A business that decides to trade online must master the art of advertising. Traditional methods such as
billboard, TV adverts and direct mailing are still used. With the modern times of the internet, presenting
your business has become easier than ever before.
Effective use of search engines
E-Commerce businesses compete to be listed as high as possible in a search engine. The closer you are at
the top, the more popular you most likely are:
Spiders – A spider is a program that locates websites in an order of how relevant they are depending
on what the user has searched in the search bar.
Meta tags – Meta tags are like YouTube tags when editing a video. The uses of these tags are supposed
to make your site easier to find due to the keywords written. In a way this is helpful because you could
abuse the use of the tags by adding as many words as you wish, however the more random tags you
put, the more misleading your website may be, attracting the wrong customers.
Pop-ups and banners
These are two other forms of promotion for commercial systems. Pop-ups are windows that appear when
clicking on a link or entering a site, they are uncontrollable meaning these adverts are everywhere and
anywhere so a huge majority of users will easily see the advert which is great. The problem is that they’re
commonly known to be annoying and are ignored by the average user.
Newsgroups and Forums
Newsgroups are forums which are set for a particular topic of discussion, whereas Forums are internet
sites where people discuss about different things and it could be solutions for problems other users may
have. The result of advertising depends on how popular of the forum site is. If you were to advertise in
Reddit, the company would be noticed more as it’s one of the most popular forums out there, which is
helpful for when you need a boost of customers. However, everyone else will have the same idea and if
you advertise in a forum, you’ll be competing against hundreds of other businesses; some may have better
deals and sales than yours.
Spam
Using spam in today’s advertising is the last resort. It is direct mailshot to random e-mail users and is easily
identifiable as it’s automatically detected by the transfer protocol and sent straight to the ‘Junk’ or ‘Spam’
folder. When e-mail was a new feature, it was useful that adverts would be sent straight to your inbox.
Nowadays disreputable people use spam to advertise so if a big company were to advertise using spam, e-
mail users will simply not take your advertising seriously and will continue to ignore.