|
Top 5 Ways to Market Your Online Business
Marketing your online
business can be a huge part of your budget especially
when you're first starting out. Finding ways to get
your name in front of your customer that doesn't cost
a fortune will help you draw sales while you're working
on getting ranked in the search engines.
Below are the top five ways to market
your business on the internet. The ideas listed are
not only inexpensive but are highly effective as well.
However, before you even consider using one of these
strategies, there are two things you must first do.
The first is to write a formal marketing
plan. If you're getting close to opening your business,
a marketing plan should already be done as part of your
company's business plan. However, it's true that many
who start online businesses fail to write a business
plan. If this is the case, just be sure to at least
get your marketing plan formalized before you start
doing business. Getting your marketing plan thought
through and documented is the minimum you should do
for your business. When writing your marketing plan,
consider the who, what, when, and how you will do your
selling and get your brand in front of your customer.
Then decide which of the following strategies you will
implement in that plan and explain how you plan to carry
out those strategies.
The other thing you need to consider
is search engine optimization. It is essential to learn
how to optimize your website so it will eventually get
ranked in the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo,
and MSN. The sooner you get started with optimizing
your site, the faster it will get ranked. Until some
of your pages are ranked in the search engines, your
traffic will remain minimal. Consider investing in a
book, ebook, ecourse, or program of some sort to learn
how to optimize your site so you can use the information
as you are building it and adding your content. Be sure
you're learning the most recent information because
the rules change frequently.
Now on to the Top 5 Ways to Market Your
Online Business.
1. Find Your Niche. Imagine trying
to sell your product or service to the entire world.
Consider the marketing budgets of companies like Coca-Cola
and McDonalds, these are companies that are trying to
appeal to everyone. Selling your product or service
to a small but focused group of people will allow you
the luxury of advertising to a smaller but more interested
group of people. Since they are more interested, a higher
percentage of the group will buy but you will have spent
less money pursuing the smaller group. Once you are
successful selling to one niche, if your product or
service is appealing to another niche, you can create
another website and repeat your success using the same
strategies you used on the first website.
2. Link Exchanges. Exchanging
links with other websites that have complimentary products
or services will not only give you direct traffic from
the link but it will also help you with your pursuit
to get ranked in the search engines. At the time of
this writing, Google is the most widely used search
engine, and it's widely known that they consider the
number of links pointing to your website as part of
the determination where to rank your website.
3. Write Articles. Writing articles
with information that is interesting and useful for
your niche market will help you gain traffic to your
site. When writing an article, include a resource box
at the end of the article that includes information
about the author (that's you) and a link to your website.
Then distribute the article to article directories for
other website owners to use on their site or in their
newsletters and ezines. This does two things, you gain
traffic when someone sees your article on another website
and clicks your link and you get a link that points
back to your site for the search engines to use to rank
your site higher.
4. Using a Signature Line in Online
Forums. This is a strategy that could be quite time
consuming so don't let it take up huge amounts of your
time, however it is quite effective in drawing traffic
to your website. Join forums and messageboards that
are useful to your niche market and then become part
of the community. When you make a post, be sure it's
useful and relevant to the information that is being
discussed, then at the bottom of your post, sign-off
with your name and little blurb about your company with
a link to your website. These are often referred to
as "sig lines". Be sure to read the forum's
guidelines to be sure you're using the proper etiquette
in the forum and to be sure signature lines are allowed.
If they are not allowed, do not use this strategy in
that forum as it could cause you to be banned from that
forum.
5. Start A Newsletter. Having
a newsletter is one of the best ways to market to your
customers and potential customers. You will need to
have a service that will host your list and allow you
to send your newsletter. Then you put a sign-up box
on your website and your visitors will sign-up. Periodically,
you decide how often, you send those who have signed
up an email with information that is relevant to your
niche. This information could be general info or it
could be specifically about your product. To get your
visitors to sign-up you can offer a special report,
e-course, ebook or anything that would entice them to
give you their email address. When you choose the service
that will host your email list, be sure they do a double
opt-in confirmation of those who subscribe, it's now
the law.
In this article we covered the top five
ways to market your website and a couple of things you
need to do before you ever even start. Now it's time
to get out there and implement some of these strategies.
1howto.com
--------------------------------------------------
Please
Share Your Tips with Us
|
