Developing a Marketing Strategy for Your Internet Business

Because marketing on the internet is a relatively new venue, it can be difficult to create a coherent strategy for effective marketing.  Unlike traditional marketing, internet marketing is in the early stages of development, and, unfortunately, what works today may not work tomorrow.  Additionally, because the internet is an open forum for others to market marketing services to you, wild promises abound that just aren't backed up by results.

Internet marketing does have some proven venues, and even the unproven venues may very well be worth experimenting with, as they may be cheap and easy.  Take into consideration, however, how time-consuming it might be in determining your marketing strategy.  In my next few blog posts, I'll go into detail on the various proven marketing strategies, and we'll touch on some of the unproven yet intriguing strategies that are surfacing. For now, however, here is a general overview of marketing strategies.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Ten years ago when I was marketing on the internet, it was downright easy to rank in the top ten on a search engine.  All you had to do was put up some decent content, and you would rank highly.  Now, you really have to work, and to use a number of strategies to get noticed and well-ranked with search engines.  This is absolutely worth your time, however, as this is the primary way people are going to find you.  The truth is that most people go to Google, or Yahoo, or Ask.com, or MSN, type in key words, and click on the websites that appear in the first page or two of the search.  SEO is critical to be found.  There are a number of companies that do SEO for you, or you can learn the basics yourself.  We'll hit some of the basics in future blogs, but for now, just keep in mind, that effective search engine optimization is time and money well-spent.

2. Pay-per-click

Once again, there is an art to effective pay-per-click advertising.  We'll discuss many of these in the future.  This form of advertising is where you actually pay to place an advertisement on a website.  The most common are Google Ads, because this is the most popular search engine, but more and more effective advertising is found on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and others.  Effective pay-per-click advertising requires some time invested in research, to understand what keywords people click on, what the value of bidding on a particular key word is, and how to grab your prospects with short, pithy ads. 

3. Craig's List

Quickly becoming a lucrative place to advertise, Craig's list ads can be free, easy to place, and effective.  Understanding how to place such ads is getting more complicated, however, because in order to be effective, you need to have multiple accounts, all verified by valid, independent phone numbers, so understanding how to effectively advertise is becoming an art. 

4. Blogs

Blogging can be a very effective form of advertising. Once again, however, the art of getting noticed is more than half the battle.  There is a science to getting your blog read, which we will discuss in future blogs.

5. Twitter

Twitter is an amazing concept.  In 140 characters you can get noticed by the world.  But millions of people besides you have quickly realized this, and as such, using Twitter for advertising requires a good understanding of the rules that Twitter sets out, and some important techniques.

6. List-Building

An old maxim says that people don't buy from you until after your 6th "touch" ... In other words you just can't expect that the first exposure people have to you will result in a sale or conversion.  To gather plenty of clients/customers, you have to have a system for repeat communications with that prospect.  List-Building, newsletter circulation and autoresponding are all important tools to build up to that 6th touch.