A broad introduction to internet marketing for marketing managers, business owners and entrepreneurs

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.

The 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 opt-in 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.