Online marketing, which is also called internet marketing or online advertising, is any tool, strategy or method of getting the company name out to the public. The advertisements can take many different forms and some strategies focus on subtle messages rather than clear-cut advertisements. 

One of the main internet marketing strategies that can help online retailers build a successful Internet business is search engine optimization (SEO), the process of tailoring your website to the algorithms that search engines use to rank websites based on “signals” that the site emits.
Related: 50 Simple Definition Every Young Entrepreneur Should Know

There are many things to consider when crafting a successful internet marketing strategies, but there are Twenty key decisions that over the years I have seen help hundreds of small business owners grow their sales and create sanity in their internet marketing strategies.

Internet Marketing strategies For Small Businesses With Limited Budgets

Define Your Brand

Build A Simple & Effective Website

The website is the central component of any business’ digital marketing strategy; it’s how your current and potential customers can most easily find and connect with you. Given its key role, it’s astonishing that more than half of small businesses owners (52%) said their business does not have a website, according to the Yodle survey.
Related: How to Create Self-Hosted Personal Blog in less than 20 min
 
Make your website a priority this year. Whether you’re just building your website now or looking to improve the one you have, keep these key things in mind moving forward:

• Make Contact Information Visible & Consistent: Incorporate your business’ contact information (phone number, address, email address, etc.) throughout your site, not just in your About Us or Contact Me section. Ensure that your contact information is consistent with what you have included on online business listing websites.
• Design An Appealing, Easy-To-Use Interface: Invest in a contemporary website with a visually appealing color scheme and straightforward navigation. It will not only make your website more attractive and seamless to navigate, but will also reflect on the professionalism of your business. Be careful about using features such as Flash which may negatively impact your site’s search ranking potential and which don’t load on some smartphones.
• Use Defining & Searchable Keywords On The Front & Backend: In drafting content for your website, be sure to incorporate keywords that consumers will most likely use when searching for your products and services. Ensure that your web designer incorporates these keywords into anchor text in page URL links and adds keyword-specific titles, descriptions and tags to videos posted on your website.
• Keep Current By Regularly Updating Content: In order to stay relevant to those visiting your site (including search engine crawlers) be sure to update your website content on a consistent basis. Develop an editorial calendar to update your site in conjunction with big promotions and sales, events, and other notable activities, or when you introduce new products or services.
• Monitor Website Analytics: Pay close attention to where your website visitors are coming from, how they’re finding you, and what they’re doing while on your website, so you can consistently update and improve their experiences through tweaks to your site’s navigation and content.

Publish Great Content

I don’t think I even need to say this, but it’d be neglectful not to mention the importance of kick-ass content. If you can create it yourself, all the better (isn’t free always better?). Even if writing isn’t your strong point, you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting someone on your team to crank out some articles for your blog.

Create Instructional Videos

Video content is really valuable to internet marketing strategies, and while it can cost big bucks to get professional YouTube videos produced, there’s nothing wrong with giving it a shot yourself or hiring a film student off Craigslist. Wistia offers a great video tutorial showing you how to shoot expert-looking footage on your regular old iPhone!

Post to Pinterest and Instagram

If you are selling a highly visual product or service, say you are in the bridal or food business, you should be regularly posting images on Pinterest and/or Instagram. Posting is free and both platforms have large followings (read: how to get followers), particularly among women. Pinterest is the ideal social media to add in list to your internet marketing strategies, if your products or website is mainly female based.
Related: 6 Pinterest Board Tactics To Increase Blog Traffic

"You can drive major traffic to your website via Pinterest, and no platform uses hashtags to build audiences like Instagram," says Eric Elkins, CEO and chief strategist at WideFoc.us, a real time social media company.

What is Your Unique Benefit?

Your unique benefit should highlight the one (or two) main things your product or service actually delivers (benefits) that your target customer really wants, not a long list of all the things your product does (features).
At Infusion-soft, we know our customers don’t just want our software: They want to grow sales and save time. We don’t describe everything our software does or the hundreds of benefits, we keep our focus on those three key benefits in everything we do. And the simpler we describe it, the better our marketing works.

Who is Your Competition?

When someone is looking to buy a solution to a problem, they will quickly make sense of the alternatives to compare against – your competition. However, most entrepreneurs haven’t specifically defined who their real competition is and don’t focus their messages to create clear differentiation for their buyers. This frustrates the buying decision process and makes your digital marketing efforts weaker.
 Related: A Beginner’s Guide to CPA: CPA Marketing

You need to be clear in your own mind about what your biggest competition is in digital marketing. If you are a tax accountant, is your competition really the other tax accountants in town? Other CPAs or financial planners?  DIY tax software? Doing taxes manually? National tax accounting chains? Each competitor type would create different comparisons, so you need to narrow it down to one or two main competitor types.

Never Stop Growing Your Network

In internet marketing strategies "if you stop, you will die". Expand your network of contacts and potential clients. Ask your best, most powerful, most influential friends or business associates to introduce you to the five people they think you should meet to expand your business. Take each of the contacts out for coffee and get to know them. Discuss your plans and future goals, tell them about why your business is special and ask for their advice. You will be amazed at how these new contacts will pay off ten-fold with recommendations to you for new business and innovative ideas you hadn’t thought of.

Internet Marketing on Twitter Giveaways

This might sound silly in internet marketing strategies plan, But give away your product or promotional item on Twitter will work better. Ask a question about a product on your website or blog. The first person to answer wins. When you send the item write, “Retweet upon receipt,” to be entered in a second contest.

Google AdWords On The Cheap

Run market research on the cheap by using Google Adwords to target an audience. Make the landing page a question survey. A snappy question to attract people, along with Google’s Geo-targeting can provide great results, for next to nothing. You might interested to read: Top 15 Reasons Your Business Should Use AdWords for your Internet Marketing Strategies.
Related: 5 Mistakes You should avoid When Setting Up Ad

Explore Bing Ads for internet marketing

With Bing Ads, you can create ads to reach the right audience and meet your business goals. Currently BingAds has lower competition than google, so you can eaily work with them. They has lots of features life geo targeting, age, device etc. Recently BingAds added 20+ new features to make your internet marketing strategies easy. Here are Top 8 Reasons to add Bing Advertising to your Internet marketing Bucket list.

StumbleUpon Advertising for Internet Marketing

If you want to try some paid advertising but you’re not looking to break the bank, StumleUpon’s Paid Search Discovery could be for you. Paid Discovery delivers users straight to your site, ready to engage. What works best on Stumble Upon? Photography, visual assets, and humorous content.
Stumble Upon is pretty cheap compared to other paid ad structures. You start with a base price of 10 cents per click, then add +2 cents for age targeting, gender targeting and device targeting. You can see the whole price list for detailed info.  Whichever way you spin it, Stumble Upon’s paid offering is leagues cheaper than most other social media ads; Facebook ads, for example, can cost as much as 80 cents per click.
Also Read: How to get traffic from StumbleUpon?: A Secret Guide

To really benefit from StumbleUpon, use targeting options to make sure you’re hitting the right audiences and niches.

Add Online Reviews to internet marketing strategies list

Let your fans review your business, then incorporate their reviews in your blog post — good or bad, unless of course it’s obscene, not-safe-for-work bad. Online reviews are a critical component of your business’ reputation and can do wonders for converting new customers. Services like RateItAll.com/Promote allow you to submit anything for review – whether it’s a local business, a blog, a website, a product, or a brand. Other popular review sites include Yelp (local businesses), TripAdvisor (travel related items), and Viewpoints (products).

Inspire Customers To Call You

Do something really different. Send a monthly postcard instead of a hard copy newsletter. Self-printed cost is $0.46 ea. including the stamp. Make it fun and colorful with a strong “Call to Action” title, like: “100 reasons to call us. List 10-to-20 reasons, including your skills, talents, and tasks. Give customers a coupon for a discount, or a free doughnut, or something fun to inspire them to call.

Digital Marketing with LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a major social media site that is often under-utilized. Don’t just add network connections and sign out – join groups, enter into dialogue with connections, and share your blog posts. There’s a ton happening on LinkedIn, and it can be a great place to promote your content, share ideas, and build your brand.

Apply Online for Business Awards

Most industries have business awards you can win, providing you with an online badge you can place on your website. Badges like these can boost credibility, and as a result, increase sales. If there aren’t any awards for your industry, host your own! You’ll get a ton of attention from other industry businesses who want to apply for your award, which means even more connections and more possible future collaborations!

Email Marketing as Digital Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to get new visitors engaged with your business, as well as maintain relationships with your existing customers.
Get new website visitors to sign up for your newsletter by offering a bonus content piece for subscribing (e.g. get your free ebook detailing how to make a homemade pizza when you sign up for our First Slice newsletter). Slowly nurture your subscribers via email until they are ready to become paying customers. Start your email campaigns with a free email marketing service like MailChimp.
Related: How to turn your blog post into an ebook

Be smart about SEO

Still don’t have a clue about search engine optimization or how it relates to your blog or website? SEO is critical for having massive success is online marketing – and can’t be ignored or overlooked anymore. Develop a comprehensive SEO strategy about how to improve your search engine rankings for your best keywords and let’s get to work.
Related: 34 Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Get endorsed by a local celebrity

Its true; your internet marketing strategies should start from the local market. Many business owners dream of having their product or service endorsed by a global celebrity. But instead of trying to get a superstar to support your business, try seeking out a local celebrity instead.
Who exactly are local celebrities? These are people your local paper is writing about -- perhaps an "unsung hero" such as a teacher or a resident who's doing something positive and newsworthy. Since they're in your neighborhood, these people should be relatively easy to locate and contact by phone or e-mail. Let them know you'd like to send them a gift, namely your product or service.

Improve your irresistible free offer

Perhaps it’s time to replace that outdated “free report” or “eBook” with an even higher value freebie to offer site visitors. As I referred to in my post about the best freebie out there – my favorite is still the Audio CD – which has huge intrinsic value because it’s a physical “thing” and you can capture mailing addresses in addition to just email addresses.

Creating a clear online marketing strategy is not what companies do after they get big, it’s what small companies do to grow and get bigger in the first place.