Online Marketing

The Internet offers truly unprecedented opportunities for marketers: the ability to address millions of people, all at once or in delicately targeted segments. As a result, marketers - professional and amateur, well-intentioned and ethically-challenged - have flooded consumers with e-mail and banner ads, with pop-ups and pop-unders, and with a range of other marketing devices of varying intrusiveness.

What's remarkable is that, despite this barrage of advertising, the internet is still a viable marketing medium. There is no doubt though that it is getting more difficult to be successful: in one highly targeted e-mail campaign that I was involved in, only 50% of the people opened the e-mail we sent them.

The sites that follow should, I hope, provide you with a guide to what is out there to help companies become successful e-marketers. There are, literally, thousands of sites that offer help in this area. I've tried to include only the most reputable and I've generally shunned those whose 'advice' effectively amounts to a reason to buy their product.

Sites to Visit

  • For some years now (which, on the internet, is equivalent to about half a lifetime) I've been a fan of the clickz.com website. It's a great resource for all things e-marketing and it remains generally product neutral.
  • Another favourite is SherpaBlog and the companion site ContentBlog. Though weblogs started out primarily as a way for individuals to publish their thoughts quickly and easily on the web, they are growing in popularity as a means of delivering editorial content too. Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing and other marketing tomes, is another who's chosen to use a weblog to deliver at least some of his content (when you're on his site, click on his head to go to his weblog ...).
  • Another excellent online source for marketing information is the slick Peppers & Rogers Group site. Though it is part-brochure for their services, the free content on the site is enough to make me recommend it.
  • If you're a small business looking to "grow and prosper online" then the workz.com site is well worth a visit. Like most of the sites in this category it is quite Americentric, but you can generalise much of the advice it proffers.
  • The HTMail site has a number of good articles on the basics of e-mail marketing: one good example is Useful Tips, another is Writing your email message. Check out this About.com page for an extensive list of links to further e-mail resources.
  • If you're running your own website, you should be able to access and analyse a wealth of information about how the visitors to your website navigate around it. To perform the analysis you need to get hold of the weblogs from the servers that host your website - check with your IT department to find out how to get the logs. This Webmonkey article provides an excellent introduction to what you can glean from weblogs.
  • There are dozens of tools for analysing your weblogs. The Analog package is comprehensive and free; so too is the Webalizer package. Amongst the pay-for-use weblog analysis tools WebTrends is among the most popular.