Effective Internet Marketing Strategy

Getting Your Website Linked

You hear all about emails, search engines, and other internet marketing techniques, but there is another often underrated yet effective internet marketing strategy. This is the power of links. If your only method is to attract people to your site through their search efforts, you are overlooking the amount of traffic that can be generated for you from other sites.

One method of upping your link potential is through reciprocal sites. This is the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” philosophy of effective internet marketing strategy. You agree to place a link to someone’s website on your site, and in return they do the same for you. It is a great way to increase the number of people who actually have an opportunity to get to your site. If you and your reciprocal site come up an equal number of times on a search engine, having a link on the other site in essence doubles your exposure to potential customers. Even if you are not the first site the person comes to, if they don’t find what they need your link presents a convenient place for more information.

Another effective internet marketing strategy is to get other website owners to want to do some advertising for you. One way to do this is to offer credit towards your service or merchandise to those who effectively sell your product for you. One example of this is a sporting goods store that gets sports clubs and teams to put a link for their store site onto the club or team site. Anytime that link results in a sale, the club or team gets a percentage of the sale as credit for merchandise at the store. Clubs remind their loyal followers about this link in newsletters and word of mouth communications, and they become remote salespeople for the company. This type of advertising may end up costing you some merchandise, but the mutually beneficial relationship can generate a lot of traffic to your site that might otherwise have been just as likely to shop with your competitors.

Another, more conventional effective marketing strategy is to pay for your advertising on other websites. There are various forms of this type of advertising. Banners, pictures, and word links can all be purchased on many sites. There are also various forms of payment models for these advertisements. 

Pay per impression – In this form of payment, the advertiser pays a set rate for every time their banner or link is shown on a website. This effective internet marketing strategy option can work well on a high-volume site, but not so well for a low volume one.

Pay per click – In the pay per click form of payment, the advertiser pays a set rate for each time a visitor actually clicks on the banner or link. This is a common form of payment, and works well for low or high volume sites.

Pay per lead – This form generally involves some sort of non-sale action that a visitor must take before cost is incurred. For example, a pay per lead arrangement may have a set cost for each time a visitor clicks the banner or link and fills out a form with their email address.

Pay per sale – The safest form for advertisers, the pay per sale model only pays a fee for the banner or link if a visitor uses it and actually makes a purchase. The downfall for many sites who agree to host pay per sale ads is that a visitor may use the link, then decide to go back to the destination site later to make a purchase. This isn’t generally traceable and the host will not get credit for the sale.

Remember that having your website linked to other sites is an effective internet marketing strategy for increasing the number of visitors, thereby increasing your chances to attract a customer. There are different ways to go about getting these links, and it’s up to you to figure out which way is right for your business.