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As a business owner, you've likely heard there are loads of opportunities for you to do well through advertising on the internet. However, for many new entrepreneurs, this can be a hard thing to get your head around. In the extremely competitive internet world, it's simply not enough to have a decent website. You have to know how to market it, and how to successfully turn visitors into paying customers. In this article we cover some of the most popular strategies used by internet marketers.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation is the process of making changes to your website so that it ranks higher in the search results. Website owners usually want their website to rank highly for words that relate to their business. If you own a London pizza takeaway, you would probably want to show up for words like "pizza takeaway", "London pizza" and "pizza". If this sounds like something that could benefit your business, you should learn more about search engine optimisation or hire the services of a search engine optimisation firm to make changes to your website's code and internet marketing strategy.

Pay-per-click (PPC) Marketing

Pay-per-click marketing is very similar to SEO but much more expensive. Your website shows up for keywords that are related to your business on the right of the natural search results. However, with pay-per-click, you pay the search engines to make your website appear higher for the keywords that are relevant to your business. And you only pay them money when a visitor clicks on your advert.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO)

Social media optimisation is advertising your business using some of the web's most popular websites. There are literally millions of people on websites like Ecademy, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Digg. You can make yourself, or your business, popular on these websites and you may find that you achieve great results if you develop decent relationships. A social media strategy is takes time to pull off, and requires a good understanding of the communities that exist on the websites you'll be targeting. Some business owners use the services of social media consultants to make it easier.

Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is the internet equivalent to newspaper advertising. You can have your banner adverts appear on online magazines, blogs and newspapers. One thing that's particularly effective about online banner advertising is that you might be able to find a publication that's exactly targeted to your customers. For example, as a curtain manufacturer, you may be able to find a website that exclusively talks about curtains.

Blogging

Blogging is becoming an extremely popular internet marketing strategy. Blogging is where you write articles and posts about your business, your industry and your company. You will then aim to get people interested in your business or your industry after reading your blog as a source of news, analysis and opinion.

Blogging, like social media, isn't simply a case of paying for advertising exposure. There is a degree of skill involved, but those that manage to forge a successful blogging strategy often experience great results.