If you can get your business in front of potential customers browsing the internet, you can earn more sales.
An internet marketing strategy is the solution to help you get your business in front of potential customers.
In this post, you’ll learn what internet marketing is and how to create an effective strategy to earn more customers.
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What Is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing is a strategy that uses online media, such as a website, social media post, or video, to introduce potential customers to your business.
The Best Internet Marketing Channels
There are many internet marketing channels, but SEO, social media, email marketing, video marketing and partnership/influencer marketing are the major channels to consider.
SEO
Your potential customers are searching for products and services you offer online (often on Google or Bing).
For example, if you own a vet clinic in Atlanta, your potential customers may be searching for “best vet clinics in Atlanta.”
However, many vet clinics show up in the search results.
And customers usually select one of the top results.
So how do you make your website show up first?
It isn’t possible to make your website rank first, but you can boost its visibility by implementing a SEO (search engine optimization) strategy.
While SEO is a fairly complex topic, the basics of it are relatively simple:
- Keyword Research: First, consider what people might type in the search bar if they’re looking for your product or service. This process is known as keyword research. For example, if you have an M&A law firm and help people sell their landscaping businesses, a keyword might be “how to sell a landscaping business.”
- Content Marketing: Once you identify the specific keywords that your potential customers are searching for, create a guide or blog post with the information that the searcher is looking for. This information is known as content marketing. A search engine’s goal is to give the user great information on the topic they’re researching, so the best way to show up first is to create excellent information on that topic.
- Link Building: Next, search engines want to ensure they’re only sending users to reliable and credible sources. Search engines evaluate a website’s credibility by calculating the number (and credibility) of other websites across the internet that mention and link to that website.
For example, in the screenshot bleow, you’ll see a link from Harvard.edu to a piece published on the Washington Post. The link from Harvard to the Washington Post signals to search engines that the Washington Post is a credible website.
- On Page Content:Search engines use bots to “read” websites and understand what they are about. If the bots can’t easily crawl a website, they won’t rank it. On page optimization is the practice of ensuring the website is easy to crawl and navigate.
If you own a local business with a physical location, it’s also important to follow local SEO best practices, such as submitting it to Google My Business, attracting local links, and more.
Social Media
Another internet marketing channel that has become increasingly popular is social media marketing. Here’s an overview of the most popular social media platforms and which ones are best for various use cases:
| Social Platform | Use Case | Type of Content |
| Ecommerce, and coaches | Images, video, text-based content | |
| Ecommerce, and coaches | Reels, short form video, graphics | |
| X (Twitter) | B2B | Text-based content, threads |
| B2B | Videos, text-based content, infographics | |
| YouTube | Ecommerce, coaches, and B2B | Videos (long and short form) |
| TikTok | Ecommerce and coaches | Short form videos |
To build a following on social media, it takes time and patience.
You’ll likely have to post content for many months before the algorithms will begin increasing your content’s reach. If you stop publishing content for a period of time, your engagement will decline and you’ll have to rebuild your audience.
However, social media is a great marketing channel to increase brand awareness and build relationships with your potential customers.
You can also build a personal brand on social media and then use your own following to promote your business.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is essential for every business’s internet marketing strategy.
Most marketing strategies are controlled by algorithms, meaning your content will only reach your followers or subscribers if the algorithm shows it to them.
Email marketing is different.
Once a person gives you their email address, you can ensure each email you send lands in their inbox (unless they’ve marked it as junk mail or unsubscribed).
Email marketing is also one of the cheapest marketing strategies.
The only costs involved are the price of the email service provider, like ConvertKit, and the cost of the email copywriter.
Even if you aren’t ready to start an email marketing strategy, add an email sign-up form to your website to start collecting emails.
We have a separate resource to help you earn more email subscribers, but the most important factor for growing your email list is offering a lead magnet, such as a template, checklist, or free tool, that people are willing to give their email address to access.
Once you have a few hundred emails, start sending regular emails to your list.
If you have an ecommerce business, you can send:
- Educational content
- Abandoned cart emails
- Promotional emails
Here’s a complete guide to ecommerce email marketing.
If you have a product or service, create the following email addresses:
- Welcome/nurture email sequences
- Weekly newsletters
- Product tour/onboarding email sequences
Here’s a more detailed list of specific types of automated emails you can send to your list.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is highly effective at building trust, as prospects can see and hear your ideas.
Therefore, video marketing is particularly effective for coaching and service businesses where a customer is buying your expertise.
Additionally, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, and it’s significantly less competitive than Google. By investing in video marketing, you’ll have the opportunity to capture that traffic and reinvest it into your business.
Another benefit of video marketing is that it’s much easier to repurpose across other social platforms.
For example, if you have a long form video, you can easily turn it into multiple short form video clips to post across various social media platforms.
Here’s a great example of a long form YouTube video from Think Media that they turned into an Instagram clip, a TikTok clip, and a podcast.
As a result, Think Media multiplied the YouTube video’s reach.
Partnership and Influencer Marketing
One of the challenges with organic (non-paid) marketing efforts, such as SEO, social media, and video marketing, is that it often takes a long time to build an audience.
To see more immediate results, you can partner with a similar brand or invest in influencer marketing.
This means the influencer or partner promotes your brand or content to their audience.
Influencers often charge money to promote your content or brand.
This video by keto influencer Thomas DeLauer is a great example of influencer marketing. In this video, the influencer (Thomas DeLauer) shares various foods that he’s changed his mind about, and then he includes an ad read at 4:42, showing his audience that they can purchase all of the foods he’s mentioning at Thrive Market.
In this example, Thrive Market hired Thomas DeLauer to promote its brand because Thomas DeLauer’s audience is Thrive’s ideal customer.
If you don’t have the budget to pay an influencer, you can also collaborate with another brand. For example, you can interview someone on a podcast or offer to promote their products/services in exchange for promoting your brand.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising can also be an excellent supplement to your organic marketing efforts.
Two common forms of paid advertising include:
- Paid search ads: The most common form of paid search ads are Google Ads. You can bid on keywords your potential customers might search for, like “flower shop in Austin.”
- Paid social ads: These are ads you might see on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter. You can pay these social media platforms to show your ad to a specific demographic, such as people in a particular age range or location. Here’s an example of a paid ad on Facebook.
- Display Ads: These are the ads that you might see on other websites as you browse the internet. They are becoming less popular as privacy policies make it more challenging to track users across the internet, but it is still an option. For example, these ads from Warby Parker and the Alzheimer’s Association:
You can also run paid ads on podcasts, industry newsletters, YouTube, and other platforms.
Paid ads are excellent for generating initial brand awareness, but don’t rely on them as your only marketing strategy, as the ROI will stop as soon as you pause the ads.
Internet Marketing Tips
The perfect internet marketing strategy varies depending on your business and target audience.
For example, the perfect internet marketing is different for an ecommerce business and a coaching business.
While an ecommerce brand must have a website for people to order products and services, a coach could have a very successful marketing strategy with just an Instagram or YouTube account.
However, here are a few fundamental internet marketing best practices that apply to all businesses.
Tip #1: Build An Email List
Most people watch a video or read a blog post and never return.
As a result, they never become customers.
To solve this problem and ensure you can show that person more of your content, capture their email address.
Once you have their email, you can send your content to their inbox.
To build an email list, you can add a pop-up to your website with a tool like ConvertKit. Here’s an example of the Copyblogger pop-up:
If you don’t have a website, you can use ConvertKit to create a simple landing page (essentially, a one page website) to capture their email. Here’s an example of a landing page template on ConvertKit:
We have a separate guide to help you create a compelling landing page, but even more important than the landing page itself is the lead magnet – the resource you’re offering them in exchange for their email address.
People won’t freely give you their email address.
You need to offer them something they really want, like a template, checklist, or calculator.
Here’s an example of an excellent lead magnet from a diet and nutrition coach.
She has a video to capture her ideal audience’s attention, and then she offers two different lead magnets:
- A quiz to test your intuitive eating habits
- A free ebook (The Five Step Guide To Food Freedom)
She also pitches these lead magnets part-way through the video:
You’ll notice that she never directs viewers to a website, proving that you don’t need a website to start an internet marketing strategy.
Tip #2: Engage With Your Audience
When you publish your first piece of content, it probably won’t immediately earn hundreds of views.
To gain traction, join online forums, communities, and attend industry events to get to know your target audience and build a relationship with them.
Once you’ve built real relationships with these people, you’ll become their first choice if they decide to purchase your product or service.
Think about it – you’re more likely to buy flowers from your friend’s shop than a random flower shop showing you ads online.
So, where do you find these industry forums?
Reddit is one place to start.
For example, Sol Orwell built Examine.com into a multi-million dollar brand thanks to Reddit. He spent months building relationships with people in the Reddit community to learn about their problems (finding credible unbiased health information) and then built a product to solve those problems.
Then, Sam had a group of people that already liked and trusted him when he launched the website, so they immediately had a hungry customer base.
Facebook and Slack communities are also excellent resources to build real relationships with people. For example, if you sell baby products, consider joining some of these new mom Facebook groups to learn about their problems:
The key to this strategy is to provide real value and answer peoples’ questions one-on-one.
If you just post content or promote your brand, you’ll probably get banned, and people will view it as salesy.
In fact, actively seek communities that do not allow promotion because those tend to have higher quality engagement and an engaged group of potential customers.
Engaging with people in real life at industry events (or even hosting your own event!) is also an excellent way to build genuine relationships.
Tip #3: Choose One Content Format And One Channel
To grow an audience as quickly as possible, most new entrepreneurs want to create every content format (e.g., text, videos, and graphics) and post on every content platform (e.g., your blog, YouTube, all social media platforms, etc.).
The problem is that you have limited time and resources.
You’ll see better results posting consistently on one platform rather than posting sporadically across multiple platforms each week.
Invest all of your resources into growing an audience on one channel with one content format (e.g., short form videos, threads, etc.).
You’ll also find that each content platform has nuanced differences.
For example, a post that succeeds on LinkedIn might fail on Instagram because a person’s mindset is different on Instagram than LinkedIn.
Each social algorithm also prefers a slightly different style of content.
Tip #4: Collaborate With Creators And Experts
Your first few pieces of content probably won’t earn much engagement.
There are plenty of content promotion strategies, like guest posting, that can help boost your content’s performance. The downside is that most promotion strategies require a lot of time or resources and don’t have a high success rate.
In the long run, you’d probably see a better ROI by investing that time into creating more evergreen content that will eventually perform well as you build your audience.
Collaborating with other creators and experts is one promotion strategy that requires little effort and has a high success rate.
There are a few benefits to collaborations:
- You earn more brand awareness when the creator/expert shares the content with their audience.
- You earn credibility by being associated with that creator.
- You build genuine industry relationships, which can lead to more sales down the road.
If you don’t have any followers across any platforms, start by reaching out to parallel businesses.
For example, if you are building a fitness coaching business, you can start by reaching out to companies that sell fitness gear, like Levels Health (a glucose monitor), or doctors.
You could interview the specialists at Levels Health and do a content collaboration on a topic about glucose monitoring. As Levels Health wants to promote that product, they’re likely going to agree to a content collaboration.
Similarly, you could interview your local doctor and ask them about what glucose monitoring is and why it’s important. That person will likely be open to collaborating because any press makes them look good to their prospective patients (even if you don’t have any followers).
Both of these experts (Levels Health and the doctor) will likely promote the final content to their audience because a third party interview makes them look credible and packages the ideas that they didn’t have time to put into a piece of content.
If you have the budget, you can also do a paid influencer collaboration. For example, you can pay content creators, like Nick Bare, to promote your content to their audience.
Tip #5: Repurpose Your Content
It might take several weeks or months to build a smooth content workflow and build a following on one platform.
After you work out the bumps and figure out a content style and publishing frequency that feels easy, add another platform to your content strategy.
However, repurpose your existing content across different platforms instead of creating entirely new content.
Content repurposing is readjusting and optimizing a single piece of content for different platforms.
For example, Think Media begins by publishing a single long form video. Then, they have their team extract clips to publish across Instagram, YouTube shorts and TikTok.
Here’s an example of a long form video:
And here are some of the clips that they then posted across various social platforms like Instagram.
As well as YouTube Shorts:
You can even use a tool like Opus Clips to repurpose the video content across multiple platforms:
Paste the URL of the long form video and it automatically creates clips that you can publish across different social media platforms.
If you’re serious about growing your other social media channels, hire a platform-specific expert to further optimize each post.
Tip #6: Publish Consistently
The top reason most content strategies fail is that marketers give up too soon. Organic content marketing has the best long term ROI, but it requires consistency for an extended period of time before you’ll see any results.
To ensure you publish content consistently, use this three step approach:
- Set aside time once per week to create content. Ideally, block off an hour or two in the morning before you do anything else.
- Schedule your content in advance. Do this as soon as you finish creating the content. You can schedule blog posts in WordPress in advance and YouTube also has a feature that allows you to schedule videos in advance. If you’re posting on social media platforms, you can use a tool like Buffer to schedule all of your social content in advance.
- Avoid your analytics. This may seem counterintuitive, but if you’re constantly checking your analytics in the early days and see that it’s very low, you’ll become discouraged. For the first few months, just publish content.
Once you have enough data to see real patterns, then you can start to analyze the top performing content. In the early days, the reps are more important than anything.
Internet Marketing Tools
There are hundreds of internet marketing tools you could use, but you could easily spend a fortune on tools before ever earning a single follower.
So instead of buying every tool available, here are five tools worth buying (and some offer free plans).
1. ConvertKit – Best For Email Marketing
ConvertKit makes it easy to collect and send emails. You can use its landing page builder to create your own landing page or embed one of ConvertKit’s pop-ups into your website to capture email addresses.
ConvertKit also makes it easy to segment your email list and create nurture sequences (which you can learn more about in our email marketing guide).
If you’re unsure how to create an email nurture sequence, you can use ConvertKit’s premade templates.
You can also monetize your emails by using ConvertKit’s tip jar, selling a product, or join ConvertKit’s recommendation network. The recommendation network allows creators to earn money by recommending other email lists in your emails.
ConvertKit has a free plan and two other pricing tiers:
2. Canva – Best For Creating Graphics
Whether you’re building an audience on your blog or social media, Canva is a great tool that allows anyone to make professional-looking graphics.
All of the graphics on the Copyblogger blog are made with Canva, and you can get started with a blank page or one of their many templates.
They offer some free graphics and you can upgrade to their pro plan and access thousands more.
Pro plan users can also upload brand styles, such as fonts, colors, logos, and more to ensure your team uses the same branded style for each graphic they create.
Canva’s new AI feature also allows you to type in any idea and then will automatically create a graphic based on that prompt. Here’s an example of the results for the prompt “create an Instagram post promoting a coffee shop:”
They offer a generous free plan, but they also have paid options if you want more storage, team collaboration options and more graphics:
3. Grammarly – Best For Content Writing
Grammarly is an excellent writing tool with AI capabilities that not only corrects grammar and spelling mistakes, but also provides rephrasing suggestions to make the content clear and concise.
It also has a plagiarism checker, making it excellent for editors and content managers.
The free plan helps identify grammar and spelling errors, and the pro plan provides more advanced suggestions for improving the flow of your content.
4. Buffer – Best For Content Scheduling
Inconsistency is one of the most common content marketing mistakes, and an easy way to prevent this issue is using a content scheduling tool like Buffer.
Buffer offers plenty of other social media management tools as well. Here are a few of them:
- Engage Dashboard: This shows all engagement across all social media platforms so that you can respond to comments and manage your posts in one place.
- Create Dashboard: This allows you to create content directly inside Buffer. It also has an AI assist tool that helps with the content creation process. Type in your idea, and it will help you create a first draft of your content.
- Analyze Dashboard: This is the analytics suite. It shows you how each post performs and helps you discover trends in top performing content.
Buffer has a very limited free plan and several paid plans:
5. Ahrefs – Best For SEO
If you choose to invest in SEO, Ahrefs is a great tool to help you identify the right keywords to target, track traffic growth, discover backlink opportunities, and analyze competitors.
Ahrefs is one of the more expensive tools on this list, but you’ll probably never need to buy another SEO tool.
When you first log in, it can be a little intimidating, but the main things you’ll see are your website’s authority (backlinks), traffic, and keywords:
If you’re just getting started, here are a few of the best tutorial Ahrefs offers on using their product:
- How to do keyword research with Ahrefs
- How to use the Ahrefs Backlinks report
- How to analyze your competitors with Ahrefs
Pricing starts at $129 per month, though it’s worthwhile if you plan to seriously invest in SEO:
Internet Marketing Examples
To help you build your own successful internet marketing strategy, here are a few examples of excellent internet marketing strategies for various types of businesses.
Internet Marketing For A Local Business
Saint Honore is a couture donut shop in Las Vegas and an excellent example of a local business with outstanding internet marketing.
First, they have a highly effective SEO strategy and (at the time of this writing) show up for many keywords related to “donut shop in Las Vegas.”
They also have plenty of backlinks from third party websites discussing the best donut shops in Las Vegas, including Eater Vegas:
They also have one of the most successful social media strategies I’ve ever seen for a local business with over 150,000 followers on Instagram and over 130,000 followers on TikTok.
Their social media strategy is primarily short form video content from behind the scenes.
Their founder, Alexandra Lourdes, also has a strong personal brand, with nearly a million followers on Instagram. She uses her personal brand to promote the business, and as a result, they’ve attracted many influencers to come try the donuts and make their own content about Saint Honore.
This is a perfect example of how even a local business can leverage influencer marketing:
Their organic internet marketing strategy is so successful that they don’t run any paid ads.
Internet Marketing For Courses
The Pilot Institute sells courses for drone and private pilots, and their internet marketing strategy is stellar.
First, they have outstanding SEO with detailed, helpful articles on topics relevant to their potential customers.
Each blog post is also well designed and easy to navigate, making it an excellent user experience.
In addition to their SEO strategy, they also have an excellent social media presence. They consistently post engaging short form video content and optimize each post for each social media platform. Here’s a snapshot of their Instagram account, which currently has over 16,000 followers.
The founder also has a strong personal brand and consistently posts long form videos on YouTube.
As people buying courses are essentially purchasing advice, who they’re buying from is important. Customers want to purchase from a credible and trustworthy source. Therefore, building a personal brand is essential if you’re marketing a course.
They also send out a regular email newsletter:
The biggest lesson from the Pilot Institute is that they consistently post high quality content across multiple channels. They don’t use any advanced tactics, they just keep posting helpful, quality content.
If you do the basics correctly, you’ll succeed.
Internet Marketing For An Ecommerce Business
Function of Beauty is an example of an ecommerce business with a great internet marketing strategy.
First, they rank for many search terms that their ideal customers might search like “custom shampoo and conditioner” and “personalized shampoo.”
Once a visitor lands on Function of Beauty’s home page, they are immediately offered a quiz (Function of Beauty’s lead magnet) to capture their email address. This allows Function of Beauty to continue to market to them even after they leave the website.
Function of Beauty also has a strong network of affiliates, and they use influencers to create content for their Instagram account.
In fact, their Instagram account currently has over 700,000 followers, and they post unique content almost daily.
They use a variety of short form videos and images across all of their social media platforms.
Need More Help With Your Internet Marketing Strategy?
The information in this post can help you start an internet marketing strategy, but if you want more help, you can join the Copyblogger Academy. It’s a course and community of entrepreneurs building online businesses.
Members have access to nine marketing courses on various topics including SEO, content marketing, email marketing, copywriting, and personal branding, but more importantly, they also have access to a community of peers.
The community is operated by seven figure founders, Tim Stoddart and Charles Miller, and you can also ask them for direct feedback on your work.
To learn more about the Copyblogger Academy, sign up today risk free. If you aren’t 100% satisfied with your investment, we’ll give you a full refund in the first 30 days.