In an age where Internet acquaintances can be easy gotten through Facebook friends and Twitter followers, it’s no wonder that newbie Internet Marketers are feeling confident that they can parlay social networking into a paying gig.
However, there is something to be said about keeping a professional reputation. It can take years to build up a good name but the good will can be gone instantly if you abuse trust. Therefore, how ethical is it to keep on marketing to friends and acquaintances? You need to constantly work on expanding the circle of your social network or risk over-extending your social capital and damaging your reputation.
There is another approach to Internet Marketing and that is through search engine marketing. Basically, you create websites that Google trusts by building authority links to your website. With trust, you will see your website slowly creep up on the rankings of the results pages.
Obviously, the logical follow-up question to ask is how to promote a website by link building? There are many options but the easiest way to get authority links is by finding a PR article directory like EzineAritcles.com and GoArticles.com. PR stands for PageRank which is a measure of the importance of a website by Google. However, don’t discount the smaller article directories either as Google likes seeing diversity in a website’s link profile.
Once you reach the top of the results page, you will find a constant source of traffic from the world wide web. And this isn’t an exageration as your potential customer could be anyone in the world. Compare this with social networking where you will have to constantly make new acquaintances to grow your business.
This comparison between social marketing and search engine marketing is not to say one is better than the other. In fact, there are merits to each type of Internet Marketing. Social marketing can be ramped up fast by marketing to the people you know but you have to be careful with your reputation. Search engine marketing might take slower to produce results but your audience is wider. Both approaches need to guard against losing trust whether it’s with people or with the search engines.
Which tactic works for you will depend on your type of business. It’s up to your to experiment and find out.
