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Internet Marketing Strategy
Internet Marketing Strategy 1)
Image is Everything
Your company and brand image are reflected in your website.
If your company is not well
know, your website is the only
way to
communicate your brand to the customer. That is, your website may be
the first exposure the customer has of your company. It is important
that the customer gets a good impression from your website.
Design your site to appeal to your target customer. A
big mistake many business owners make is to design the site to appeal
to their own tastes. If you represent your target customer this is OK,
if not, do some research to see what appeals to your target customer
and be sure to listen to the suggestions of your web designer. In addition
to appearance you want to be sure:
- Content is useful and well written.
- Site navigation is straightforward with no broken links.
- The site loads quickly.
- The site requests some action from the visitor.
Based on your website, presentation,
ease of use and content, The customer is making judgments about your
business.
Redesign your website now.
Internet Marketing
Strategy 1) Promote your Site for Free
The best designed site is useless if people don't visit
it. Unfortunately the old axiom "Build it and they will come" does not
apply to websites. The most common way people find a web site is through
the search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of
optimizing your website so that it comes up high in the search rankings.
This is the Holy Grail of Internet Marketing. Everybody wants to do it,
the payoff is astronomical but it is a very elusive goal.
More information on SEO.
The other great way to promote your site is through link
exchanges. Don't just exchange links with anyone, they key is to exchange
links with businesses related to your own business. If you are a scuba
dive shop, exchange links with boating sites, tourism sites and other
outdoor activity sites such as rock climbing.
Another overlooked method is to be active on the net.
Start a newsletter that your potential customers would
be interested in. Offer to write articles for other people's newsletters.
Many websites allow you to post comments on articles or
blog enties. Make use of these and be sure to mention your company somewhere
in the response.
Internet Marketing
Strategy 2) Pay to Promote your Site
If you can't achieve your results with free methods, you
can always pay to put your ads in front of your customer. You can place
banner or text advertisements on portals, media and news sites.
A disadvantage of banner advertising is that it is not
targeted. If fact, studies have shown that banner advertising is a surprisingly
ineffective internet marketing strategy. People rarely give them a second
glance. This is the reason you now find the more intrusive ads that
force you to look at them by covering content you are trying to read.
If you are not targeting your ads, you are wasting your
money. This is the real reason behind Google's astonishing success: they
deliver on the promise of targeted advertising. With search engine
advertising (also called sponsored search) ,
you set up a list of words that will trigger your ad when someone searches
with those words. One drawback is that your competitors are
also displaying their ads for those words. No problem, you can pay more
to have your ad appear first! All the search engines offer search based
paid advertising.There are also paid
directories that
can list your site such as Froogle, Shopping.com and Yahoo Shopping (shopping.yahoo.com).
For more information and answers for specific situations, please send an inquiry (we do not list an email to prevent spam).
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