The evolution of online marketing

Put your hand up if you know what the following terms mean:

SEO

PPC

Social bookmarking

hashtag

If you're a business owner and you haven't heard of any of these terms or you don't know what they mean then it's time you learnt about modern online marketing for business.

If you have heard of these terms then this means you moved beyond the Yellow Pages.

Modern online marketing for business means all these terms above and so much more. Here we are going to take a short trip down memory lane to remember what online marketing used to look like and how far it has come.

Once there was Yellow Pages.....

Yes it was great to have your business in black and white (or colour) in the Yellow Pages but then when you got listed in the online Yellow Pages...well that was something. It meant you now had given your business an online presence.

It wasn't long after this though that businesses realised a Yellow Pages wasn't enough...that maybe a website was the way to go.

So not only large businesses had a website but small businesses also had their name in html lights. At this stage most small business websites consisted of one page. Some info on the company, and some contact details.

Soon small business realised that just a having a one page website was not good enough because no one could find them unless they had the exact url address. So businesses started employing fancy web developers to do up schmick online marketing campaigns with thorough keyword researchto achieve SEO.

This coincided at around about the same time as Google overwhelming every other search engine out there. Businesses soon realised that to get to the first page of Google they needed keywords to boost website traffic.

Then came email marketing. Some call it spam, some call it clever marketing, whatever you call it we've all received it. Small businesses realised that if they kept their subscribers informed with monthly emails this may mean they might buy from them due to constant reminders of how worse off they were if they didn't buy from them. This was the start of trust marketing for small business.

Then came blogs. Blogs were mainly the domain of high profile journalists or geeky IT people who used to have an opinion on everything and anything. Then these journalists and geeky people started getting thousands of people reading their blogs and put ads on them, sold things on them and made money! Businesses weren't going to miss out on this highly effective online marketing strategy so they blogged too! And discovered that blogs actually help boost they keywords which further helped them up the search engines! Great!

Next came Facebook. Small business scoffed (or ignored) this website which allowed teenagers to post debaucherous photos of themselves consumed in youthful over indulgence. But businesses soon realised that Facebook was a highly effective social media strategy that allows businesses to interact with their customers on a very personal level, not to mention the ability to use PPC (you know what that is right?).

And on the seventh day God made Twitter. Was it a spinoff from Facebook's status update feature? Who knows? Who cares? This weird website which allowed only 140 characters or less was also scoffed at as some weird vanity contest as to compare who had what for dinner. But alas it soon became clear that big business was using Twitter to drum up more business and soon small business wanted a piece of the pie and it became included in the top 10 online marketing strategies available. And now we know how important it is to have Twitter for online marketing.

In amidst this jungle of status updates tweets, and keywords we have also seen the proliferation of online article writing, images used for SEO, forum submission, social bookmarking and even pinging (who does this?). So we have seen the evolution of online marketing go from a full blown colour ad in the Yellow Pages to 140 characters on Twitter.