Online marketing is any effort to spread the word about your company that uses the Internet to reach people.

Basically, it’s anything that you do online to get more eyeballs on you, grab people’s attention, and hopefully, at some point, get them to buy from you.

There are seven major sub-categories of online marketing that I want to cover in this guide.

Overview

We’ve already talked about search engine optimization (SEO), and I showed you all of the important aspects of it that you have to get right.

Next to SEO, there’s search engine marketing (SEM), which is simply the paid version of SEO.

Marketers pay Google to display ads in their search results in the hopes that they will drive traffic (especially interested people, or leads) to their product landing pages.

Then there’s content marketing. This is where marketers try to create valuable media and content to distribute to potential future customers. This is the good guy version of online marketing where you mostly try to guilt people into buying.

Of course, you already know social media marketing, which is where you use one or several social media channels to engage with customers, build relationships, and then send them to your products and services.

Pay per click advertising (or PPC) is similar to search engine marketing, but it isn’t limited to Google and its competitors. Most social media networks let you create ads that integrate naturally into their feeds, allowing you to pay for clicks to your website.

Affiliate marketing is a kind of referral marketing where you share profits with fellow marketers in exchange for promoting each other’s products.

And finally, there’s email marketing, which some already consider old-school. But it’s still one of the most effective channels. Once your customers have given you permission to contact them, you can email them at any time, providing value and asking them to buy when the time is right.

You can already guess how big online marketing really is. You know how huge of a space each of these individual categories fill.

I mean, just think about how many social media platforms you can name off the top of your head:

Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Google+, YouTube, Periscope, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon…

OK, you get the point.