Key components to online marketing

Online marketing is the process of promoting products over the internet; they can be your own products or someone else's products for which you get a commission.

A lot of people looking to make money online choose online marketing, but when getting started, it helps to know the key necessities that can get you started without investing too much money. Otherwise you'll come across marketers who simply want to sell information, which may not be very useful or which you could've got for free elsewhere. Below are the basic components one would need to get started.

If you want to learn about ways of making money from your website see Google adsense or search 'affiliate marketing'.

1. Setting up your website
This is the destination where your target audience will come to buy or learn about the product you're promoting.

Setting up a website is fairly easy; you need to find a webhost, you can start with a search on Google for 'web hosting'. A typical starter package costs under £30 a year and includes a web address. Ideally you should choose a webhost that is situated in your country as geo-location of your website matters in search engine ranking.

It is possible to do marketing without a website or on a free hosted website( or blog), however, this puts a limit on what you can do, also your target audience might not take you seriously.

2. Creating content
Although most marketers promote third party products, it is not enough to simply copy your content from somewhere else; search engines such as Google will see this as duplicate content and likely will not rank your site as well as they would a site with original content. More about duplicate content.

3. Promoting your website
In order to make money from your website you need visitors, and in order to get visitors, you have to promote your website to let people know it's out there.
There two main ways of promoting your site; search engine ranking and advertising:

Search Engines
Most people use a search engine to find information or products they want to buy, this makes them the best place to be found. In order to get found, your site needs to appear amongst the first few results for search terms that relate to your site; for example if your site is about coffee and you're based in London, you might want to rank well for 'London coffee' and 'coffee in London'.

The common way of achieving high rankings is by applying what's called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to your site; there are many places where you can learn about SEO Including:
- Webmaster guidelines - Guidelines from Google.
- Digital Point - a community of experienced and novice online marketers, you can read posts or sign up and ask questions.

Advertising
Another way to get visitors is advertising, but this will cost money unlike the promotion you do yourself. You can buy the adspace yourself on sites you find suitable or you can use programs like Google Adwords which automatically places your ads on relevant sites.

Before you decide to advertise, you should consider how well your product is likely to convert into sells; you could end up spending a lot of money without much return.

4. Analysing data
Finally you'd want to know how many people are visiting your site, how they're using it and all the other statistics, there are free services you can use to get this data, one is Statcounter, a free limited service that shows statistics in real time. Another is Google analytics an unlimited free service but with delayed reporting.