With a variety of marketers believing that internet marketing is the future of online marketing, but there are some online marketing disadvantages that everyone has to deal with. While the internet is both a great way to reach the masses and a fairly inexpensive form of advertising, knowing its short-comings can help you target your online marketing campaigns better and get you more business.

One of the major obstacles on the internet is that browsers sometimes view the internet like TV, they only want to view what they want. During commercials, people tend to take a break, go to the bathroom, or fast forward on their DVRs to simply bypass getting sold something. For advertisers, you will need to find a different strategy to get the attention of the audience.

Today’s online marketing strategies depend on getting links from other sites connecting to yours. The challenge to this is that other website owners will not link to you unless they give them something in return. One strategy is to offer a reciprocal link, where you link to someone’s website and they link back to yours. This strategy was used heavily a few years back but doesn’t appear to have much factor with search engines anymore. Even if you don’t get much search engine advantage from reciprocal links it still allows for possible referral traffic.

Another limitation to internet advertising involves search engine’s ranking criteria. The way a site gets ranked is how relevant the search query matches to the content of the page. Though it’s not an exact science, some major factors that contribute are title tags, meta tags, and the type of text on the web page.

You might of heard about Search Engine Optimization, usually referred to SEO. That’s one of the most popular buzz terms online today, and most site owners seem to want their website optimized. Basically, SEO is the technique of using key terms a certain number of times on your site so that search engines will consistently rank it very high.

You may find that when writing for the search engines, you might not be writing for the actual people visiting your site. If your web page is concentrating on too many key phrases to the point it doesn’t read naturally, you risk the chance of losing the people on your site.

The disadvantages listed above are common issues you come across with a typical online marketing strategy. This doesn’t mean it’s not impossible; nothing a little hard work and creativity can’t solve. Keep in mind, no matter the number of internet marketing limitations, the information you are providing is still reaching hundreds even thousands of people.

One of the best skill sets an online marketer can possess is the ability to be innovative. Successful Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns are the direct result of growth and revenue generated through tactical execution and out-of-box thinking.

At the onset, successful online marketers understand that in-depth keyword research, strategic bid optimization, effective campaign setup, continuous split-testing, and creating highly conversion driven landing pages are the keys to online success.

Handling the intricacies of PPC is like handling a slippery eel! Success can slip right through your hands if you miss the mark. And quite often, a simple change in PPC tactics can mean the difference between a campaign that takes off—and one that never leaves the runway.

Without the right strategy and execution, you could end up paying higher than average ad costs, experience non-existent visitors, and cross the finish line well below your margins.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of online advertising in aggregate with disciplines in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Contextual Advertising, and Paid Placement.

Contextual Advertising is when ads are displayed on a website where a contextual ad system determines what ads to display based on the page’s related keywords.

Paid Placement Advertising is when an advertiser pays for keyword placement within a sponsored ad section of a website. With Paid Placement, you can determine where you want to rank as long as you are willing to pay for it. Both Contextual and Paid Placement Advertising tend to fall within Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most sought after form of online advertising for businesses. The reason for this is it costs absolutely nothing to rank within the organic search results. When a website is properly optimized for search engines, they can expect to show up in organic listings for keywords that are relevant to their website. Sites that rank well for high traffic keywords can expect to receive a significant number of visitors. With SEO being the most rewarding form of online advertising, it’s also the hardest to execute. Many web designers, webmasters, and even search marketers struggle to take full advantage of getting sites to rank organically.

The top search engines utilize complex algorithms to determine what and where a web page will rank within their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). There are over 100 plus factors that help determine organic search engine rankings. Each search engine weighs certain factors more than others but typically hold the factors with the most influence equally high on their lists. Within SEO, their are 2 major areas of focus, On-Page and Off-Page factors.

On-Page factors, which is about 20% of SEO, includes everything a webmaster can control. These factors are changes that can be made on a website by modifying keywords in the Title Tag, H-Tags, Alt Tags, Body Content, and Site’s Theme.

Off-Page factors, which consists of the remaining 80% of SEO, includes factors a webmaster can’t control. These are factors that consist of acquiring quality relevant in-bound links (online votes) from other websites, blogs, articles, directories, social sites, and etc. Search engines, especially Google, place more emphasis on Off-Page factors because it is much more difficult to influence.

Why do many webmaster’s, web designers, and some search marketers struggle with SEO? Simply put, they focus most of their energy on the 20% of SEO. Just that alone is not enough to have a well optimized website. In the upcoming months, we’ll discuss some strategies to getting quality in-bound links to your website and some high-level On-Page optimization strategies.

Unlike SEO, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising comes with a cost. An advertister pays everytime someone clicks or an impression is executed on their ad. Even though it is more difficult to get a positive return with this type of online advertising model, it’s absolutely not impossible. Maybe you have heard that PPC advertising is a complete waste of money? And quite honestly it is…but that’s if you don’t know what you are doing.

Have you ever heard of Affiliate Marketers? Many of these marketers are some of the most savviest online marketers. Most affiliates generate 80% to 90% of their business through PPC advertising. They work with much lower margins and still find ways to generate positive ROI through PPC advertising. Some of the top affiliate marketers are generating well over 6-figures on a monthly basis at 50% to 300% ROI.

Why do most people fail with PPC advertising? Well, PPC advertising requires a high-level of understanding, right keyword research, proper campaign setup, bid optimization, high click-through ads, continual split-testing, highly converting landing pages, and much more. With PPC advertising, the slightest change in a campaign can be the difference from a negative to a very profitable campaign. Most people just don’t understand the intricacies of PPC advertising and in return are paying higher ad costs or converting less visitors keeping them well below their margins.

When done right, PPC advertising can prove to be a great online advertising tool to improving a website’s bottom line. In the upcoming months, we will cover some PPC strategies that will dramatically improve you return on investment. We’ll go into landing page design, avoiding the infamous “Google Slap”, high-level keyword research, and much much more.