How you go about promoting your website or web portal, and how successful are your efforts towards that end govern the success or failure of your online business. The above holds true for both — e-businesses and offline businesses that have an online arm as well. However, marketing in the online realm is very different from other mediums of promotion. But the good thing is that the basic tenets of online marketing draw upon heavily from the rules of thumb proclaimed in the traditional advertising domains. For small businesses, there is always a constraint on the advertising spend. Therefore, such businesses should focus their marketing strategy on the age old principles of garnering attention, developing the audience’s interest, creating a desire in their minds to possess the advertised product, and ultimately inducing them into buying your product. As we go further, we shall take each of these aspects in detail and see how you can apply them to online marketing.
In whatever venue you market, it is necessary to draw in prospective customers or the net effect is zero. For any business of any kind, marketing means visibility. Online, businesses ordinarily assess the success of being visible by the amount of traffic flow to the website, visitor “click” counts demonstrating who sees the wares. But actual content in a given website is only a small part of what really draws traffic. To maximize the number of hits on your website, you have two potential means to grab the attention of possible customer, and these are simple. You can work to put yourself out there by website strategies, or you can buy attention by paying for advertising and promotion.
Earning your traffic results on the internet can be found in what are called ‘free’ and ‘organic’ search results on Google, Yahoo and even MSN. When prospective customers do a search on an internet search engine, they find the results most relevant to what they searched for which are the ‘free’ and ‘organic’ results. Any ads found are discussed below. Many people assume the results that rank the highest are the ‘best’ results in some way. It’s really a winner takes all game! If your site isn’t on the first page of results, then your web traffic will be diminished. If you don’t make it to the second page of results even, you might as well not be listed at all since most people don’t go past the second page of results at most. This style of web marketing is called ’search engine optimization’. If you don’t want to do this yourself, you can hire a search engine marketing firm instead. Winning at getting customers to your site and on the top search engine searches isn’t rocket science, but is part science and part art that requires constant work and attention to maintain keeping your site on the top searches so customers can find your site and possibly purchase your goods or services.
One of the most effective ways to increase internet traffic is buying some form of advertising. One of the most pervasive forms is banner advertising. Originally, these were very popular forms of advertising, but as they became more prevalent, their effectiveness waned. They can still be effective as long as you have a clear marketing strategy and are able to track your advertising statistics. Text advertisements are probably the most common form of internet advertising today. Google has paved the way, and if done correctly, your internet traffic can multiply quickly by using Google ads. MSN and Yahoo also offer text advertisements on their sites. One downside to text advertising is that the cost can add up fairly quickly, depending on how many hits you receive for your ad. Each time a searcher clicks on your text ad, the provider charges you a set amount. Another way to increase traffic to your site is to buy traffic from someone who has an e-mail contact list or has a lot of traffic on their site already.
As you can see your web site marketing strategy must first be focused on getting attention. Attention first requires that someone is exposed to your message. You can earn the exposure, you can buy it, or like many businesses you can do both. Earning the attention is a long term focus and requires skill and consistent commitment of resources. However, it pays off almost indefinitely and likely much cheaper in the long run than buying it. Buying the attention is much faster to get results and allows you to test ideas without committing the resources to earn attention. Any comprehensive web site marketing strategy is likely to include both methods.
You can get more information about Business Marketing at www.BizRave.com . Eric Menzies writes about Fastest Way To Increase Page Rank and other topics.
- Eric Menzies
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