Tuesday, October 14, 2008

successful marketing strategy

One of the most important factors to bear in mind when planning and building your business web site is what sort of visitors you are really looking for.
The process should be;

1 - Find the Target market .
2 - Get them to visit your site .

If you don't proceed in this way then you might get great amounts of visitors to your site but they may not be 'quality' visitors... i.e. they may have stumbled upon your site whilst actually looking for something else.. something you do not offer.

So If you have a site that sells red leather jackets and you promote your site under the category of 'clothing' then you will probably get many visitors coming to your site all looking for some item of clothing.

If you fine tune your advertising from the start it is possible to pre-qualify the web site visitor a little so that you will only receive hits from those who are looking for 'red leather jackets'.
By doing this you will have MUCH LESS traffic... however, the traffic you do get will be looking for exactly what you are offering from the very start. This will increase your conversion rate immensely and you will make far more sales per visitor and therefore, if you are paying for your advertising will increase your Return On Investment (ROI) .

What are the methods you can use to get traffic to your site?

Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Engines Google's Adwords and similar Article submission Blogs Newsgroups or Forums Classifieds (online) Offline methods
PPC (Pay Per Click) .

Most Search engines now have some sort of pay per click system. This is basically where you pay the search engine to appear at the top of the results page for your chosen keyword... the cost for this is based on performance so you pay a certain amount each time your site is visited.
The actual cost of each click depends upon the popularity of that search term but normally starts at about $0.10 per click and for the average popular term can rise up to about $1 per click and for certain terms can rise up to as much as $20 or $30 per click.
Search engines .

To get your site included in the major search engines can be the best form and at the same time the most difficult form of getting visitors to your site... it can be completely free of charge. If you do manage to get your site included then when you will probably find your page after typing in your chosen 'keyword' or 'search term' to be low down in the results.

For popular keywords your new site will probably be found after thousands of other sites. Most people don't click on the web sites that are listed below the 4th or 5th positions so being ranked for example 845th for your search term is almost the same as being ranked 23rd as both will result in next to no traffic at all. The depressing truth is that you must appear in the top 3 or 4 positions to obtain any considerable amount of traffic.

To achieve high rankings for your particular search term is an art in itself... this art is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This art form has no rules, only guidelines. The search engines want to give accurate results and therefore don't tend to make public the details of how they rank the search results .

Google Adwords :

Adwords is the google answer to PPC where you pay for your listing based on the search term but instead of appearing at the top of the search results page your ad will appear in 2 different places.

First, in a column of adverts down the right hand side of the search results and second they appear on participating web sites that have related content to your keywords. These sites will get a small percentage of your payment per click but will send you a large amount of traffic.
Using ADwords successfully is basically a numbers game. You need to know the percentage of sales you can make from your web site.. i.e., if you sell 2 of your products for every 100 visitors to your site then it is possible to calculate more or less how much you can afford to spent on ppc advertising.

For Example:

Say you sell handbags for $50 that you buy for $20 and for every 100 visitors to your site you normally sell 2 handbags .

Your profit margin for the two sales will be $60 ($30 profit per sale).
Divide the profit by the amount of visitors ($60 / 100 = $0.60) - this is the maximum amount you can spent on advertising to break even .

Obviously you need to do better than break even and make a profit therefore as a rule of thumb you can divide this amount by 2 ($0.30) to get you maximum bid per click to be able to advertise with ppc AND still make a profit .
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successful marketing advices :

always you have to know first, that internet marketing strategy, is the personalization of the message. It is important to not only identify who your potential customers are, but also to know what they are looking for. Your marketing message needs to be developed and customized to deal with your identified target customer base.
This means that you should talk directly to your target market rather than as a general customer. If you are marketing head ache pills, make sure your marketing message addresses people with head aches and not just people with some form of pain. Know your market and address them directly.

Second in internet marketing strategy is privacy. With anything online, people are of course worried about their information being safe. You should make sure that your potential customer base has good reason to trust you with their information. Having information about your customers makes it easy to cater to their needs. Without security you will not get that opportunity.

You need to make sure you have proper security to guard customer information. You need to make sure that current and future customers are aware of what steps you are taking to protect their information and privacy. Draft a Privacy Policy for your business and make it easily accessible to your clients.

Don't assume that your clients will know about your privacy policy - tell them. Make sure you put their minds at ease and they will in turn be willing to trust their information in your hands.
As with any business, customer service is important to your internet marketing strategy. This is because people need to know they are being cared for, especially in the cold world of the internet .

Adding a customer service link and giving your customer an easy way to contact real representatives will aid your internet marketing strategy a great deal. Poeple like to deal with other people. Make sure you give your customers that option.

Internet marketing strategy is a necessity for not only online businesses, but also any business that wants to reach that group of people who use the internet.

In order to get your strategy in place and running smoothly it is important that you understand that while many aspects of internet marketing are the same, there are also aspects of it that differ from real world marketing .

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