Marketing Your Business on the Internet

Understanding the Digital Ecosystem

There are millions of pages on the web, and more are added daily. With all these pages, how can you ensure that your website gets noticed? It isn’t easy. To increase traffic to your site, you need to learn all you can about digital marketing strategies and when to use each. In this lesson, we’ll start with a high-level view of these strategies with an introduction to the digital marketing ecosystem, several types of websites, and common business models.

Understanding Your Digital Footprint

To establish a web presence for your business, you’ll need to understand your goals, your customers’ needs, and your target audience. With this information, you can establish a market position that differentiates you from competitors and helps grow your digital footprint. We'll discuss these topics and more in this lesson.

The Digital Customer Journey

In this lesson, you’ll learn about the phases of the digital customer journey and how to create content and develop strategies for users during each phase. It’s essential to meet your prospective customers where they are, and this lesson will discuss ways to do just that.

Domain Names and Search Engines

In this lesson, you’ll discover the importance of selecting your site’s domain name. You’ll also learn how search engines work. With this knowledge, you can make choices that help drive visitors to your website.

Website Optimization

In this lesson, you’ll discover how to optimize your website so it ranks higher on search engine results pages. You’ll learn about keywords and coding elements to improve your site’s ranking and reach more visitors, as well as what backlinks are and how they can affect ranking.

Web Analytics

This lesson will explain how to find invaluable performance data about your website. The number of visitors, how long they stay, which pages they visit, and how they get to your site are just a few metrics you can evaluate to learn more about your audience and improve your site.

Paid Media

 During this lesson, you'll learn how to develop ads that inspire your target audience to take the action you want. You'll understand how to advertise your website using search engine marketing (SEM), display advertising, video marketing, social media, and more. 

Email Marketing

Despite the growing number of junk email messages filling inboxes, email is still a thriving medium. So, it’s important to understand how to use email to keep current customers and acquire new ones. In this lesson, we’ll examine how you can use email to promote your business.

Creating Engagement Through Content

If you want visitors to spend more than a few seconds on your website, you'll need to make it interesting, entertaining, and informative. Stickiness is the factor that causes visitors to spend more time at your site. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use content such as blogs and syndicated content to make your website more engaging and increase stickiness.

Creating Engagement Through Community

In the previous lesson, you learned to build site stickiness through content. In this lesson, you’ll learn to build site stickiness through social media. You’ll also become acquainted with synchronous and asynchronous tools you can use to develop a social media community experience for your visitors.

Selling Products Using E-Commerce

The last element you can use to build site stickiness is commerce, or, in this case, e-commerce. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use e-commerce to engage visitors on your site and encourage them to return more often. You’ll become acquainted with technology you can use to create an online store, including shopping cart software and online payment systems.

Completing Your Digital Marketing Plan

In our final lesson, you’ll have the opportunity to compile all the information you gathered during this course to create your digital marketing plan. To help with this effort, you will download a checklist, calendar, and budget worksheet to walk you through the process of completing and implementing your plan.