Internet marketing process has an objective. The aim of internet marketing is normally to increase prospects, subscribers, enquiries and sales from a website or sales page. It is therefore a numbers game - the numbers coming from traffic or visitors to the site, the sales coming from the copy or presentation of the product on the website. Tune these two factors and you have a successful internet business. 

Here's ten ways you can get more traffic and convert those visitors in to sales at your website. This is internet marketing in a nutshell. Getting word about your business out there is a start, so we'll start with... 

1) Articles and press releases. That's two in one already really. Articles can be submitted to sites that publish articles. These include major article directories such as ezinearticles, smaller directories and niche directories which are specific to your particular product line or niche. Press releases involve submission to press release sites and sites where journalists can pick up stories, too. 

2) Social marketing. Sites like facebook and myspace are the most used and visited sites on the internet. Such sites hold a mass of potential customers therefore. Sites like "twitter" and "stumbleupon" - a "social bookmarking" site can be integrated with facebook and increase exposure. Social "blog and ping" is a technique whereby your site can be bookmarked on sites like "delicious" and "misterwong" and then you can post those social link lists to your blog and "ping" your blog at a site like pingomatic. 

3) Increasing backlinks. Backlinks are covered in the first 2 points in two ways - links from resource box in articles. Links from your press releases. These tend to be one way links - in other words other sites on the internet are linking to your webpage or site. This increases your site's "authority." It figures if sites are linking to you, you are worth a look. Other way of increasing backlinks is "reciprocal linking" where you link to other sites in exchange for them linking to you. You can do this via request or via a link exchange program. 

4) Email marketing. Having a subscriber form on your website means you can capture details of visitors and follow up with them via email. Perhaps you can offer them a free gift or perk to encourage them to sign up. Email marketing can be done manually and/or through the use of an autoresponder which automates following up with subscriber prospects. You can publish an ezine in this way, too, and gain a loyal following if it is good. 

5) Advertising. Online advertising consists of banner ad programs and advertising schemes run by individuals and companies on their websites. In addition, advertising can be done "per click" through programs such as yahoo ads and google adwords, where essentially you bid on a "keyword" related to your niche and will pay a maximum amount per click through to your site from an ad. 

6) Forum marketing. There are forums online and message groups related to your product or service. Making yourself known as a helpful contributor and active participant on forums will enable you to build a good reputation and also pick up sales and subscribers through a "signature link" in your forum posts, offered through most forums withint the "profile" part of your membership to the forum. Normally a couple of lines about yourself and a link to your site is quite acceptable provided it is done through the signature link of your posts. 

7) Blogging and RSS. There are many free blogging platforms nowadays, including blogger. Here you can set up a site in minutes and start publishing articles and getting traffic quite quickly. You can also market your product or main site through your blog and use your blog to keep in touch with your subscriber, prospect or customer base. An RSS is a "feed" of your blog that can be read by an RSS reader. RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS feed directories and also added to sites such as myyahoo, igoogle or to other people's websites or blogs, increasing exposure and backlinks again. 

8) Offline marketing. This is an article in itself really, so I'll just list a few of the common ways to advertise your internet business. Newspaper ads, business cards, giving talks/seminars, word-of-mouth marketing, networking clubs and forums, business clubs and breakfast groups, attending seminars/talks and meeting new prospects in person, telephone marketing, mailshots/direct mail, local magazine ads are some of the ways to increase your internet marketing offline. 

9) The copy on your website. This is very important. The copy refers to the words on your webpage or site. Sales copy is a kind of advertising that sells products on your website. What your site says about you and your product is what your prospect sees and will influence how they feel about doing business with you. Therefore it is very important to get it right. The content of your website. Content means what is on your website in terms of information, pictures and so forth. The more relevent content your website has, and the better structured the navigation of the site, the more the search engines are going to like your site which leads us to our final point... 

10) Search engine marketing - "SEO". We've covered a major aspect of SEO already - generating backlinks to boost site authority. Search engines also take in to account "on site" factors such as the use of metatags, keywords, headings, image labels and the overall content and structure of the site. Domain name also can make a difference. Again, this is an article in itself and much research can be made in to search engine internet marketing.

This article is brought to you by Sam Beatson who has been involved with the internet since 1991. You can visit http://www.sambeatson.com to find out more about how to get the most out of your internet marketing.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

Comments

Add New Search RSS

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
UBBCode:	-color-aquablackbluefuchsiagraygreenlimemaroonnavyolivepurpleredsilvertealwhiteyellow -size-tinysmallmediumlargehuge
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0alpha3

!joomlacomment 4.0 Copyright (C) 2009 Compojoom.com . All rights reserved."