Just like marketing in the physical world, Internet Marketing encompasses a very wide spectrum with many options and avenues to explore in order to promote a web site. Before even starting to market a web site, several elements must be explored and analyzed before hand in order to fully understand what it is to be marketed and how best to do it. This post will briefly cover some of these elements and create a foundation from which an Internet marketing campaign can be built.
1. An analysis of the services or products which the web site will offer should be made. This includes describing those services or products involved, figuring out unique selling propositions and what the benefits to the customers will be. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) should also be made at this point.
This will form a strong understanding of what the entire site will be about and how it can be promoted.
2. Analyze the market to see what the competitors are doing, what the current market is like and if there are any opportunities in the future and how to capitalize on them.
3. Try and adopt different personas so that you can understand how customers will perceive the site and business. Try to create four or five different demographic profiles and see how each would benefit from using your web site. Doing this enhances your ability to sell to your customers as well as trying to provide a good user experience for them so they will come back. It also will hone your Internet Marketing skills.
4. Now we start getting into internet marketing itself. Keyword research is the next stage, and your campaign should focus on initially trying to get twenty or so good keywords down. The primary keyword phrase should be focused on the home page of the site itself, while the rest will make up keywords for site content and other marketing strategies. The ideal is to find keywords with high use, but with minimal competition from other sites.
5. Next, focus on what marketing strategies to use and how to implement them. The keywords found can form the basis of paid promotions like PPC (Pay Per Click), or organic listings via SEO (Search Engine Optimization), or use of social media (like Facebook and Twitter). The keyword phrases found can also form the back bone to other off-page marketing in the form of article writing and submissions designed to attract traffic and back linking.
Create a blog where you can give tips and solutions to problems, while at the same time promoting the service or product specified on your business web site.
6. Other marketing methods to bring targeted traffic to your site include newsletters, email marketing, affiliate marketing, video marketing, forum replies (leaving back links in signatures), and listing the business on Google Places, Yahoo and Bing equivalents.
7. Of course, there are traditional means of promoting your site and business via business cards, letter heads, local sponsorships, newspaper advertising and so on.
Internet marketing is a huge industry and it is very easy to make a full time job out of marketing just one web site, given the amount of work involved. There is no one set formula to follow, every site and every business will have its own personal marketing plan applied to it, but the overall key is consistency and measurement to ensure things are always happening and always being recorded.
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