In the high tech age, a lot of the conventional promotion processes have become almost usless and although these methods can still be useful to an extent, it would be fruitless to rely solely on these processes. In this day and age the main type of marketing is carried out is online. This can be detailed as the advertising of a product using the forum of the online community and the systems this gives. The use of Online Marketing has risen over the past decade due to an increase in the use of the internet on a personal level. This rise in world wide, online, communication can be attributed to the increasing craving for fast, simple, communication. Through the growth in the use of the internet, new marketing systems were fashioned, moving advertising from the “actual” to the “online”. This means that certain kinds of marketing techniques such as mail-shots have now been replaced with spam e-mails. As such I would conclude that the “traditional” marketing techniques have not disappeared; they have simply been replaced and have “developed.

It is through the growth and change of these marketing techniques that we can begin to see the pros and the cons in the marketing world. With any kind of marketing there is generally a price but with the online market this is vastly reduced due to the fact that online products can be very cheap (many being free). In the technological era there are a lot of different ways to make use of the internet but one of the key ways people would seem to use the internet is through the use of web-based search engines. This is the searching of an online database for particular websites via the use of search criteria. This is an successful way of finding websites that you do not necessarily know the website address of, and allows the user of the search engine to discover new websites that hold the information that they are looking for. This “mass-use” of search engines means that they are perfect for marketing if used properly. The best use of search engines for marketing is called Search Engine Placement. This is the advertising of your website by making is appear at the head of the results list when appropriate criteria are entered into the search engine. Search Engine Placement is done by the use of keywords on your website and the keywords used when adding your website to the search engines database.

The positioning of the keywords on your website is something that although easy to do can be something that is done incorrectly (making it useless). This is where you might use a company such as an Search Engine Optimization Company. SEO (Search engine optimisation) organisations are companies that have professional knowledge of the way in which search engines run and how best to market a website using the engines. An SEO Company can help advertise your company, not only helping with choice of specific keywords but also through the placement of those keywords too. Ideally the right placement of keywords on your website should increase the traffic to the site, thus increasing business and in due course revenue.

But what are the pros and cons of online promotion? Online marketing is simple and can be done by anybody but for fully effective marketing it would be prudent to employ someone to help. This may seem like it defeats the point of online marketing, in that it costs, but it is less costly than other forms of marketing.