A big mistake that businesses make is to simply put their current company literature onto a website and expect this to be sufficient to have a maximum impact online. A business does not want a web visitor to have the same experience that they could have from offline literature. The business website must utilise the potential of the internet and form a website that is engaging and communicates to the web visitor on many levels. A successful online business utilises the creativity and communication techniques that can be sought online to give the customer an interactive experience on the website.

Having an interactive ecommerce solution is now an obligation for businesses to sell online. Many businesses fail to add certain elements to their website which engage with the customer, here are the top elements that need to be included in an ecommerce software solution:

• Social Bookmarking: The recent Google algorithm update has meant the need for an ecommerce solution to have a social presence is now a necessity. There is now huge traffic and potential customers on social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The ecommerce software must have the ability to link into these sites and interact with their customers. Having sharing buttons on the ecommerce solution so that customers can spread the word on your behalf to their friends and colleagues is a priceless marketing tool and is so simple to incorporate.
• The businesses social presence is now benefitting the businesses search results more than ever with the algorithm update. This means that increasing the social brand will benefit the traffic and potential sales. By adding these ‘share’ buttons and ‘like’ buttons will increase your social presence and now that the search engines are using a websites social status as an element when ranking the website they are essential tools that need to be incorporated.
• Email Newsletter: Collecting web visitors’ information and statistics is fundamental to the success of an online business, knowing their web habits and behaviours will give the business an advantage over competition. By adding a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ option, the business is then able to gain an email address of the web visitor and interact via email. When the email list starts to grow, it can be become one of your most valuable marketing tools as information can sent directly to the web visitors’ inbox. By engaging with the customer, with their consent, the ecommerce solution is more likely to make a sale, as the customer has expressed an interest in the website already.

Incorporating these elements into a business website will gain the website an exposure to your customers and interact with them to create sales. By utilising the social market will give the business an exposure to a market that is growing all the time and will be the future of how a customer finds your product or service.

While some of online marketing’s advantages benefit can be enjoyed right away, some of its benefits require discovering. Internet marketing or online marketing refers to the ability to market products and services through the internet.

Internet marketing offers the following advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages
- Gives the ability to freely market products or services at an incredible low cost.
- Nearly anything can be sold through internet marketing.
- Payments can be collected conveniently online. It supersedes traditional businesses including orders and transaction.
- Products or services are placed on a world wide audience. The product is marketed globally that can even reach the most remote places.
- There are many available ‘How to’ resources’ to improve marketing strategy.
- Affiliate marketing can also be combined with online marketing while both provide passive source of income.
- Online marketing can stay open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- Requires ample time for site maintenance

Disadvantages
- Requires tremendous amount of skill to learn.
- It can be very confusing to try, especially for beginners.
- Online marketing sometimes loses its appeal shortly after six months.
- It requires an overwhelming knowledge to understand.
- Intense competition makes it very hard to succeed.

Building a name for a particular product online can be tough, especially in today’s competitive market. So to make your online business easy and effective, here are some effective techniques to help improve your business revenue:

Video Marketing:
- Incorporate rich streaming videos or various media ads to your site.
- Try to make your marketing video creative, simple, and funny (optional).
- A video where ‘research shows’ can heard or seen is one of the most effective testimonial videos to post. Tutorials and funny videos can also do well.
- Distribute your video across different video sites.
- Buy post-roll or pre-roll ads on to your videos.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
- If you’re running on a large budget create an account on prominent PPC networks like MSN, Yahoo, and Google.
- If you’re running on a low budget you can go with Google.
- Find keywords and niche markets that you can target that related is to your product that are not heavily competitive, but still generates moderate to high traffic to reduce your PPC cost down.
- Learn how to use keywords and SEO to maximize your product’s online exposure.
- Remember to place and use quality advertisements only.

Mass Media Marketing
- Mind your ethics and promote your product as ethical as possible.
- In order to leverage your social media successfully, be active in the community. Keep your social media accounts and sites to a handful. This way, managing them will be easier.
- You can also introduce online bookmarking campaign.
- Create web contents either linking to an informative article, or your own articles, or links to support Wikipedia’s edits.

Search Engine Optimization
- Optimize your meta-tags including your title tags according to your keyword product.
- Creating friendly search engine HTML sitemaps can also help improve product exposure.
- Create source HTML source code and optimized robots.txt
- Create an optimized XML maps too.