Website Promotion Strategy

Marketing on the Internet involves online advertising to reach out to potential customers. It requires creativity like designing, development and technical aspects like marketing and advertising.

Affiliate marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing and interactive advertising are all different facets of Internet marketing. It also includes sales, public relations, information management and customer service. Ever since the advent of Internet, it is widely used for all kind of purposes. Among the advantages of Internet, some helps in doing business, shopping, etc, from the comfort of the house. According to research, a quarter of the Internet users shop online. It has also helped to grow electronic commerce.  Internet marketing is a part of electronic commerce. 

Direct marketing techniques like radio and television commercials, mail, and newsletters are the inspirations for Internet marketing, which involves direct response marketing strategies and is rapidly growing. Business-to-business, also known as B2B, and business-to-consumer, also known as B2C, are the two business models to which Internet marketing can be linked. B2C companies were the first to start when Internet marketing originated. They are companies that sell directly to the customers. B2B companies are meant to do business with each other.

Websites built for Internet marketing are slightly different than others. There are peer-to-peer modeled websites which are used to exchange products and services between each other. Other is name-your-price, where the customers have to specify their price range that they can spend and select products that fall in that price range. Priceline.com is an example of such a website. Amazon.com is a website which is based on find-the-best-price model, where customers can find the lowest prices. Last are online auctions sites, where items are bid. Ebay.com is an example. 

The companies who use Internet marketing are at an advantage. They don’t need to put in huge amounts of energy and time into Internet Marketing as with other traditional methods. With the help of only few resources, national and international markets can be reached. Because of very low investment startup costs, even small businesses are turning to online marketing. Websites and blogs have been developed for this purpose. Internet marketing is advantageous in the sense that the data is easily available on the Internet. Newsletters can be directly sent to customers and if it doesn’t contain the information they are looking for, they can search for information about the product online, make a decision and purchase it online itself.

One of the factors that hinder the growth of online marketing is delayed loading of the page. The web pages that take a lot of time to download test the patience of the consumer. To add to that, if the businesses design complex web pages with lots of graphics and animations, it will slow down the speed even more. Another minus point of online marketing is that the customers cannot feel, taste, smell or try products in order to make a good decision. To over come this, some of the online stores have created liberal return policies with the help of which the customer satisfaction is guaranteed.

Another biggest threat of online shopping is identity theft. Paying online using credit cards, e-checks are susceptible to hackers and information can be stolen and used. Many hackers and websites have been caught who were involved in buying and selling of personal information. Most of the websites have taken measures and incorporated good security on their websites. One of the best methods is encryption. When the data is being transferred between two computers; there is a possibility of a hacker intercepting it. So the data is changed by applying some encryption algorithm and is sent through the network and upon receiving, the decryption algorithm is applied to bring back the data to its original form.

Online selling is influencing all kinds of businesses like banking, advertising, music, etc. Instead of going to a store for buying cassettes and CDs, music can be bought online. Bank transactions like depositing, withdrawing, transferring funds, and paying bills are all performed online. Billions of dollars are invested every year in online advertising alone.  

Gifts are loved by one and all. They are a way of expressing gratitude. Marketing gifts are given to customers to thank them for their patronage. These thank you gifts cannot only be presented to existing customers, but also to potential customers when they try a new product. This would encourage them to buy other products, which will increase the company sales. This practice can be made more advantageous by making it a marketing and branding strategy, which helps in expanding business, along with earning customer goodwill. To make it marketing oriented, a lot of planning should be put it in so as to not to loose its essence.

Sending promotional gifts is a means of rewarding clients, to show appreciation for their loyalty throughout the years; this will make customers feel like they are valued. Flyers are discarded the moment they are received, and are seldom read. But when a person is gifted with something that he/she can use, there is a probability that they will not only enjoy it, but they will also keep it for sometime, might be for several years and until the time they have it, they will remember the company. One of the better methods is to print the name of the company on the gift. This doesn’t involve any strategy and can be implemented even if there is lack of imagination. Name and brand recognition can be established by having the logo of the company or information of the company printed on the gift. This also helps build brand recognition amongst potential customers.

Also give the customers the gifts that last long. The longer the gift lasts the longer the customer will remember your company. Gifts like a pen, key chain, coffee mug, calendar, refrigerator magnets, etc. which not only lasts forever but are something that is observed and used many times a day. There are certain gifts, which can fit the budget, promote marketing and at the same time serve the purpose of gift.

Calendars are one of the most opted gifts by small companies as promotional products. They aren’t expensive and are used year round. Following them are office supplies. Stationary tub, embedded pens, sticky pads and diaries containing the logo of the company are very good gift ideas too. Desktop accessories are the next best things. Things like pen stands, paperweight are hot giveaways.

For home, gifts like fridge magnets, coffee mugs and thermo-flask make ideal gifts. They, too, are noticed many times a day. The good thing about them is they can be modeled in different colors, shapes and styles and can be unique when compared to another’s promotional products. And hence, they are more like collectible items. Innovation can increase the interest of the user in this regard.

Key chains are also something which is carried everywhere and they don’t even cost too much. Usually people use the promotional ones to store spare keys. T-shirts and cap are a bit expensive, but are worth the investment. They are usually worn outside and people around can easily sight the company’s name and logo and they function like a walking billboard.

Creativity is the key to selecting the right gift to market your product. The more money that is invested, the better the gift, but the gift should be selected such that it earns maximum returns.

There is plenty that has been written about search engine optimization. Most of it leaves out this very important secret, without which no SEO campaign has any hope of being successful.

Folks are concentrating so much on using keywords and keyword phrases that they have forgotten something much more important and without which keywords can be virtually useless.

Lets illustrate this with a common scenario that we all go through fairly frequently. You enter a keyword phrase at your favorite search engine and the first page of the results comes through. What do you do next? Do you go to the first site listed or do you scroll down the listed sites. Most people do the latter, but what would they be looking for? The answer is simple, the headline or article title that looks the most relevant to what they are looking for.

Now let us assume that the site that comes up right at the top, at number one has a boring uninspiring headline and the site that is number 10 at the very bottom of the first page has a hot enticing title. What will happen? But of course No 10 will end up getting all the traffic while number one will be starved of hits. That is how important headlines are. So without a good headline all the good SEO work that you put in will not yield the expected results, even if you do end up right at the top of results for popular keyword searches.

Why SEO Will Hardly Work Without Powerful Headlines

In fact, SEO will hardly work without excellent headlines and titles to your articles. One of the key aspects about SEO is the accumulation of back links pointing to your site. Search engines favor this happening in a natural way rather than you having to purchase links. For this to happen, your article on the web page will need to get very high traffic so that when a fraction of these visitors link to your article, you will quickly end up with thousands or even tens of thousands of links pointing to your site.

To attract this traffic, a key component of your content will be the headline. Many stories have been told about headlines making the difference between a few hundred copies of a supermarket tabloid sold and a couple of millions. Online headlines are even more critical because many times it is all that somebody sees before they make a decision on whether or not to click on a link that will lead to you and your article.

Why Good Headlines Without Keywords Still Work

Many times webmasters have been greatly hindered in their work of creating suitable article titles by the need to use exact keyword phrases. The result has been awkward headlines that hardly inspire readership. Yet those who have realized that it is possible to leave out a keyword phrase from your headline or to modify it slightly and still succeed in SEO have greatly benefited.

The truth is that while it is true that your keyword phrase as early as possible in a headline will help a great deal in terms of SEO, it is in fact not the only consideration that leading search engines take into account when deciding how your site will be ranked in search engine results. More important are the number of relevant back links pointing to your site. This means that an excellent headline that will attract readership and ultimately back links to a site is much more important than a poor headline with the exact keyword phrase slotted in at the beginning of the headline.

What Is A Good Headline?

A good article title or headline has to be relevant to start with. Never forget that headlines are supposed to flag down your target readership and not everybody. This is perhaps the most common mistake people make when creating headlines. And this is where the webmaster thinks to create a headline that has as general an appeal as possible. Actually a headline that seeks to attract everybody quite often ends up attracting nobody.

Excellent Headlines Are the Fuel That Will Drive Your SEO Campaign

Always remember that without good targeted headlines your SEO effort will most probably come to nothing. It is therefore a good investment to spend your time studying the art of creating good headlines for your SEO content.

The majority of the world’s working population perform their jobs in offices and most of the world’s working population do not like their jobs because, well, who wants to work? So, if you don’t like to work but have to work anyway, why stick yourself into a job with low pay? The best solution would be to find a high-paying job, work hard and then start your own business if you can. The problem is, even with a high paying job, you can’t earn enough money to start a business.

The World Wide Web, being an economy in itself, offers a variety of opportunities for making money. You can try your hand at freelance jobs like data encoding, medical transcription, article composition and programming. There are a number of freelancer websites that you can join so you may work at home and put some extra money in your pocket. Start-up capital = $0

There are supposedly expert moneymakers who, for a small fee of $100 to $200 will teach you how to earn $2,000 to $10,000 a month. You can try out their system for free, but, you will have to place a deposit to be able to get the free trial. Start-up capital = $49 to $100 depending on deposit requirements.

Finally, you can be a passive internet salesperson. I call it passive because all you have to do is establish a base of operations in the internet. Once that base has been established, you have the potential to earn from $0 to unlimited income. All you have to do afterwards is maintain or update that base once every three months. And yes, this advice is free. No trial offers, and no deposits required.

Vendor sites offer internet surfers the opportunity of earning additional income in exchange for the promotion of their website and products. This is how it works.  You will need to sign-up for affiliate membership. Most vendor sites that offer affiliate programs do not charge you for this.  This is only fair since you will be selling them to people. Be wary of vendor sites that charge fees for membership to their affiliate programs.

Once you join-up, they will give you a reference number or an ID number that you will paste into your html scripts. Your vendor site will give you instructions on how to paste them.

Normally, an affiliate will have to have a website where they can promote the vendor site. You will promote the vendor site by adding links to the site’s home page and some specific products which you think will sell more. You will need to design your website to accommodate these links as well as alter some of your websites graphics to make way for banners, or picture links.  Don’t forget to add the ID or reference number to the link so that the vendor can identify your referral.

Once you have the links in place, you will need to write some 250++ words about the product you are selling. I recommend allotting 1 web page per product as this will help you in search engine result rankings. The content you write will have to be relevant and filled with keywords that pertain to the product itself. Once everything is done, you need to find out if your website shows up in search engine queries when browsing for your product.

If you think this is too much work, you can try writing newsletters about a product on a vendor site that contains links to the product. You then post the newsletter on the internet and hope that a search engine indexes it.

The problem with most affiliates is that they don’t last long because they fail to maintain and update their product links. Some of the products that you have linked to before may have already been discontinued. You need to check on your links at least once every 3 months or once a month at optimum.

 Finally, don’t be content with what you have and keep looking for additional products to sell. This isn’t a get rich quick scheme. Times are hard and we need all the financial assistance we can get. This is just one option where you can possibly earn a lot more than your current income.