Top 5 Ways to Market Yourself Online

Thanks to the Internet, we’re living in a golden age of communication. A person in the most remote part of the world still has the capacity to reach an audience of millions. At the same time, the need to stand out from the crowd heightens and marketing becomes more critical than ever.

The amount of ways that you can market yourself online is almost immeasurable. Of course, each method of marketing comes with its own set of pros and cons.

While no method is going to work universally, these are the top five ways that we’ve found for self-marketing.

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SEO Through Backlinks

If you’re trying to market yourself online, then you more than likely have a website or some other product that you are trying to promote. The amount of page views that your site gets is a direct result of how well you’ve marketed yourself. When it comes to page views, nothing is more effective than SEO, or search engine optimization. Backlinking refers to inbound links that lead to your website. They boost your site’s overall ranking in major search engines such as Google and Bing.

To put it bluntly, backlinks are a critical part of almost any online and local search marketingcampaign. If you can get other sites to link to your content, you’ll be organically marketing yourself by placing your website right in front of people who are using local search for searching for what you’re offering.

Networking

In real life, one of the most effective ways to market yourself is to know the right people. The same holds true when it comes to online marketing. Knowing the people who can place a valuable link to your website or who can direct traffic through a favorable blog post is critical. Even if you’re not concerned with small business marketing SEO, having a good relationship with people who might review your product can have a tremendous amount of value for your marketing efforts.

Google+

Google has built something interesting through its Google+ social network; they’ve built a network that encourages people to share interests and share content with one another. For the self-marketer, though, there’s a hidden value to Google+.

Google has included a button on its network and now in its search results that lets users give a +1 to a page. The more pluses that a site earns, the higher it ranks. Thus, being active on Google+ and gaining pluses there will give you a boost in search engines, making your marketing efforts on Google+ effective in other areas of the web.

Build an Email List

This is one of the oldest marketing methods on the Internet, but it’s still effective even with email supposedly on the downswing. Having a person’s email address is the 2012 equivalent of having their name and home address a decade ago.

With an email address, you can communicate on an ongoing basis and consistently market towards a base audience. By offering some sort of newsletter or other offer that entices users who visit your site to give you their email address, you’ll be able to build a repeating customer base.

Understand the Power of Social Media

At this point in the Web 2.0 game, social media is known by everybody. It is still worth repeating, however, just how much social networks have become the backbone of the Internet. Facebook has hundreds of millions of active users. Twitter sees users publish one billion tweets per month. There is no doubt that social media is at the core of the Internet now, and if you’re marketing online at all, you need to understand how to use it to your advantage.
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