Creating an Online Marketing Strategy

Before you start any online marketing it is a good idea to develop a strategy for how you will undertake such a big task. This should be done for exactly the same reason as you create a business plan, or a normal marketing strategy; you need to have a plan so it gives you focus on what you want to achieve, and how you intend to achieve it.

If you think online marketing is just about SEO, then you are missing a huge chunk of potential traffic for your website. In this article I will try to list some of the popular ways that online marketing can be undertaken, and help you create a marketing strategy of your own.

Ad-words/ PPC Advertising

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is an effective way of getting traffic to your website, but it does cost money. The way it works is that you (and your competitors) set a maximum bid amount that you are willing to pay for every person that clicks on your advert. Based on the amounts that yourself and other people have bid, your advert will be placed accordingly. The higher your bid, the better the position you will receive in the results, and consequently the more clicks you will get, but the more money you will pay…

Before you start spending large sums of money on PPC schemes it is a good idea to bid on niche terms that only cost a few pence, you can then work out approximate conversion rates from people clicking on your advert who then go on to buy something. Armed with this knowledge you can calculate how much you are willing to bid, and still expect to return a profit.

Create an Affiliate Program

Affiliate Programs are a great way of getting people to promote your product on your behalf. Affiliate Programs work like ‘finders fees’, by offering people who operate websites the chance to earn commission on any sales that are generated from them referring people to your website.

Usually the schemes work on a results basis, so the affiliate will only receive money once a successful sale is made, which means that other than the initial cost of setting up the scheme, you are likely to never actually lose money from it.

If it is possible to set-up an Affiliate Program for your product or service it is well worth doing.

 

Link Building

Link building itself deserves an entirely separate SEO strategy due to the many number of ways it can be undertaken. Link building is often a Catch22 situation for new websites: websites won’t set-up link exchanges because you have no PageRank, but in order to get PageRank you need people to link to you.

Here I will list just some of the possible ways you might perform the link building exercise for your website:

· Directory submission – Submitting to web directories should always be your first step when you have created a new website. It provides a topical, one-way link with anchor text that you can choose yourself. More importantly, the links you get from web directories can be your first step to getting some PageRank (PR) for your website.

· Link Exchanges – Exchanging links with other websites is a good way of boosting your PR and also enables you to target specific keywords or phrases in the backlink to your website. You should always to try exchange link with websites that are similar in theme to your own.

· Natural Linking – Although there’s not a lot you can do about this yourself, once your website starts to get well known on the Internet you will find people begin to naturally link to your website. These are the best type of links as they aren’t reciprocated and they usually come from similarly related themed sites and are therefore much more powerful.

· Get links from websites that rank highly for your chosen key phrase - If you manage to get a one-way link from a website that ranks in the top5 for your chosen keyword/phrase then this link will be immensely powerful. Even if you have to pay for a link like this, it is usually worth the cost, particularly if the website has a good PR.

· Buying Links – You can either contact websites yourself to propose paying for a link from their website, or you can use a service such as Text Link Ads (www.text-link-ads.com) or LinkAdage (www.linkadage.com) to find websites who are willing to sell a link for an agreed fee. Buying Links is a useful way to get a good level of PR for your website.

All of the above can be done manually using a spreadsheet to keep track of your link partners, or you can buy some search engine optimization software such as WebLink SEO (www.weblinkseo.com), which can help you manage your links and create your link pages.

Email Target Users

This is more of a direct marketing approach, but the more people who know about your product/service, the more chance that either they’ll buy something from you, or might signup for your Affiliate Program, or might decide to link to your website.

It basically entails emailing companies who might be interested in using your product/service. I’m not advocating spamming thousands people, as this may have the opposite effect and may actually damage your business reputation, instead try to contact a few select companies who you think would definitely be interested in using your product or service. If you’re not happy about emailing them, try ringing them. In fact, if you have a good phone manner, then I would advise ringing people, rather than emailing them.

Postings in Forums

Nowadays there are forums devoted to everything. If you can find a forum that is dedicated to your website topic then join it. Not only will you keep abreast of any new developments in your field, but you’ll also get to know a network of people who have similar interests in the same field as yourself. They might either buy your product or service, or may recommend you to others, or maybe provide you with suggestion on how you might improve your existing product.

Word of Mouth (Viral Marketing)

Word-of-mouth advertising is the most effective form of advertising there is. Nothing beats a personal recommendation from a friend or colleague. There isn’t very much you can do to improve word-of-mouth advertising, as it usually grows as your business grows and becomes more popular.

However, an Affiliate Program will help as it encourages people to spread the word about your product or service. You must always remember to take care of your customers, as it is said that a happy customer will tell 2-3 people, an unhappy customer will tell 7-10.

Once word about your product or service begins to spread, it does so at an exponential rate, one person tells 3 another people, each of those 3 people tells another 3 etc etc… you can see why it’s called viral marketing, as it spreads the same way a virus would spread.

Banner Advertisements

Banner Advertisements work in a similar fashion to PPC schemes, but rather than paying a certain amount for each person that clicks on your advert, you pay a certain amount every time your banner is displayed regardless of whether or not they click on it. Banners are extremely powerful marketing tools, but you must make sure you place your banner a) on a website where people will be interested in your product or service, and b) make it eye-catching and enticing so people will actually click on your banner.

Like PPC schemes, you should ideally have some idea of the conversion rate between people who visit your website, who then buy something. If you don’t have this information it is hard to know whether banner advertisements are cost effective.

Banner advertisements will also help with your brand awareness as even if people don’t visit your site, they are still aware that your product or service exists. Even if people don’t visit your website, or visit and don’t buy anything initially they may still remember your website and return at a later date, or they may recommend your website to a colleague.

Get Listed on Comparison Sites

If there are websites that compare or review similar products or services to your own then you must get listed on those sites. Like restaurants want a restaurant critique to visit their restaurant, so should you want someone to review your product. A good review can do wonders for your brand, but a bad review can be irreparable – so be nice to the person doing the review!

Not only will this provide an extra link and more traffic to your website, but it will also make people realise that you actually exist. Again, this helps to create brand awareness, and getting listed alongside your competitors is a good way to start.

Press Releases

One of the current popular ways to promote your Internet business is through a press release. With press releases there are two immediate benefits: the first is that people will read your press release and may be interested in trying your product or service. The second, is if you provide a link to your website from within the press release then you also get a one-way link from each website that displays your press release. If you create a good press release, this could potentially be hundreds of links.

When you write your press release you must not write it like you would an advertisement for your business, instead you should write it aimed at a journalist or the reader of a magazine. You must stop thinking “what’s in it for me?” and start thinking “why would XYZ magazine’s readers be interested?”. Also, since it’s a press release, it must be newsworthy – you must actually have something important to write about.

Once you’ve written your press release you can submit it yourself to various news agencies, or pay a Press Release Newswire service such a PRWeb (www.prweb.com) who specialize in Internet press releases to distribute your press release for you.

Write Articles

Writing articles is similar to writing a press release, except rather than writing about your company you write about something in which you have in-depth knowledge and that people would be interested to read about.

So why spend hours writing an article for other people? Well, a number of reasons: if you provide some very useful content then you as a person will become revered to as an expert in your particular field, as a result people will respect your opinions and feel compelled to try you product or service. You can place a link in your article, so every website that publishes your article will also provide a link to your website. Some websites might even pay you if they publish your article. And also you can write articles to be helpful, of course!