though is that while the optimisation industry doesn’t see the value in some less search engine focused marketing techniques, they will pay a veritable fortune for paid links. The likes of ReviewMe (www.reviewme.com) change up to $250 for a single “review” (which is SEO speak for a plain text link not so subtly hidden in a purpose written article). One text link. One! Not just that, but a single text link on a new page that has no PR (and will maybe only will ever receive minimal PR filtered through from other page links)!

For that $250 (around £150) there are so many different options you could aim for. While a lot won’t have any direct SEO benefit, we still need to consider traffic and branding benefits.

$250 would allow me to buy banner advertising on a niche site / forum / blog for a limited amount of time. Depending on the type of site and its subject area you could be looking at a decent amount of traffic, enquiries and exposure – certainly enough to justify the cost.

An alternative would be to spend the money on a directory listing on a site such as TheBestOf (www.thebestof.co.uk) – £10 per month for a year and you get a full page listing (written by your local contact), an audio advert where you can pitch your service, inclusion in a high traffic site and a direct (SEO friendly!) link back to your site. A link AND qualified traffic – that’s like SEO Christmas!

Online marketing professionals do focus on SEO a lot and that isn’t a bad thing – it just isn’t the only thing and you should be looking to spend your budget wisely and spread your marketing scope.