Boost Your Business Using Internet Marketing Promotion

Boost Your Business Using Internet Marketing Promotion

There are several ways to boost your business in the internet marketing promotion world. There's article marketing, videos, audio, playing around in social network communities, business communities, forums, email marketing, lead generation, exchanges, joint-venture partnerships, and various other ways to make this happen. However, you will have to strategize a plan or all of it will get you nowhere.

If you're the owner of a small service business, having a solid Internet marketing plan in place can both increase your name and brand recognition locally in your geographic area, as well as expose you to a whole new set of potential clients throughout the world.

Marketing Plan
What do you want to accomplish by using Internet marketing? To find new clients? Provide services and info to existing clients? Sell services or products? Educate your target market or your staff about your product or service? Create an online community for your target market? How much money to have to spend each month on this Internet marketing plan? Having a goal and budget in mind will make your marketing more effective.

Track competition
Knowing and understanding where you stand among your competitors can you help you strengthen your marketing message. Do a keyword search for the terms someone might use to find your business online. Write down the URL's of your top 5 competitors. How popular and relevant are their sites? You can check their traffic ranking with Alexa, http://www.alexa.com/#traffic, as well as see what other sites link to them. Does your competition offer something unique? Where are the gaps in the service or product offerings?

Target Market:
Instead of trying to marketing to everyone (the shotgun marketing approach), find a clearly definable target market that you can easily describe and locate. What industry? What socio-economic group? What do they read? To what groups and associations (real and virtual, personal and professional) do they belong? How much money do they make? Can they easily afford your product or service? What keywords are they using to search for businesses like yours online? (Note--you can do keyword research with free downloadable software, http://www.GoodKeywords.com).

Solution to a Problem:
The reason that someone will buy your product or hire to you to provide a service is to solve a particular problem that they have. What problems and issues plague your target market? How does your product or service solve that problem? How does your solution differ from that of your competitors? What makes you uniquely qualified to provide the solution to their problem?

Branding Your Business:
Your domain name can either help you be memorable or cast you into a sea of "brandless" solutions. At a minimum, you'll want to buy both your personal name as well as the name of your business in the .com version, if it's available. Then buy the .com versions of your product names and program names. If you use a full-featured domain registrar, you'll be able to point and mask these domains to internal pages of your web site, or use them as stand-alone sales letter pages.

You may also think of problems faced by your target market or solutions that you provide and buy domain names in the .com version of those as well.

Assess your website.
Your web site should be visually appealing, with one primary font for the text and a simple primary color scheme, along with an easy-to-navigate layout, and readily identifiable buttons to link to other pages in the site. Your content should focus on and address the problems of your visitors and how your product or service can help solve their problems. Rather than listing the features of your product or service, detail the benefits they'll gain from purchasing your product or service. People rarely buy features -- they buy benefits. Don't depend on your web site designer to write your content -- that is best done by you, as you know your business and your target market better than anyone.

Present a clear call to action that is clearly shown on every page of your site. In an online business, your primary call to action should be getting the visitor's name and primary email address by asking him subscribe to your ezine or by giving him access to a free ecourse, special report, audio recording, or ebook. Lastly, provide an abundance of readily available information to demonstrate your expertise (articles, blog posts, free downloads, giveaways, contests). Your visitor is always asking WIIFM (What's In It For Me) -- make your web site about your visitor, not about you.


Internet Marketing Strategies:
How will you create traffic to your website? There are countless ways to do this, including: pay-per-click purchases (in which you buy a keyword at a search engine and pay for placement on that search engine for that keyword and pay for each visitor who clicks on that link and is sent to your site); organic search engine listing ranking (in which your site comes up at the top of the non-sponsored listings on a search engine by having keyword rich descriptions in the page title and page description meta tags and then optimizing each page for no more than 3 keywords in the first 250 words on a page); well-written email newsletter that is published on a regular basis; submission of articles on topics related to your target market to article submission directories; regularly post entries to a blog aimed at your target market, full of content discussing issues related to that target market; series of podcasts containing interview with experts of interest to your target market; ongoing series of teleconferences containing value-added content for your target market; submission of online press releases with new tips information for your target market; exchange relevant links with others in different industries with the same target market;