We thought today we would do this Internet Marketing For Dummies video and try to give you a place to start as you're thinking about online marketing or trying to wrap your head around the migration from traditional marketing, offline marketing, to online marketing. How do we help? Watch this quick video.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello and welcome to our Internet Marketing For Dummies video. I'm Chad Hill, and I've got Adam Stetzer here as well.
Hey, good afternoon, Chad. The digital age has clearly arrived and everybody's rushing to get online. We get requests all the time internally from our writer team, our content marketing team, and even as we're training our customer service reps, to really dig into the fundamentals of internet marketing.
So but we thought today we'd do this Internet Marketing For Dummies video and try to give you a place to start as you're thinking about or trying to wrap your head around the migration from traditional marketing, offline marketing, to online marketing. How do we help?
Right. So let's step back and talk about the traditional marketing and a regular storefront that everyone can relate to. Before the internet when you were talking about offline marketing, you typically wanted a nice retail storefront in the right neighborhood that looked inviting and was well merchandised. And then the second thing is you would use print advertising, Yellow Pages, to drive people into your store.
So using those as pretty well known equivalents, on the web your storefront is your website. So you want a website that's well designed, that answers the questions that your prospects might have, and has an easy way to get in touch with you. But that's just a start. Because now you have the storefront but you don't have the traffic. So let's talk about how you can get traffic.
Right. So the Yellow Pages is clearly dying and most people know that so that's why they're searching for Internet Marketing For Dummies videos is, I can't pay those Yellow Pages guys anymore. I probably have a website. It may not be great, but something. But they're struggling with the traffic part. How do I get people into my virtual store?
Right. So the first place to start and the best equivalent is if you were advertising in the Yellow Pages, your category business was successful in the Yellow Pages 10 years ago, then search engines are the online equivalent of Yellow Pages because that's where people go when they have some intent, they're looking for something, and they put a search query into a Google or another search engine, and Google serves up those results. So ideally you want to be in the search results page that shows up. And there's two ways to do that.
So you're basically saying, if you're starting from scratch, again this is Internet Marketing For Dummies, the website is your new storefront and the search engine is your new Yellow Pages. So you really should just take those two key points away. But then you're saying it starts to get more nuanced. Because being found in the Yellow Pages, and I guess in the old days it was too, the phone company would try to sell you a big two page spread or you might be a little guy in the back. And I guess that's where the search engines start getting nuanced as well.
Right, so the quickest way to get presence in the search engines is to use their advertising products. So you go, and again you would hire a company like Semify or maybe you would try to learn it yourself. But what you do is you say for these keywords I would like, when people search for this topic in my area, I want my ad to pop up. And so basically you get charged for every time someone sees, not necessarily sees your ad, but every time that they then click on your ad and come to your website. And so that's the best way to get up and running and have presence in the search engines.
But in the long run you also want to think about search engine optimization, which are those organic results of the other parts of the page that are not advertising that people often really covet because it's very prevalent and very obvious to see the top few spots on that page. And there's a lot of tactics that you have to do in order to make sure that your website is best positioned to show up in the organic results area.
And many people I think have heard about and are very interested in SEO but I agree with you, Chad, that's not where you should start. If you're just now making this migration and joining the digital age, get your website up and running. Make sure your storefront, again the digital storefront, is very inviting and works. And then start with pay per click, which is the advertising product.
Start with Google. That's where the most searches are. And just buy advertising. It'll be the most familiar to you, it'll get the phone to ring, and it'll help you make that first step, which is probably pretty scary if you're just starting to get into internet marketing, where you can see that, you can put the dollars in and you can get a client out. Do that for at least six months or a year.
And through that process you will probably start to wonder, how can I get these new customers cheaper? And that's when you've graduated away from Internet Marketing For Dummies and into advanced topics. The first one you'll probably confront is SEO. We invite you to watch all those videos as well.