When you are just beginning to look at your business market from an online point of view, there are a number of questions that will come up in your mind. How to you market online? What is internet marketing? Will you use Multi Level Marketing? And how will these marketing principles affect your identity as a once brick and mortar business, and now also an online business? Of course, marketing takes on a whole new range of options and necessities when you get an online presence; which can intimidate many business owners unfamiliar with the terms. Below, we offer a basic overview of both MLM and Internet Marketing; and give good strategy ideas for implementing one and/or the other.

Multi Level Marketing

One of the most common ways that businesses have always marketed their products and services-prior to the advent of the internet, was that of a concept called Multi Level Marketing also known as MLM. Though there are many definitions of what people considered marketing to be of this kind, the most basic strata of multi level marketing is that it uses a network of people to create more selling of your product or services. Often multi level marketing is lumped in with pyramid schemes which have a pyramid of people working in a caste to make money, and all money is distributed according to successful sales amongst the sellers-those at the top making the most. For our purposes, MLM is a means of using old fashioned advertising to get the word out on your product-so through word of mouth, and networking. While it might have been a likely choice between MLM and Internet Marketing for a business with an online presence; it is now vital to have both if you really want to make some profit.

Internet Marketing:

Internet marketing is a very loose term associated with marketing your products and services to your intended market. At its most basic concept, internet marketing works to get your site out more effectively to your market than your competitors. Moreover, there are billions of sites online; and internet marketing helps distinguish one site from another, and offer the most related sites for a person surfing the web. For internet marketing, it is not a might-it is a must have. With this urgency for internet marketing, you need to make yourself aware of many key concepts that will help you compete for visibility online. These are: Email marketing, SEO, SEM, affiliate marketing, and social networking. Though each of these concepts is much more complicated, I offer a quick explanation to get you started here:

• Email Marketing: email marketing is a means of automatically sending out emails to your customers, getting them signed up for emails, and telling them about promotions, sales, and new products to keep them coming back to your site.
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization: This is a way of optimizing your site content and internal parts and developing links to your site to improve how you rank for keyword terms in your niche.
• SEM: Search Engine Marketing: Though closely related to SEO, SEM works in a paid and “unnatural” fashion to pay for rank in the search engines for your specific keyword terms. You do this through common SEM ad campaigns such as Google AdWords, Yahoo SEM, etc.
• Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate Marketing is a system of paying in money or product/service other owners of sites to promote your products or services-based upon performance.
• Social Networking: Though a part of SEO practice, social networking is becoming its own sport in the online marketing world. This is where you can create a duplicate online presence and interact with potential customers through a friend of a friend of a friend kind of manner. The most popular Social sites are Youtube, Facebook, My Space and Twitter.

As you can see, there are a lot of options for you to think about before starting your business on the Internet, but it is all worth it because it does woerk if you are willing to put up the time.