Some internet marketing strategies are evergreen, others ebb and flow.

For instance, written content has been around much longer than the internet and it’s unlikely to fade. Sure, the medium it’s delivered in might change – we’re no longer painting hieroglyphics onto walls – but we still like to read things.

Other internet marketing strategies that are now available would have been written off as a science fiction dream only a few years ago – personalised adverts spring to mind here.

So which internet marketing strategies are currently the most successful?

Written content

Yes, written content still rules the web.

But – to an extent – the way it’s delivered has changed.

Look at any set of search results and most of the time you’ll see videos mixed in with regular web pages.

For some searches, you may come across PDFs and other documents.

A lot of the videos that show up high in the results – more so on Google than YouTube which has its own algorithm and places value on views and viewing duration as well as other more obvious factors – will have written content below them in the description.

Which essentially means that Google are still serving up written content.

For most search results the ratio is around 80-90% written, 10-20% video.

Given the massive amount of data that Google have at their fingertips, that should tell you a lot about which strategy they think their searchers want.

But it should also tell you that the variety of written content has increased.

Which is why I often turn my blog posts into videos, audios and documents for document sharing sites like SlideShare and Scribd.

Sometimes I’ll expand the posts into complete products – I did that recently:

• I wrote a post about creating a product review site. That was just over 800 words long and got a good reaction.
• I then went into much more depth with a 29 page PDF report that is available here.

I could also have placed that report onto a document sharing site or turned it into a Kindle book.

Now there’s an idea.

And I just just broke off from writing this post and did it! It’s now waiting for Kindle to approve the book. Once that’s done, I’ll add it to CreateSpace as well for those who prefer printed versions.

That’s an example of how you should adapt your internet marketing strategies.

Within every section there are niches.

For the written word, that includes:

• Blog posts
• Reports – downloadable from your site and shared on document sites and elsewhere
• Kindle and printed books
• Guest posts
• Forum posting
• Video descriptions

Videos and audios

I’ve included these two internet marketing strategies in one section as I think they often go hand in hand.

You can extract the audio track from the videos you create using software such as VLC.

And unless your video is constantly referring to what’s being shown on screen the audio can be placed on a podcast site so that people can listen to you.

Videos often appear in the search results, audios show up much less often.

But that doesn’t mean people aren’t listening to audios. It simply means that they are searching for them in places which do a much better job of indexing them than Google does – places such as iTunes and podcast sites which bypass Google altogether in the same way that people searching specifically for videos will bypass Google and search on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

Video creation can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.

My preference is for simple – that way the message isn’t obscured by fancy tricks.

Most of my videos are created as PowerPoint style presentations. Either using LibreOffice (a free office program suite that I’ve found to be more reliable than its cousin OpenOffice) or with liberal use of page breaks in a Word document. Which is how I’ll likely create the video of this blog post as I find it easier to copy and paste the whole page into a document than split it into slides.

Then it’s simply a matter of loading up your favourite screen capture program and pressing record while you read out the document.

It’s not the most thrilling video to watch but it gets views and it’s the kind of video you can “watch” in the background – effectively just listening to it.

It also lends itself well to being turned into an audio podcast.

The content of the page it’s based on is uploaded as a caption file.

And the video (and audio) will have an extra written description to help search engines in the indexing process. Which means written content is still important for videos.

Blow your own trumpet

This is a British phrase that means boast and brag about yourself.

This used to be frowned upon and wasn’t something you were expected to do.

And, to an extent, that’s still true. You wouldn’t do this kind of thing at a dinner party.

But on the web it’s almost expected.

Facebook encourages you to post things on your wall.

Twitter encourages you to let the world know what you’re doing in 140 characters or less.

Pinterest likes you to put images and videos on your board.

The list goes on – you’ve only got to look at the share buttons that are linked from this post to see the diversity of places you can tell whoever cares to listen what you’ve just done.

I’ve not got enough followers on Twitter or elsewhere to make a noticeable difference to the traffic my website receives when I tweet about a new post. Maybe one day that will change. Maybe not.

But regardless of whether or not it makes a direct impact on my website traffic, I do it and you should too.

Because your social media presence is one of the signals that Google use to decide where to put your site in the search results.

I’m experimenting with using Outbrain on this site. It chooses similar posts and suggests them at the end of each post. And it’s encouraging people to explore more of my website.

Outbrain isn’t social media but it’s another way of getting more traffic on your website. It offers a paid advertising option – something that’s on my “to explore” list.

It’s easy to get bogged down with social media.

There are far too many places you could use.

I’d suggest that you pick a few sites that you get on with and use those on a regular basis rather than using a scattergun approach.

Other people think that you should post to as many social media sites as possible, often using software to help you. That’s not my preferred strategy – I tend to think that a “less is more” approach works better – but other people get success from it so if that approach appeals instead, investigate it with long established services such as OnlyWire.

Diversify your internet marketing strategies

One thing that should have become very apparent during the course of this post is that diversity is the common denominator of the various internet marketing strategies I’ve examined.

This is the same as almost everywhere else in the world.

Our potential choices are ever widening.

Your favourite, most visited, website probably won’t be the same as mine or the next person who gets to this page.

Television, radio and music are all going their various ways. Audiences are decreasing as the diversity spreads.

The web is going the same way but even faster than traditional media has done.

Actually that’s probably not quite correct.

The web is showing classic 80/20 behaviour.

Almost everyone will use a handful of big, well known, sites such as Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook and Amazon.

So that’s maybe 95% or more of internet users will use maybe a fraction of a percent of potential websites.

It’s the flip side of that equation we need to pay attention to with our internet marketing strategies.

Because the remaining 99.999% of websites are spread out all over the web.

For instance, I use YouTube for most of my videos, But I also host some on my own website and put a few in places such as Vimeo.

My document shares go on SlideShare or Scribd. But they could equally go on lots of other document sharing sites, each of which have their own loyal users who don’t often go elsewhere. And providing they are long enough, the documents could easily end up on Kindle and eBook sharing sites.

Kindle books can be distributed elsewhere with services such as SmashWords or printed on demand using CreateSpace and other printed self publishing books.

Images can be printed on T-shirts and other media.

The list goes on.

And at least part of your strategy should be to become a relatively big fish in one or more of these relatively small ponds.

You should aim to become well known in your niche.

It doesn’t matter than almost no-one on the planet hasn’t heard of you providing almost everyone in your chosen niche knows your name or brand.

That goes for every market.

I know several cyclists but they’re each in a different niche within the market: leisure, urban racing, mountain biking (sometimes on man made courses, sometimes indoors, sometimes on trails). And I know others who follow events like the Tour de France.

They use different websites. They buy different accessories. They have different people who they follow. They probably regard the other options as alien and not really real cycling.

That goes for every niche.

Part of your strategy needs to be finding and getting involved with the various places your niche inhabits.

Direct places such as specialist sites.

And indirect places where they’re likely to go – cyclists are likely to be conscious of their diet. They’re also likely to take photographs – maybe with SLR cameras, maybe with devices that fit on their cycle helmet, maybe with their phone for impromptu photos and videos. And more likely all of those.

If you can find where several similar niches cross over, you may have struck gold.

At least part of your internet marketing strategy ought to be keeping an open mind and expanding your horizons.

An 80/20 split is good – spend most of your time on tried and tested methods, adjusting them as you go, but also spend some of your time exploring new methods or twists on old methods.

Devising your own internet marketing blueprint can be a good way to crystalise those thoughts and help them turn into reality.

Feel free to share your internet marketing strategies using the comment box below this post.