Strategic Internet marketing is rare in the ranks of mainstream online marketing. A lot of internet marketers run unprofitable websites or businesses with no short or long term strategy.

Most people don’t have specific goals, while some just jump from one opportunity to another. Most internet marketers treat their internet marketing businesses like hobbies and expect to earn profits from them.

To succeed in internet marketing, you have to have a strategic internet marketing plan. You need a system. Depending on your internet marketing interests you need to focus on a long term goal and run your business accordingly.

Strategic internet marketing is not grabbing affiliate links and Twittering people or copying PLR material and throwing up a blog. It isn’t writing random articles or investing in product after product with no common purpose.

What is strategic internet marketing?

Strategic internet marketing involves having a marketing and branding plan that employs specific, effective and proven marketing techniques to get high converting results toward a common set of goals.

It involves deciding on a proven set of strategies and performing the tasks that support those strategies over and over for extended periods of time.

Everybody who has been successful in online marketing has a track record of having a system and sticking to it day after day after day. No secrets, no get rich quick scheme. Hard work, within a system, in a consistent manner, every day for a long time.

Every promotion within a strategic Internet marketing system has a purpose and the results of every promotion are tracked, tested and tweaked for increased results.

When the results are tweaked and performance improves, a good Internet marketer will move resources behind the top performing processes, scale them up and repeat them. In turn they will drop the ineffective processes and reallocate resources and budget dollars toward the high performers

The key to strategic internet marketing is to constantly evaluate and test and realign your most important resources which are time and money. If you don’t track your marketing campaigns and ads, you are flying blind and wasting your time.

What are some of the best online marketing strategies?

Everybody has their favorites and it certainly should include things you like to do otherwise you are forcing yourself to do things you don’t like and will probably struggle. Once you get some traction and start making money you can outsource the stuff you don’t like to do.

1) Article Marketing

A very effective and inexpensive way of promoting your business is article marketing. Writing solid articles builds your credibility and authority quickly and can drive targeted traffic to your site for free. This takes some work over time but anybody can do it

2) Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay per click or “PPC” is one of the fastest ways to drive traffic to your sites and offers, but it costs money and if you don’t know what you are doing you can lose your shirt before you get any results. This is an Internet marketing strategy for folks with money to spend or people that have some experience with keyword research and search engine optimization. It’s a great strategy, it just needs to be used wisely

3) E-mail and Newsletter Marketing

Having your own list of subscribers to send a newsletter to on a regular basis is a powerful way of expanding

your internet marketing business. This requires you to have a list of subscribers which you build by using the other techniques wisely and collecting contact information from people who “opt-in” to your various offers.

4) Search Engine Optimization

“SEO” is a very effective part of a good strategic Internet marketing plan. SEO involves a wide variety of techniques but is essentially split into two parts; On page SEO and off page SEO. This is a long term marketing tactic and continues to pay off over time. Ideally this practice evolves and never ends. You want to be “optimizing” your business every day. On page SEO involves tweaking your sites and pages to attract the search engines and people looking for your service organically. Off page SEO involves going “off” your site and doing things like link building to get other sites to notice and link to you.

These are just a few of the things you can do to build a profitable online business.

The most important thing to remember is to step back and and look at your business strategically. Everything you do should support the overall end goal of your business and anything that doesn’t should be reevaluated and either fixed or scrapped.