Whether your business is a store front or strictly an internet only business, effective online marketing can broaden your customer base dramatically. The World Wide Web has over 1 billion users, with an estimated 10 million online at any given time. Even if you're only looking to broaden your business reach within your geographic location, there are 74,000 internet homes in Ireland alone, many of those homes with multiple users. Your business could easily reach these new customers simply by marketing your business effectively on the internet.

Let's say your business is a store front operation. You are not really interested in selling products online. How would online marketing help you? Many search engines now include a locator function, a way to not only list your website and something about your business, but show where your business is located on a map. With a web presence your business will not only attract visitors because of your website, but these visitors can actually find where your store is located thus visitors become customers. Estimates suggest that for the first time since the invention of the phone book more people used the web rather than a phone book last year to find the business they were looking for. The web is only going to become more of a resource as internet phones are becoming more and more popular.

If you are an internet only business, online marketing or search engine marketing is critical to your success. People shopping on the web use search engines to find the right products. If your website doesn't rank well with the major search engines, your customers will find someone else first. So, you need to make sure you website is properly marketed and optimised to rank high on search engines. It isn't enough to just have a website. You have to market it online effectively. By suitably shifting your keywords, tags, links and other aspects on your site, it is possible to dramatically increase your site ranking with the various search engines. Links, particularly reciprocal ones, are considered the golden key in terms of search engine rankings. But if you are not familiar with how to properly build quality links, just adding links to your website does nothing for you or your business.

Remember, there are thousands of potential customers out there. You could turn many of these potential customers into your customers simply by effective online marketing.

Using effective internet marketing can help even local business attract new customers. But in order to be effective you need to be savvy about how the internet works and how to get the best results from the major search engine searches. Internet users are potential customers, but only if your marketing to them.