Internet marketing is not only marketing or business. It is science. In order to succeed you need to know some basic rules and facts. This applies to advertisers and publishers. It is amazing that 99% of internet marketers fail. They fail because they don’t understand how web works, how people visit websites, what they need and how they search. The second important fact about internet marketing is that most of its secrets you can get for free. You only need to visit few forums, blogs and other sites to learn about web business. Of course, you need to distinguish between relevant information and spam. In the beginning, if you have no experience, this is not a simple task, but as you search for answers you’ll develop skills for this.
The most important fact about internet marketing is called–Keywords. Everything is about keywords. Keywords and web search. When people search for something they type the keyword in a search engine and they get a list of websites that are related to this keyword. The difference between failure and success is whether you can participate in this process. You can participate in many ways. You might be interested in showing your webpage on the top of the search results so that people will visit your site and buy something. As an advertiser you might be interested in displaying ads related to the keywords people search for. Most of the online business is related to the web search. If you understand how it works then you know how you can succeed.
Web search is a simple task for a user and extremely difficult task for anybody willing to offer this service. The web is big, there are billions of pages. You need to visit all the pages, store them, analyze them, separate relevant content from spam, properly index pages and display the best pages relevant to the keyword somebody searched for. In the mid 1990s there were many search engines that tried to search the web. They all failed. They failed because they couldn’t display results relevant to search query. However, there is one company that managed to make web search a big business–Google.
Google managed to make a web search engine that can deliver relevant, top quality results. The key to their success is PageRank, a proprietary algorithm for ranking websites. It is based on links pointing to some web page. The more links point to some page, the higher PageRank this page gets. This is some kind of public voting system. If you link to some page you vote for that page. The ability to serve relevant, high quality results ejected Google into the sky. For the first few years there was no business model around Google web search. But then they have discovered a gold mine. They managed to develop a huge business for advertisers and publishers. And this business is connected with keywords.
There are two programs called AdWords and AdSense. Both systems are about displaying ads. AdWords is an elaborate system of creating text and image ads and, in general, targeting web search results or third party websites. Advertisers bid for top display positions when somebody searches for particular keyword. The higher is the display position, the higher is the price the advertiser pays to Google for the click on this ad. AdSense is a system for publishers–website owners to display ads relevant to the content of the pages where they are displayed. For each click on this ad the publisher gets paid. The price is about one half of the price the advertiser has paid to Google for this click. So in this process we have at least three satisfied parties. The advertiser gets a visitor to his website, the publisher gets paid for visitor clicking an ad on his page and Google gets also paid for offering the service.
Internet marketing can be a full time job. If you understand it you can master it. And in order to understand it you must first understand keywords and web search.