Often in the web hosting industry the terms advertising and marketing are used interchangeably. While this might not seem like the end of the world, the truth is, the two things are not the same. In order to achieve optimal exposure for your business, it is important to have a solid understanding of both.

Advertising and marketing are like squares and rectangles. All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. In other words, all advertising is marketing but not all marketing is advertising. Confused yet? How about a few straight-forward definitions:

Advertising refers to ads. These ads may be online, in a newsletter, in a magazine, or really anywhere ads appear. Typically these ads cost money and they are designed to attract customers to your business. Ads are incredibly important and they are critical for the success of your business but ads alone aren’t enough. It’s the ad campaign that really creates a business identity. That’s where the marketing comes in.

Marketing is the overarching public image strategy for your business. It involves the designing of ads, from the single run to the multi-ad campaign. It also involves the crafting of a company image. Marketing is the process through which you craft your company message. What image do you want your company to project? What look and feel do you want your logo to communicate? What tagline best represents the products, services and goals of your company? Without a strong marketing mission, your ads won’t have a leg to stand on.

It may also be difficult to create momentum without a solid marketing strategy. While a single ad may work well, if you don’t have a strategy, how will you follow up? Marketing should be rooted in your business. It should recognize the core values inherent in your original vision, and the changes your business has gone through as it has evolved. Sometimes it is necessary to change your business’ image. Without a marketing strategy in place, changing an image suddenly can alienate customers and corrupt a recognizable brand. A solid marketing strategy will help you incorporate your old image into your new image. This provides continuity and enhances brand-awareness so you build on what you’ve got rather than poking holes in your foundation.

The best way to begin developing a marketing strategy is to sit down and think hard about your business. What do you offer? What type of customers do you have? How are you different from your competition? Often a solid mission statement will help you to articulate your business’ goals, and from there seeing how you stand out will be much easier. If you don’t have a mission statement, write one now. It will prove invaluable for all future brand efforts and will always provide a reference point for anyone you may hire.

So advertising and marketing go hand-in-hand, but advertising is the tip of the iceberg while marketing is the core. The key idea here is representation and consistency. If you are true to your company’s vision and consistent with your message, you will continue to grow and your business will continue to solidify. So invest in some top-notch marketing! Your business will thank you.

Backlinks inevitably come up in every discussion of SEO. They are a critical part of building solid traffic and play a large role in getting your website ranked by search engines. Building good backlinks can take a lot of time. Unique IP addresses are very important, so you can’t just set up a bunch of domains and link to yourself and get results. The ranking of the sites linking in is also important. The more authoritative the site linking to you, the better your site looks to Google. In a perfect world, content really would be king. Unfortunately, with billions of websites out there, learning how to use the system is an important element for success.

Buying Backlinks

Buying backlinks from an SEO company can be very effective very quickly but the ground you gain usually doesn’t last long. Since many backlink packages include software you run on your server, you risk damaging your site’s reputation and getting your IP blocked for spamming. Buying backlinks one-by-one can be very effective if you have a decent budget and are willing to spend time researching each site before you invest. It’s rather like advertising but with the search engine as the consumer.

Building Backlinks Yourself

The organic backlink is the most powerful of all. Good content, well distributed WILL grow your traffic though, of course, it takes both work and time. Trading links is a great way to grow traffic while supporting other businesses and growing your network. Great methods for building backlinks on your own include: posting on blogs, posting on forums, posting on article directories, utilizing social bookmarking sites and newsletters.

I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, the secret to success is hard work. As much as we all might not want to admit it, the quick fix or the magic bullet are just as pretend on the Internet as they are in the real world. The great thing about investing time and energy into building up backlinks is that, in the process, you’re also improving your brand and building your networks. The more good content you put out there, the more attention you get. And I just can’t ever say enough for good old fashioned reputation. Behind every computer (kind of) there is a person, with a real live brain, forming opinions about every single thing he sees. If your company keeps popping up with compelling content he wants to read, you’ll get his clicks, and his links, and his network.