To Market, to Market…
Choosing Your Own Internet Strategy
You’ve finally arrived! That web site you created looks like it’s going to be the belle of the ball. After a lot of editing, dress rehearsals, dry runs, and listening to your friends’ suggestions to tweak this and that, the web site has now come up from the ashes ready to do battle and promote your product or service.
Don’t rest on your laurels yet. You’ve only just begun. The next step is to roll up your sleeves, get down into the trenches and choose a marketing strategy or two.
Which strategy is best? The choices are limitless. You can concentrate on one, adopt three or four at the same time, and experiment with a dozen strategies until you decide which one works best for your web site, meets your objectives, and blends with your personality. Naturally, you’ll select the one that brings home the most bacon!
Our suggestions –
A) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the master strategy of them all. Everyone goes by SEO strategies before trying anything else. SEO is simply getting the major search engines to notice you. When they notice you, your battles are half won. They’ll include you in their search yields, put your web site in the top 20 rankings (if you did the right things) so that when your site lands on the first and second pages of say, google, you’re assured that the buying universe will notice you too. Studies suggest that most surfers looking for something will look no further than the second or third page of search results. Writing good articles for your web site is just one SEO method.
B) E-Mail Marketing
Quite a challenge, given people’s distaste for spam e-mails. However, since majority of people these days communicate via e-mail, it’s an effective way to reach out to your target audience. The idea is to structure and word your e-mail in such a way that it does not look like spam. How does one do this?
Dr. Michael Wilson suggests putting your name and signature and contact details on the email, publishing a newsletter (a lot of effort, but definitely worthwhile) or making offers to your potential customers. You can also rent target e-mail lists for a fee.
C) Viral Marketing
In medicine, we know that viruses spread from one human to another. Marketers take that concept and apply it to internet marketing strategies. The rationale for viral marketing is similar to “spreading the news” or “word of mouth.” One way is to write articles for free that other web sites can use. Viral marketing is defined by Wikipedia as the use of pre-existing social networks to increase brand awareness; it is popular because of low costs, good targets and high response rates. The goal therefore is to capture a large customer base without the expensive methods of traditional advertising. Blogging is also a form of viral marketing.
D) Paid Advertising
Dr. Wilson and other marketing gurus recognize three types of paid advertising: CPM (acronym for “cost per thousand views”), PPC (pay per click), and pay per action (another name for affiliate marketing). Web site owners or developers purchase a text ad in an e-mail newsletter, initiate an affiliate program or buy per-per-click ads. People also list their products and services in shopping comparison bots and auction sites.
Do you notice that when you do research on yahoo, google or msn, there are ads on the right column that pop up depending on the keywords you typed? The rank of your site depends on how much you paid for a particular search word vis-à-vis what other businesses paid.
There are at least 15 strategies that marketers employ. These are the more common ones. Find the most suitable for your internet business. Before trying out the strategies, you may want to speak to friends and colleagues who have web sites. Read articles on the internet. As in exercise, it’s always good to warm up first!
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