Online Marketing
Today, with nearly half the world’s population wired to the internet, the ever-increasing connectivity has created global shifts in strategic thinking and positioning, disrupting industry after industry, sector after sector. Seemingly, with each passing day, some new technological tool emerges that revolutionizes our lives, further deepening and embedding our dependence on the world wide web.
And why not? Human beings have always enthralled themselves into one pursuit after another, all with a means to an end of improving our lives. Clearly, the conveniences afforded by the internet are quite literally earth-shattering, to say the least. Three decades ago, few could have ever imagined the present state of our on-demand-everything society, with the ability to instantly communicate and conduct business in real-time, at a pace that often seems dizzying at the best of times.
However, with all of these so-called modern conveniences to life, where technology’s ever-pervading presence has improved even the most basic tasks for us such as hailing a ride or ordering food, or conducting any sort of commerce instantly and efficiently, many are left in the dark. While all of us have become self-professed experts at consuming content and utilizing a variety of tools freely available to search and seek out information, we’re effectively drowning in a sea of digital overload.
The truth? Today, rising above the noise and achieving any semblance of visibility has become a monumental undertaking. While we might prevail at searching, we fail at being found. How are we supposed to get notice while swimming in a sea of misinformation and disinformation? We’ve become immersed in this guru gauntlet where one expert after another is attempting to teach us how we can get the proverbial word out about our businesses and achieve visibility to drive more leads and sales, but we all still seem to be lost.
Online marketing is no simple task. And the reason why we’ve landed in this world of “expert” internet marketers who are constantly cheerleading their offers to help us reach visibility and penetrate the masses is because of the layer of obscurity that’s been afforded to us in part thanks to one key player: Google. Google’s shrouded algorithms that cloud over 200+ ranking factors in a simple and easy-to-use interface has confounded businesses for well over a decade now.
Understanding Online Marketing
Google’s core algorithms and its propensity to shroud its data in layers of obscurity is not something new. However, it is critical to any understanding of marketing on the internet simply because this visibility is at the heart of everything else that you do. Forget about social media and other forms of marketing for the time being. Search engine optimization (SEO) offers up the proverbial key to near-limitless amounts of traffic on the web.
The better you learn and understand SEO and the more strides you take to learn this seemingly confusing and complex discipline, the more likely you’ll be to appear organically in search results. And let’s face it, organic search is important to marketing online. Considering that most people don’t have massive advertising budgets and don’t know the first thing about lead magnets, squeeze pages, and sales funnels, appearing visible is critical towards long-term success.
When traffic is coming to your website or blog, nearly unfettered, it allows you to test out a variety of marketing initiatives. However, without that traffic, you’re forced to spend money on costly ads before really determining the effectiveness of your offers and uncovering your cost-per-acquisition (CPA), two things that are at the core of scaling out any business online.
I liken this to a paradoxical Catch-22 scenario because it seems like without one you can’t have the other. It takes money to drive traffic, but it takes traffic to make money. So don’t make the mistake that millions of other online marketers make around the world.
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