So you have taken your concept and ideas to a website designer/developer in order to turn your dream into reality – the dream of owning your own business and having a website to generate your income. So the worst is over, right? WRONG!!! This is just the tip of the iceberg because the real work is just beginning. If you expect to receive visitor traffic – a.k.a. your prospective buyers – you’re going to need a good internet marketing strategy. After all, the key to making sales and generating a profit is what? That’s right – you’re website visitors.

So what’s the big secret? The secret is . . . there is no secret. You’re going to generate visitor traffic with a very powerful tool called search engine marketing or SEM for short. For the uninformed, SEM is a type of online marketing that promotes websites by growing their brand and increasing their visibility in the SERP’s or search engine results pages. This is primarily accomplished through paid (SEM) and unpaid (organic or SEO) advertising. In reality, SEM is the best of both worlds in that it is the “umbrella” that covers PPC and SEO.

Getting Noticed

Growing brand awareness and increasing online visibility is a matter of doing something to get noticed by your prospective visitor traffic. And that is where SEM plays an extremely important role. Not only that but achieving higher rankings in the SERP’s necessitates having a great SEM strategy. There’s no guarantee in internet marketing, but if you develop a good strategy, it will help you achieve a higher ranking in those search results. Remember, statistics have proven that most consumers do not navigate past the first results page when doing research, searching for important information, shopping, and so on.

Additional Considerations

SEM involves paying for your advertising through formats such as pay-per-click of PPC as it is most commonly referred to. This is sometimes referred to as the “intrusive” form of marketing and advertising. Conversely, SEO is the organic or unpaid method for marketing or what is called the “non-intrusive” form.

While there are proponents of SEM who believe that paid search advertising is the only way, SEO stands just as firmly on their belief that organic search marketing is the only way. Ironically, they are both right considering what we mentioned above regarding strategies and using both forms. But the bottom line is simple – SEM will get you noticed on the web!