The goal of online marketing is to increase sales by finding more customers and driving existing customers to spend more money. It sounds simple enough, but with all of the options, technologies, and Internet buzzwords flying around, it hard to find out what really works and what is just a waste of time. The main questions that companies need to address are:

• Where are new customers looking for businesses?
• Can they find the company there?
• What do people have to do once they find the company?

Customers looking for businesses use search engines. According to the Nielsen and Webvisible research of January 2009, 63 percent of people looking for a product or service go to the Internet, and 83 percent of those use search engines. Acording to comScore, more than 93 percent of all searches are done on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Twitter and Facebook are still less prominent. Advertising on other websites is not that effective as well to reach potential customers looking for natural products. Search-engine optimization (SEO) is the process that makes a business and website easily found. There can be a lot involved in SEO, but the single most important thing is to claim or set up local business listings. When someone does a search for, "organic food store in Santa Clara," the search engines display matching local business listings, even before they show any website results. To claim or add a business, go to: Google: Google.com/lbc Yahoo: https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx Bing: http://listings.local.yahoo.com Once a visitor arrives at the company’s website, he needs to so three things:

1. To purchase or by the natural product;
2. To sign up for updates;
3. To tell other people about the company and product(s).

The first step is to have a professional, inviting website that is SEO-friendly. Whether or not you choose to sell products online, design it like an online store. It must be easy for people to see what products are available and have a feel for what the store looks like. It is essential to have the company’s address and phone number on each webpage along with a link to contact by e-mail and a link to a map. For selling online, the website must have a good, simple e-commerce system or something like Living Naturally or OrderDog, which directly integrates with inventory and POS systems. Website visitors should be enticed to sign up for e-mail updates so the company can market to them again and again. The e-newsletter signup must feature prominently on the site and offer a clear incentive to sign up. No one wants more commercial e-mail, but they’ll sign up if they get special discounts or offers that aren’t available any other way. In the physical store, collect e-mail addresses from everyone who comes in, using the same incentives. For most retailers, it’s best to send e-mail updates once per month with specials, coupons, information about upcoming activities, and maybe a tip or two. Here’s where social media comes in. Set up a Twitter account and Facebook fan page, and let people know they can also follow the company that way. Then when e-mail updates are sent, post that same content to Twitter and to Facebook and encourage people to share it with their friends.

Amazon (AMZN) emerged from the dot-com bubble as one of the few winners and continued to blaze a trail of impressive growth. One of facets of Amazon's high-profile success has been its unabashed embrace of transformational growth in its white space. Amazon survived the dot-com bubble because it had a viable and innovative business model built around a market-changing, customer-value proposition and a radical profit-formula that upended the staid book industry. Then it quickly expanded beyond books to include all sorts of easily-shippable consumer goods, growing from its core into near adjacencies. A few years later, the company seized its white space when it devised a new value proposition, offering a commission-based brokerage service to buyers and sellers of used books. Then it moved into its white space again by developing a model to serve an entirely-different customer: third-party sellers. By opening up its storefront to other retailers that were essentially competitors, Amazon transformed its business from direct sales to a sales-and-service model, aggregating many sellers under one virtual roof and receiving commissions from the other companies' sales. Then, Amazon identified a new area of potential growth by finding another new customer -- the IT community. Serving new online customers’ needs required different processes, different resources, and a different profit formula -- in short, another new business model. In 2002, Amazon launched a web-services platform, and within five years the site used by Amazon's web-services platform had grown into the seventh-largest in the world. In late 2007, it set up Lab126, whose first product, the Kindle e-book reader, came to market wrapped in a business model not only foreign to Amazon's DNA but also potentially disruptive to the entire publishing industry. To launch this high-margin, product-based offering, Amazon had to become an original-equipment manufacturer (OEM). The company wrapped this technology in a seamlessly-integrated, iTunes-type digital-media platform that combined both transaction- and subscription-based content delivery. It partnered with content producers in innovative ways and created an open back-end that allowed independent publishers to generate new content for the Kindle. In its first year alone, Amazon sold an estimated 500,000 Kindles. Amazon has greatly expanded the market for e-books and positioned itself for success not only in this market but in newspaper and periodical distribution as well. Amazon has the unique ability to launch and run entirely new types of online business models while simultaneously extracting value from existing businesses. The lessons here are valuable to any business looking to break into the online world.

In online marketing, reputation and perception is the key. Readers must get an idea of a company before they start reading and believing in what it says or offers. It would be hard to put faith and confidence in an organization they do not know. Here are some aspects to gaining a good reputation. Convincing authority When promoting a new product or offering on an online-marketing site, companies need to make sure that it’s noticed. Back up the product or offer introduction with credible information, sources, and testimonials. No matter how innovative and groundbreaking content may be, it is only as believable as its sources. Believable content In online marketing, it’s important not to exaggerate but to state the facts as they are. The honesty of a product should speak for itself. Unethical businessmen like to put big words on small things to make them more valuable, and consumers hate that. Testimonials Let the target audience know how people have benefited from the product -- comments and testimonials must be posted online. People and enterprises who have benefited from the product or service will gladly tell others about it. Remember that who believes in a company is just as important as the company itself. To have an edge over the competition in the online-marketing arena, organizations have to be convincing -- they need to be believable and have proof to show potential customers and clients.