|
|
Your Portal to the World
|
Good Product or Service + Fair Price + Good Website
+ Plenty of Qualified Traffic = A Successful Website
|
|
|
The
Internet offers one of the most powerful money making opportunities
anywhere! Millions of people are on the Internet daily.
Yearly Internet commerce is in the billions per year and is expected to
climb to over a trillion in in the next few years!
You've heard the success stories, ranging
from the home-based business to the large companies, all with booming
business on the Internet. So what do all these success stories have in
common? Internet marketing. They created an internet website, and
properly marketed it.
Online marketing is, simply put, marketing
on the Internet. The Internet is a wonderful place to do business! And
for many good reasons:
- Reason 1: Advertising on the Internet is
free or practically free. Conventional advertising can be expensive.
But on the Internet, advertising and marketing is practically free!
- Reason 2: Online marketing is much faster
than conventional marketing. There are no ad deadlines to deal with. No
two-month delays for your magazine ad to appear. And no printing,
envelope stuffing, or mailing.
- Reason 3: The internet levels the playing
field. Off the Internet, a small retail sporting goods shop has a hard
time competing with Sportmart, a superstore the size of an entire city
block. The small retail shop can only afford small newspaper ads.
Sportmart has giant ads and special pull-out sections. But on the
Internet the small sporting goods shop can present products with the
same professionalism and flash as Sportmart.
Think about it... Coke and Pepsi can
afford to spend one million dollars per minute on television ads. But
on the Internet, they can't do anything better than you can do.
With the proper website, a teenager
working out of his bedroom could look bigger than Coca-Cola. This is
the "level playing field advantage."
You can create a dynamic web presence that will put you on equal
footing with large companies, make you look professional and instill
confidence in your potential customers.
- Reason 4: Selling on the Internet is easier
than anywhere else. Unlike a retail store, an Internet online store
requires very little maintenance and effort. Plus there's no employee
payroll, no rent, no insurance and none of the other costs associated
with a retail store.
Each and every day thousands, tens of
thousands, or even millions of people could visit your online store,
view photos and detailed information about your products, place online
orders, enter their credit card numbers, and have their funds
automatically deposited into your bank account. Setup properly you
could build yourself an online money machine, automatically working
around the clock, with little to no effort on your part.
- Reason 5: You can instantly make changes to
your website. A typical color brochure can easily cost thousands of
dollars for design and printing. But if you discover an error, want to
change a price or add a new product, you can't. You're stuck with that
brochure until you re-design and print a one. But not on the Internet. On the Internet you have total freedom to
adjust prices, add new products, put new graphics on your website, and
so on. And changes can be made
in a day or less.
- Reason 6: The ability to quickly and easily
collect demographics and statistics. Once your Internet business is
rolling, you'll really appreciate this. In marketing it is critical to
test and measure, make changes, and then repeat the test & measure
process.
For instance... ad concepts,
headlines, price points, and offers can all be tested and measured.
Whatever works, you keep... whatever doesn't work, you change back.
In print advertising and direct mail,
one single test can take two to three months. But on the Internet you
can test and measure, make changes to your website, then test and
measure some more, all in a matter of days.
- Reason 7: There are many potential
customers. There are tens of millions of people on the Internet each
and every day. That's certainly enough prospects to make your marketing
effort worthwhile.
- Reason 8: Prospects are in the right frame
of mind.
On the Internet, most prospects are in
a working mood or a business frame of mind. Taking action is certainly
convenient. Filling out a simple online order form, or clicking a
button to print a fax or mail order form couldn't be easier.
And with online ordering there are no
postal delays... the order is received moments after they click the
"Order Submit" button.
Let's recap. The Internet is a wonderful
place to do business, because the results are almost immediate, changes
are easy, and it's virtually free. The Internet's "level playing field
advantage" allows small companies to compete with the giants. There are
many many prospective customers on the Internet, and these customers
are in the right frame of mind to place an order.
|
Web Directories are hierarchical directories on the internet that are
maintained by people (as opposed to robot spiders and relevancy search
engines). The web directories are Yahoo (which now gets second
billing to relevancy results provided by Google) Looksmart, Open
Directory Project, DMOZ and a half a dozen other smaller
directories. We recommend you research your keywords and submit
manually to all of the web directories. It will take about an
hour to submit to all the live directories, and some of them charge a
fee for the submission.
 |
- Permission Marketing
- You should be using a well crafted permission marketing
effort. Gather the e-mail addresses of the visitors to your
website (with their express permission), send them your periodic
newsletter, product updates, and special offers, etc.... If you
do not have a permission marketing strategy currently running on your
site, you are missing a valuable tool and another way to help generate
sales, additional traffic, and improve conversion rates.
- Banner Exchanges
(Free) - You can get free banner advertising by joining a free
banner exchange like linkexchange.com, virtualads.com, or dozens of
others. By giving up some advertising space on your site, you can
get free banner advertising on someone else's sites.
- Per Impression (CPI)
Campaigns (Fee) - Only site owners that have a bit of
experience with other promotional tools should consider this
resource. Impressions ads like banners, skyscrapers, buttons,
pop-ups, and pop-unders, are a good method of online branding, because
there is no better way to put your name in front of huge amounts of
people fast. While they do cost money, and the click through rate
is not as high as it used to be (or as high as other methods), they are
another way to generate traffic to your site.
- Newsletter Campaigns
- There are literally thousands and thousands of permission
based email newsletters on the internet. Most of these sell
commercial ad space. There are some unbelievable bargains to be
had on these resources, and click-through rates are much higher than
banners. They are great tools and should not be neglected.
- Newsletter Ad Swaps
(Free) - Once your permission marketing email list is built up
to a reasonable level, you can easily trade ads with other newsletters
that share your target audience, but who are not necessarily your
direct competitors. This can give you a massive reach to your
target audience on the internet.
- Affiliate Programs
- Affiliate programs are the "Queen Mother" of internet
marketing. Many of the most successful websites on the internet
get the majority of their traffic and sales from affiliate
programs. In short, you can quickly and easily recruit hundreds
or even thousands of websites that will promote your product or
service, and link to you in return for a small percentage of every sale
they send your way. In other words, you use an affiliate program
to recruit a huge commissioned sales force of websites. Affiliate
programs are no longer the exclusive domain of the e-commerce
giants. Two of the largest and familiar affiliate programs are:
WalMart and Amazon. You can and should be running an affiliate
program on your site.
- Leverage Marketing
- Many of the strategies when used in combination with
each other, make each other dramatically more powerful. For
example, using a classified ad blast to promote your affiliate
program. There are literally hundreds of possible combinations of
these effective marketing tools that can really ratchet up your
marketing.
- Content Driven
Marketing Strategies (Free) - Not necessarily a great option for
every website, content driven marketing takes time and effort, but can
pay huge dividends. Create a purely information area of your
website dedicated to top notch information about your subject
matter. Optimize every page for relevancy search engines, and be
sure to feature an offer on every page. The increased exposure to
search engine information seekers can dramatically drive traffic.
These are just a few of the marketing techniques available for you to
help build your revenue from your website. Many others are
available as well and all should be used to help build your qualified
traffic. It may sound time consuming, but the most time is spent
in getting your marketing set up initially. Afterwards, you can
fine tune your efforts in just an hour or two per day.
|
|
|
