On a fundamental level, marketing and promoting products or services online is no different than traditional off-line PR and promotion.

It doesn’t matter if you are selling a product or service, you need to advertise to get the word out and create a buzz about your product or service to quickly communicate benefits in order to close the sale and achieve your conversion objectives.

Depending on the variables such as the profit margin, considerations of the sales cycle such as is the price point low enough to sell on impulse?, is there a two step close?, what is the best way to identify, target and sell to your audience? All of these simple questions must be clearly delineated prior to embarking on an online marketing campaign.

In the past, consumers had less distractions on their mind and had no problem sitting for hours browsing through the paper, actually reading a magazine instead of (power skimming) flipping through it so fast like you are trying to see the hidden animation on the pages like a stick-figure theater. Faced with less time available on a daily basis due to hectic schedules, people have less time to shop or do the things they enjoy. So, you have to be brief and to the point when you communicate benefits to prospects if you want them to react to your marketing message.

Commerce is a cycle of supply and demand and somewhere in the middle is the manufacturer, the distributor and end-user in the sales and marketing process. Regardless if the advertising encapsulates B2B (business to business), B2C (business to consumer) the core theme must be based on relevance, providing a solutions to a problem, or some type of enhancement.

The key is to appealing to peoples emotions first, then communicate the benefits to reinforce that initial emotional trigger. This involves understanding visual or intellectual appeal and implementing it in some way, shape or form to create the right emotional and rational hook for your offer.

There is an audience for just about anything, I am sure if Google would only show us a fragment of what people are actually searching for on a daily basis, we would be shocked at the variations of keywords and phrases lumped together in an attempt to find just what they were looking for.

One rule of thumb in organic optimization is, a page can be comfortably optimized for at least three variations of a keyword or related key phrase. So, if you have multiple products or keywords you want to rank for, then you should have a grasp of the necessary amount of content development and site and information architecture to support each of the major categories.

What is paramount for someone advertising, marketing and selling products online is to understand that the difference between broad match and exact match means that you should have enough pages that allow you to be pliable in your approach and have pages for general / broad phrases that link to more specific pages on the topic.

In order to rank for something, it needs to (a) exist in your website (b) be clearly delineated as the objective of the page (relevant tags, titles and links form other pages) as well as (c) have enough popularity (through internal or external links) to get the attention of search engine spiders. From there, if organic optimization is your objective, the spiders will deliver free traffic (the best kind) to your content and based on how compelling the offer is it will either convert or fail to convert them into a client or sale.

How many times have you come across pages online with the title tag stuffed with every possible variation of product related to what is on the page, but only a fraction of the items are present, or the page is sparsely populated? Don’t follow that example, robust sites with relevant information on a topic have a higher chance of ranking for dozens of related keywords and key phrases.