7 Truths About Online Marketing Today

While considering the plight of small business Internet marketing this weekend, I came up with 7 truths about online marketing right now that cannot be ignored.

Quality content is better than quantity
Social media is a necessity
Building relationships is key
Small business search engine marketing is almost all local
You can’t improve what you don’t measure
A blog is better than links
Change is guaranteed

Let’s talk about these one at a time.

Quality Content

Quality content has always been better than quantity. This is even more true today. You are much better off with 10 high quality original content pages than 100 mediocre content pages. And in many ways those 10 pages will be easier to maintain. The search engines have quality guidelines for a reason.

Social Media Is Necessary

If you haven’t figured out by now that social media is becoming more and more important, then you probably haven’t spent much time online in the last couple of years. Facebook is the most trafficked website online. Google+ is the fastest growing social network of all time. And Google is integrating its search product and its social product more and more each day. Soon, social and search will be so intertwined that you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Building Relationships Is Key

Sales has always been about building relationships. Online and off line.

The most successful Internet marketers are those who figure out that the tools at their disposal are best used for relationship building. E-mail is the best relationship building tool on the planet. Social media is great for building rapport. A blog keeps the conversation going.

If you aren’t building relationships, then you aren’t really marketing online.

Small Business SEM Is Almost All Local

Think about who your customers are. Unless you are an online-only business, chances are your customers are local. So your Internet marketing should also be local.

You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure

Are you measuring your online marketing efforts? If not, why not? You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

When you build your website, add analytics to your code so that you can get a view of who your visitors are and what they are viewing on your website. Do your best to measure your social media efforts. The more you measure the more influence you can have on the outcomes.

A Blog Is Better Than Links

For the past 10 years almost every Internet marketer on the plan sang the praises of inbound links. But Google has spent a considerable amount of time killing bad links. I have done my fair share of link building and I’ve done my share of blogging. I can tell you that a blog is much better than links. Here are 5 reasons why:

A blog adds fresh content to your website every time you update it. That fresh content is great food for search engine spiders.
Your site will be re-crawled and re-indexed every time you update it.
You can use your blog to build internal links on your website, which are just as important as inbound links. And you can drive traffic to your most important landing pages using those links.
Every blog post is a separate web page. For every web page you create, you increase your chances at gaining additional search engine rankings.
You can have robust communications on your own web property with your customers and potential customers using your blog. It’s less time consuming than link building and your efforts are easier to measure.

These are just five of the benefits of blog marketing. There are plenty more.

Change Is Guaranteed

There is only one thing I can guarantee you. Internet marketing will change. At one time, there was no Facebook, no YouTube, and no Twitter. Today, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you ignored these online marketing tools.

I can’t tell you what marketing online will be like 10 years from now, but I can guarantee you it will be different than it is today. Embrace the change and make the most of your opportunities.