Introduction________________________________________________________________________
The 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing offers a broad introduction to internet
marketing methods for people like you – for marketing managers, business owners and entrepreneurs.
It has been written to help you build your overall online marketing knowledge, explaining a wide variety of internet marketing activities or ‘pillars’.
Few businesses understand the technical aspects of internet marketing. I strongly believe that companies need to have some understanding of internet marketing methods in-house, so that they can understand why things need to be done. Businesses can then make the decision to either do everything in-house, or manage the process and outsource the technical side to a good search engine optimization firm.
Search engine optimization firms are good technicians, but they don’t necessarily understand how to portray your business online. They will do what they are told to do, or they will tend to do a very good job of just certain aspects of search engine optimization. However, you know your businesses best and that’s why it’s important for you to understand what you can and can not do, or should or should not do, from an internet marketing perspective.
The content of this book will introduce you to the fundamentals of internet marketing and give you a broad understanding of how to implement them. I will be using real life and fictional examples to demonstrate the concepts discussed.
Introduction - 5The 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing is not just about search engine optimization, and overall, internet marketing is a lot more than just search engine optimization. However, the two aspects of search engine optimization (namely onsite and offsite search engine optimization), are key features of a successful internet marketing campaign.
Onsite search engine optimization includes getting all aspects within your site right, such as (but not limited to) having the correct title tags and heading tags on your web pages.
Offsite search engine optimization consists of controlling, as much as possible, the relevance of the sites on which your links appear, the relevance of the pages within those sites and the wording used within the links on those pages. Therefore, when a site wants to link to you, you need to be aware of what linking text to request from the webmaster in order to maximize the value of the link.
Inbound links from other websites play a large part in your final search engine rankings so it is important to try and generate as many relevant inbound links as possible. Increasing your inbound links can be done using a range of different techniques, which I will discuss throughout the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing.
Internet marketing as a whole includes paid advertising as well as other forms of internet marketing, such as podcasting, video marketing, email marketing or any other method of bringing traffic to your website or driving prospects to your optin pages. (We’ll come to what an opt-in page is later on)
Ideally, when undertaking an internet marketing campaign, you want to mimic what happens naturally when people find a website to be a useful resource. By employing a successful internet marketing campaign, you try to replicate the natural building of links when increasing the popularity of your website. You do this by generating a wide variety of links and building diverse forms of traffic towards your website.
Internet marketing can be summed up as any activity that helps to promote and measure the success of your business online. By reading the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing book you will better understand what needs to be included in an internet marketing plan for your own business.
I’ve tried to provide a broad-based overview of internet marketing methods in as a logical manner as possible. I’ve tried to do this in a way that makes internet marketing methods easily comprehendible, while still providing some of the ‘meaty details’ within each of the internet marketing areas discussed. By sectioning off these internet marketing methods I began to realize that there were 13 key important areas to understand – and therefore 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing.
There are two things to bear in mind when reading this book…Firstly, the purpose of the book and who the book is aimed at. The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive general introduction to internet marketing for marketing managers, business owners and entrepreneurs. If you’re a seasoned Internet marketing expert I would hope that you know most of the information – although a little recap never did anyone any harm!
Secondly, this book is free. This means that it’s less likely to get updated as often as a paid book which is surely understandable. That’s not to say this book will ever become completely outdated. The principles behind each of the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing will be alive and well for many years to come.
However, to try and keep things as updated as much as possible, instead of including any links to recommended websites within the book, what I’ve decided to do is to keep all the resource links online. That way it’ll be much easier to always recommend the most relevant of resources. Links to every website mentioned in this book (as well as many other relevant, useful resources) can be found at http://www.13pillars.com/resources.
Finally, when you get to the end of this book, you’ll see that I also provide a follow-up 26-week internet marketing plan ‘action plan’ newsletter.This newsletter is free-of-charge and it’s a great way to help you implement the 13 Pillars. Just visit www.26weekplan.com to sign-up.
But now it’s time to get going with the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing.