|
More and more people set up Internet sites to have a presence on the web.
Their interests and intentions vary greatly:
There's the hair dresser who feels he should not be left out and who can then print his website's address onto a business card or show it in some classified ad hoping it will attract visitors who later become new customers because they are intrigued by what he has to offer. While certainly today many customers just expect you to have a website, don't expect too much traffic on it and from it in these cases and certainly not many new customers unless you offer something truly innovative or something that simply sets you apart, e.g. a special treatment against dandruff etc. With some true customer testimonials you could even attract many new customers, provided it is really this type of customers you wanted to attract (i.e. those suffering from dandruff). You could then add more content on the medical aspects, on how dandruff was treated in history and the more content you add that sets you apart and gives people a feeling you are the expert, the more visitors and hence probably customers you might get.
A local bakery could present their different types of bread and cakes etc., or a restaurant could show pictures (but professional ones!) of their rooms, their menu, specials, or an "all-you-can-eat"-timeslot etc. (be sure to be specific enough from what they are allowed to choose from or you might invite criticism!) and they could have a monthly draw offering a price like a free candlelight dinner for two or as a bakery special rebates for people who purchase on their birthday etc. Some just want to express themselves through a blog, but even some of those have turned that into a full-time profession earning more than before in their 9-to-5 jobs. All this works to some extent, however, if you want to have global reach and need to compete against the bigwigs in your industry or if you "simply" have a completely new concept, it can be very tough to make yourself heard.
For this you need knowledge and techniques that go far beyond what a local barber or baker need to do. Mind you, they can rely on word-of-mouth and if they are in a smaller town (called Smalltown) in all probability they will figure at the top of search results for e.g. "barber Smalltown" since there aren't many and chances are their competitors are even less Internet-savvy. Not so when you deal with issues of global reach - competition is not only fierce, losing or gaining a little in search engine listings can make or break a business or at least mean thousands to millions in revenue gained or foregone!
To succeed in this challenging environment you need to know a lot more than just be able to describe your product. While you cannot successfully expect to market over the Internet what you could not market "door-to-door", in other words, if you don't have developed a sales pitch that convinces more people than just you, you will never get anywhere no matter what the advertising medium, but to get somewhere in Internet marketing you need to understand what drives traffic to your site and what does not on top of anything else one needs in conventional marketing.
That is not normally taught in business marketing courses yet, and if it were often it is still rather theoretical. Mind you, all other forms of advertising have decades if not almost centuries of practice behind them and of course some principles have emerged of what works and what not. And anywhere, in direct marketing as well as in print advertising, sales letters etc. you have to know how to write copy, i.e. a good written sales pitch. That goes for Internet marketing too and if you can't do it yourself, you need to hire a good copywriter. If he or she is good it will be money well spent.
But then, even if you know your product and how to present it or got professional help in doing so, Internet marketing only starts here!
Tools, Tips and Tricks for the Successful Do-It-Yourself Internet Marketer
While we cannot cover each and everything in an article, we want to share with you some basic concepts which we think cover maybe 80% of what you should be aware of (I didn't write "need to know" - because knowledge comes from studying; all we can provide here is a kind of study guide!). The remaining 20 or so percent are mostly product and niche specific and can therefore never be covered in an overview article.
The Basics of Internet Marketing
Imagine you have set up a brilliant site, hosted, say, in Canada - how are people in France, Venezuela, the United States, Afghanistan, India or Great Britain going to know about it (assuming you have something on offer for all these areas, e.g. if it is a download product in English)? But even no one in Canada will ever become aware of what you have to offer unless they are psychic or happen to type your domain name in the address space - chances of one in a billion probably unless you have a popular name - but all these domains are probably taken by the time you register your domain.
No, most people will arrive at your site via search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Excite, MSN LiveSearch to name but a few, at least in the beginning, i.e. before you are listed on other sites. There are thousands of search engines, but among Google and Yahoo you probably already capture 90% of all search traffic unless you are in a very special niche! But Google or Yahoo and all the others won't know (they're not clairvoyant) about your site unless they came across it at least once in their life!
You will have to kick-start your site prominence and you must design your site so that it is search engine friendly and can be "spidered" easily. Search engines have software that crawls the web, i.e. they visit all sites at regular intervals. These intervals depend on many parameters, and we can't list them all. One of these is hw many sites link to you and what is their individual promiinence, another is probably how often you update content etc. But the main thing is, they need to get there at least once to take note of your site. Then they need to understand what your site does, and that is determined by the content, hidden or overt. "Hidden" content is e.g. the keyword and title section of your website, which is not directly displayed in the document shown but resides in the HTML source text. Don't mistake "hidden" for "cloaked" though. There are people who put all kinds of information on their site that is e.g. formatted white in order to fool the search robot (which can read it while your eyes couldn't) - nowadays search engines analyse this and eventually will penalise such behaviour (sometimes called "black hat techniques"). You can try and get some head start by setting up a free account at Easy Submits where you can submit to over 500 directories for free or get someone to do it for you for a fee. The main thing to watch here is that you don't get seen in what Google now calls "bad neighbourhoods" e.g. pure link farms which indiscriminately list any website that cares to submit and which then might get you down-ranked by Google because they see this as of no value to search results. Some good articles on the problem are PageRank Tools To check the PageRank of your site or of competitors' web presences you could use: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php3 (very intricate!)
http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php Keywords should be honest
If you are a hairdresser and use a keyword "free haircut" that's ok, maybe even brilliant (if it were true at least sometimes), but if you had a keyword saying "best doughnuts in Smalltown" it would be outright fraud. You might get away with it for a while but search engines would eventually downgrade your ranking and you'd lose much more than you gain. Also it makes little sense to drive traffic to your site just for the sake of traffic when people actually looked for something else and will be put off. Keywords should be to the point
Esp. in the beginning you would be listed somewhere after the millionths page in search rankings - no way anyone could find you if you used general keywords such as "bakery" or "hairdresser" - but "relief from dandruff in Smalltown" could be something that would be found if someone was searching e.g. for "dandruff Smalltown", like a customer who suffered from dandruff and lived in your town Smalltown.
Also "birthday cakes Smalltown" might work. You can never be absolutely sure, so you have to check. There are a few free tools out there like WORDTRACKER free keyword search (which offers a paid service as well, as most of the free sites do, check out their study guides at The Wordtracker Academy too - they're free).
See also: Effective Keyword Use as an SEO Ranking Factor You need a Linking Strategy
Before we waste a lot of words on this, let us point you to an honest side that gives away their basic report on this for free: (Why) Linking Matters and their reports site: Linking Matters Reports. They are now also available in German and French.
Think about making news: Getting Included in Google News
Try paid advertising e.g. with google adwords: SEO Tools - Adsense Calculator Increase your backlinks with software like Arelis, Zeus or IBP - More on that in a later revision.
You can leave comments on blogs that then backlink to your page. Search for thematically appropriate blogs or entries:
http://www.blog-search.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/
Do Some Housekeeeping
The longer you run your webste the more broken links you'll get plus you need to make sure all relevant pages link to each other. The longer you run your webste the more broken links you'll get plus you need to make sure all relevant pages link to each other.
See for example: Using Xenu Link Sleuth to Spot and Improve External Links in a Domain Broken Link checkers: You Should Consider Blogging
There are a lot of costly guides to blogging out there, but Jack Humphrey gives his away for free at BlogNetworksAssociation (of course he sells stuff, but read the guide first, then decide, what is for you - the techniques described are very valuable for internet marketing in general).
It You want To Become Bigger You Need a Coherent Internet Strategy
If you want to make money, e.g. by selling eBooks, instructional videos, audio tapes or any other resource online, whether it has to shipped or can simply be downloaded, you need to get not only a lot of backlinks to your page by others so that you show up in rankings, you might also want to supplement that with e-Mail campaigns and any kind of viral marketing that better publicises your product. Then what? People will want to buy, so you need the payment infrastructure in place and many, many more things. You can try and lear n all that step by step by wading through reams of free newsletters, but chances are you will lose valuable time and hence money that way. There are lots of do-it-yourself-guides out there on the web and again for a newbie it is difficult to sort through the chaff. One course that impressed us because it covered the Internet marketing problem not only from every conceivable angle but also gives you minutely detailed step-by-step guidance can be found here at eSlumDog Millionaire. Take a look - it leads you through all steps in 15 comprehensive modules which come with a PDF guide as well as instructional videos and it has a lot of bonuses on headline and copywriting etc. - training material which alone could cost you a fortune elsewhere. Useful Tips at Wrap-Up As with anything else, if you want to be successful, don't sit on your hands. Everyone with a web presence can improve its visibuilty and thus garner reputation and thus traffic. A nice example of what someone does to check her blog popularity (and act upon it) is at "Go Make Something" in an article titled "Finding Art Blog Eye Candy". If you want to get long lasting success and don't have a one-off product, you need to build an e-Mail list. We willexpand this into a separate section soon, but for today just consider applying for and downloading for LYRIS' short how-to "Email Design No-No’s Guide for Non-Designers" (you need to register) and check out their Email Marketing Resources. |
