Online Marketing Solutions / Online Branding Solutions
Businesses that want to succeed in the online world should know how to market their selves, meaning they must know their target market / audience and the channels they can use in order to get to this audience.

The following online marketing solutions can be used for branding a new business as well as for promoting an old one. Most of these marketing channels are good for most of the markets / target audiences, and yet this is not an axiom.

My advice to you is to think thoroughly about your target market, what your potential clients are looking for and where (online) they might look for it and only after that take a step, choose your marketing sources and build your online marketing strategy.

What are the best online marketing sources out there?

Sponsored Links on Search Engines / Search Advertising

Sponsored links on search engines are textual paid ads that show up on search results pages. Since these textual ads are keywords related they are considered as ads of high relevance both for the user and the advertiser.

Two of the most popular search advertising services are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Sponsored Search.

Banner Ads

Banner is a clickable graphic image, used on websites, that attempts to promote a service or a product through catching the user’s attention. ‘Though banners ads come in many forms and sizes, the most common form is a rectangle image in one of the following sizes: 460 pixels wide by 60 pixels high, 460 x 55 or 392 x 72.

Textual Ads

Textual ads are online advertisements that use nothing but text based hyperlinks.
The advantages of the textual ads are:
1. They can be downloaded immediately (as opposed to banner ads).
2. They cannot be blocked by all kinds of ads blocking programs that usually block banner ads.
3. They are easy to assimilate within the text content and thus are considered less “pushy” in the eyes of the web user.

SEO / Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a method through which one can promote his site on search engines’ generic results to earn a better and highly targeted traffic.
Promoting a website through SEO is one of the best online marketing solutions, ‘though it is just as well very time consuming. One of the reasons for this is that search results can vary from websites to landing pages to images, documents and even videos. This leads to the fact that anyone who wants his website or service to be shown in most of the search results and at the top of them, must invest lots of time and creativity as well as money in creating an appealing website, video and so on.

SMO / Social Media Optimization
Social Media Optimization focuses on optimizing one’s online presence within online communities and social platforms, while aiming to get this “social presence” to the top of search results.
Facebook, for example, is a social website that can be used for business promotion through networking as well as by getting the business profile into the top of search results for a relevant term (keyword).
See for example - http://www.facebook.com/itsyourturn

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is an online marketing solution that increases brand awareness or product sales through creating a buzz on different platforms such as social platforms, emails and video websites.
This youtube video of bing.com is a great example for the power of viral marketing.
Since the video is funny there’s a big chance that people will forward it to their friends to watch (or link to it just like I did!) thus enhancing the awareness to bing as a new search engine and a brand. At the same time, since the video will get lots of views on youtube, there’s a high probability for it to be shown on relevant search results (see the video results at the top of the search results page for the term “bing”.