Internet Marketing refers to all of the strategies you put in place to market your products and services online. As such, you must establish a significant web presence so that your prospects can find out what you have to offer.

You can have one website or several, but the sum of your website activity must encompass all five of the following marketing vehicles:

Lead capture

Your lead capture pages, also known as squeeze pages and opt-in pages, are the most important pages on your websites. These pages allow your prospects to raise their hand and say, “Yes, I want to hear from you.”

You don’t absolutely have to have separate pages for capturing leads, but it’s highly recommended. If you have a blog or content site, you can simply put your opt-in form in the sidebar of those pages. If you do this, however, make sure the opt-in form stands out. You might even want to consider using a pop-up or pop-under window in addition to having the sign up form in the sidebar.

Sales pages

Sales pages are where your prospects go to read your offers. They should serve one purpose and one purpose only: show the visitor how doing business with you will benefit them.

Each of your sales pages should focus on one product or service. Don’t confuse your prospects by giving them so many choices that they can’t make a decision, so they just leave your site.

Blog

A blog is an excellent tool for establishing relationships with your clients and prospects. It’s an easy way to foster communication and encourage interaction. The exchange of information between you and your readers gives you immediate feedback on how well your material is being received.

You can publish your blog as a subdirectory of your main website, or you can give it it’s own domain name. The choice is up to you. Many experts use their own names as the domain name for their blog because it makes it easy for people who are looking for information about them to get to know them very quickly.

Social Networking

Social networking sites have two major benefits.

First, like your blog, they allow and encourage interaction between you and your intended audience. The two-way communication tells you what your prospects and clients want and what you need to fix in your marketing system.

Secondly, social networking sites generate a lot of traffic and are highly-rated by the major search engines. When your social networking efforts tie in to your main websites, your relative importance goes up. That’s extremely powerful for improving your search engine rankings.

Authority

Establishing yourself as an expert, someone to be listened to, is essential to the success of your Information Marketing business. You need to show your intended audience that you know your stuff.

Your authority site can be your blog, it can be your main “corporate” website, or you can set up a separate content site. The choices are virtually limitless as to how to demonstrate that you are an authority in your niche. The important thing is that you establish a web presence that showcases your knowledge.

You have a lot of flexibility in setting up your websites and establishing your web presence. Plan carefully so your place on the web can grow as you expand your empire.