It’s the year 2009 and maybe you are a late comer to the Internet. You have an existing business but you have finally been persuaded to start an Internet marketing initiative. You might be a local small business or you might be a national brand, whatever the case may be you know, you need to establish a presence on the Internet. It’s no longer an optional decision, it’s a mandatory. After all, your competitors are way ahead of you, your customers are on the Internet, and in todays economic climate, it makes sense to look at alternate marketing solutions.
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Starting with the basics first: your website
Assuming you own your business domain name and have a reliable web host,the next step is web design. You probably already have a website. It’s more than likely a static brochure that’s years old. What worked years ago is ancient today. Invest the money and have your website professionally designed. Your website is not a set it and forget it strategy, don’t let it become a dinosaur from 1999. You may know a little html and probably have played with Front Page, this does not qualify you as a graphic designer. Establish a clear road map of what your website will be, then let the pros do the work. When I see an ancient website I walk away, but when I see a modern website, it catches my attention, and personally I’m more in tuned to stay on the website. Your customers are no different. An old, outdated website is a reflection of your business, that’s not the image you want to be portraying. The web gives you an advantage, a well designed site can make you appear larger than you may in fact be, it can make even the smallest of small business’ be as grand and large as a major corporation. There are many key components that go into designing a website, site navigation, layout, content, usability and so forth. A good designer knows this, so it’s crucial to work with them every step of the way on these details. Clutter is a turn off, if you must put a lot of information on your website, do it an organized way, a CMS system might be the route you take.You get the point. Just as in real life image is everything. You never get a second chance to make a first impression on the web, WOW them the first time and win their business.
If you build it they will come:
That is if you were lucky enough to secure a premium .com domain that has plenty of type in traffic. If you have the budget, domain name acquisition is always a good strategy, but a very costly one at that. Chances are you don’t have $20,000 and up to wash away on a good domain name. Where is all this leading to? One word, search.
If you are not listed in the search engines, you might as well not even be in business online. The last study I read, was that 90% of all people looking for information or services use search engines, and when I say search, I’m mainly referring to Google. You should focus on all the search engines, but the main emphasis is on Google, for the simple fact that is sends the most traffic bar none compared to Yahoo or MSN. If you’re a national brand with deep pockets, the logical choice is to hire a reputable company or individual who specializes in search engine optimization. If this is done right, it’s money well invested. The smaller businesses are often pinching pennies and can’t afford to outsource their search engine initiatives. That’s fine but it will require more time and patience. My word of advice is this, learn, learn and learn as much as you can about optimizing for search engines, read, read and read more. There are a hundreds of websites and blogs dedicated to SEO. The information is free, and of course there are plenty of books on the subject matter too. Before you go broke wasting your entire budget on a PPC, do some research and use the tools that are ready available to help guide you in making sound logical decisions.
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Start small with everything you do, if you take the PPC route don’t go for the big target keywords, you will end up going broke in no time with little to show for it. Focus on the long tail keywords, don’t always go for the obvious. The companies with the deep pockets will win in that game hands down. As you gain more experience and see an increase in sales, you can start to compete on that scale at a slow measured pace, but never from the get go. PPC is a great way to get some traffic circulating, but remember it comes with a price. The focus of your search initiatives needs to be on organic traffic generation for the long term. Always remember domain authority is a big deal with the search engines, starting out you have none. You need to build it with inbound links, fresh content and constant tweaking. For anyone who is seriously looking to get involved with SEO, set up a Google Reader account and subscribe to as many search engine strategy blogs as possible, read the feeds every day and start implementing what you have learned. It’s trial and error just like everything else, but in time you will see the rewards, and then you will not have to rely solely on PPC.
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What about email marketing?
Don’t rule out email marketing. Ideally you want to market to your existing customer base assuming you already have newsletter in place, at the very least you need to be capturing email addressees on your site. Customers or potential customers who have expressed interest in your product can be golden lead sources. Learn how to market to them via newsletters always with usefulness and incentives, it could be a coupon code for their next purchase for instance. You can also buy lead lists for targeted industries. You will also need a solid mailing solution to handle the mailings, ISP white listing, filtering of lists and so on. There are quite a few affordable solutions that offer this that won’t break the bank. Don’t waste your time with free self hosted mailing scripts, all this will do is generate a ton of spam complaints, and most likely will have your web host coming down on you, or worse you risk getting your hosting suspended. Let the third party vendor handle of this. Gather as much data as possible about the people visiting your website and use it to your advantage, otherwise you are just flying blind.
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Affiliate programs still work and they work well:
If you’re running any type of e-commerce website you should be looking at an affiliate program to help sell your product. Let other people sell your product for you, it’s as simple as that. Of course there are plenty of things to factor in with this, such as conversions, cost, break even points. You need to decide what payout structures will work in order to stay profitable. Your product, its market and the pricing point will help you determine this. Typically the payout structures will work in a per lead, per sale, per click, or rev sharing model. Use a third party vendor for this. There are plenty of companies in business for this, a quick Google search is all the research you need. These companies usually handle all the risk, the link tracking and payouts. Your job is mainly creating the graphics, landing pages and all promotional material for the affiliates. Most of these companies have a pool of websites that can promote your product. Spend the time and fine tune your product offering, conversions and marketing goals. Once you arm yourself with an affiliate program, you can then seek out the relevant websites in your niche to promote your product. Look at what your competitors are doing and try to do it better than them. There is no need to re-invent the wheel, just fine tune it.
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Okay, but what about social media?
My ideal marketing mix for any online business would first and foremost be a search engine strategy, second I would incorporate a social media marketing campaign. Should you use social media for marketing? Absolutely! Point blank, if your customers are using it you need to be as well. Social media should not and will not be the magic bullet, it’s simply another channel or layer of marketing. Social media is about conversations and how it relates to your brand or products. The cost barrier is relatively low, and it’s a well known secret social media will greatly improve your search engine rankings. If your customers are using social media, find out where and actively establish a presence where they are. Invest the time, contribute and participate in any way that will be add value to the communities. Join the conversation, create the conversation but never try to control it. Make your content shareable, start a blog and create useful content about your product, or your areas of expertise. Be open and transparent with your motives, and never treat social media like an email marketing campaign. Social media is a two way form of communication, never one way.The foundation and core of what social media is, consists of the five C’s. Conversation, community, commenting, collaboration and contribution. These are the five fundamentals that companies and marketers must understand to be able to successfully market on the social web.
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There are plenty of other things I left out, but in the scheme of things are not as important as the ones I touched upon today. Marketing on the Internet is not hard, it takes time to create and find that perfect formula that will work for you. Search engines are still king, they have been since the mid 90’s and will continue to be for quite some time to come. Focus the majority of your time and efforts on search, everything else is important but should be secondary.
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Great article and I agree with you that we should start with the basic first. Building a business always start with the fundamentals before it can grow big. Thanks for the tips!
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Michael, again I am gleaning some points that I am missing from your posts…I want to considered your idea for affiliate marketing to assist in sales.
Because of some of the instructions that you shared in the book with Valeria, we have spent most of our time, prior to launch in just becoming involved.
I still use the 5 C's to guide my social strategy, even though I am still only chipping away at being effective.
Thanks for the assistance.
Michael, I appreciate you have had to leave some things out, but I think you could have given “Video” a mention. Any newcomer to promoting their business online needs to learn about videomercials for s/e rankings and starting conversations.
As you rightly say, search engines are king, but the likes of YouTube are becoming search engines in their own right and are hot on their heels traffic wise.
Not sticking to the fundamentals is what now a days most marketers do. I think, now a days more marketers are suffering from marketing myopia. That's why instead of doing internet marketing, what most of them do is better known as Spamming.
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I like that you mentioned e-mail marketing since that is how I conduct most of my affiliate sales and one of the only reasons that I don't have to wear a tool belt and a hammer anymore! Great read!
I think, using social media for marketing is nice for your bussiness job. That thing will improve your search engine rankings.
Great article! Thank you so much for sharing, I am so new into Marketing, just graduated and starting to learn online marketing. Start with the basic is the main key.
Putting your business in the internet world is not a bad risk to take, there are several advantages of having your business in the world wide web. 1st is that more people will easily get into your product by means of social media, moreover you can spread it by search engine optimization.
Thanks Mike! Some great tips here! Especially starting with the basics! I can speak for myself in saying I thought I needed every tool under the sun to be successful, when really – the possibilities are endless with what we have here right in front of us.
Thanks for sharing