Part 5: Marketing Strategy

Introduction

Optimising your web page is the key to marketing on the internet with regard to establishing a presence by using optimising techniques in the construction of your pages (See part 1) and external optimization strategy's (Part 4).

You will now need to develop your own active internet marketing strategy in order to drive your sales further. This should be built around the basic corner stones of a basic marketing plan which are market dominance, market penetration, innovation strategies and growth strategies. Then you combine this into the more specific field of internet marketing with effective advertising strategy's.

Make sure you have a subjective view, test the marketability of your product before you start. A vision is a good thing however it only works within the framework of a strong value proposition.

Visitor Trends & Loyalty

To maintain your presence in the market you should keep your visitors both intrested and loyal by updating your pages regularly, using add to favourite and save as homepage links (allowing visitors a handy tool for returning to your site). The use of opt in newsletters to maintain contact with your visitors.

Internet marketing is all about controlling your visitors trends for example unique visitors, time spent on a page, visitor loyalty are not only good for business they also play an increasing part in the ranking process on the internet, the tracking text you get from the google adwords webmaster tools has been noted as playing a part in the ranking process that cannot easily be tampered with so will no doubt be a important ranking factor in the future.

Having good visitor trends in turn will make you more visible and create the snowball effect that internet marketing is famed for with independant media's like blogs and chats rooms due the credit for many of todays success story's.

Prominently displaying phone number, addresses and contact information will encourage the visitors of the web pages integrity and customer focus .

Layout descriptions and scripts so they describe benefits, positive themes and customer focused rather than simple bland descriptions you can visually highlight the key focal issues to avoid burying them in detail.

Encourage interaction with the visitors perhaps with minimum effort voting buttons or suggestion boxes.

Look for new search phrases that have been used to visit your site to help with brainstorming.

Keeping abreast of current trends and maintaining core keywords for your Website. Stay abreast of developments relating to the contents of your Internet pages you could create a new page on your site with RSS feeds relating to your subject matter this adds value to your site while giving you usefull updates to work on. Like wise you can syndicate your own content for options do searches for "syndicate your articles", "syndicate your content" and "submit your article" on Google.

Establish and maintain your presence in the marketplace

Establish your presence in the Internet market with the help of relevant directories, online forums, blogs and link exchanges to maintain your popularity.

Maintaining your popularity is the key here with things like eyecatching designs, branding, catchy phrases, being on top of current affairs keeping your subscribers loyal and reminding them you always around without offending them. The latest trend being the video feeds and mobile connections , and tommorrow who knows.

Whats your site got that others havent and how long can you keep it "yours". This part of the deal will come back to one thing your own creativity and innovation, the part that seperates the big success story's from the rest of us.

Breaking into a competitive field or a business which is wide open to competition can be done using two methods.

Method 1: Create a campaign that makes money through high volume sales with slim margins or

Method 2: Do the opposite and establish your name in one or more tight niches. By doing this you will reduce the size of the competition by separating yourself as a unique, trendy or specialist source within the larger market.

Growth strategies and Advertising

To expand your presence in the internet market you need to start advertising begin or join an affiliate program and use reputable company's to run your advertising promotions.

The types advertising promotions would vary from the type of web page you may have, for instance if your selling your own product, drop shipment or turnkey, I would recommend Google Adsence, an Affiliation partner or another pay per lead option. However if you've published a site which profits result in popularity rather than targeted hits you would be more inclined to opt for CPM marketing and search engine. There are two main reasons for using CPM marketing, establishing and promoting a brand name or product and converting the low cost CPM traffic into more valuable lead or Adsence traffic.

Internet product marketing: Adding items such as events products and services to the Google base data API, is a handy tool to market specific Items with options to bulk upload your entire inventory this allow's visitors to easily find the product they are looking for, you don’t even require a web site to make use of this service.

Search engine marketing and SEO, getting listed on search engines and directories can be time consuming and frustrating, there is no real shortcut, in some cases impatience and repetitive submissions can be mistaken as Spam and have a negative affect. A recent Page Optimiser study showed that web surfers prefer non-paid listings. For this reason, high rankings in search engines still matter and are free.

Here are a the basic guidelines for search engine marketing, Know your target audience choose relevant keywords and infrastructure to attract Internet browsers, create positive links to directories and similar sources of relevance.

Submit to the major search engines. There are many programs and sources promising fast solutions however it all come back to the basic stated above anything else is of little significance so don’t be manipulated by SEO opportunists rather spend your time and money on cpm marketing until the traffic eventually starts coming in from the search engines, the trick is to regularly monitor your progress and adjust your format from time to time to optimise it using SEO tools the important ones being freely available on this site (CLICK HERE FOR SEO TOOLS) as well as many other internet SEO websites including Google .

PPC search engines are search engines that allow you to bid for a special position on their result pages. You pay a certain amount for every click your listing receives.

Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) is the largest PPC search engine worldwide. Overture listings appear on Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, InfoSpace, MSN Search and on many smaller sites.

Espotting (merging with FindWhat) is the largest European pay per click search engine provider. Espotting listings are on the European versions of Yahoo, Lycos, AskJeeves, AllTheWeb and many other major European search engines.

Kanoodle( a smaller player) listings appear on CNet, HotBar, Galaxy and many other smaller sites. With cheaper bids than the other two PPC search engines no deposit and a free test their search engine it should not be dismissed.

It all comes down to your visitor versus sales conversion rate and the price of your products. To determine the effectiveness of bidding on pay per click search engines, you must constantly monitor your bids. Only by keeping a close watch will you know if PPC advertising works for your site.

Internet Marketing is a complicated an ever changing industry learning the in and out’s is an ongoing process however having a game plan is an integral part of any successful business and has an important role to play in the development of your web site. Now let go to the next section Part 6 monitoring your website.