Strategic Internet Marketing

Strategic Internet Marketing

Strategic Internet marketing is, obviously, the key to success on the web. Internet marketing isn’t nearly has hard as it is made out to be so long as you know the general rules.

Strategic Internet Marketing

Internet marketing breaks down into a variety of areas, but the two biggest are paid and free marketing. If you want immediate traffic, you will have to pay for it. The goal is to move away from paid to free traffic as soon as possible.

Strategies – Web Ecommerce

There are many strategies for web ecommerce projects, but one has been proven over and over. Of all the strategies, the “need strategy” is the clear winner.
Strategies – Web Ecommerce

I always laugh when listening to mainstream marketing company blabber on about branding and demographics. On the web, ecommerce is boils down to one concept and only one. You must determine the needs of your prospects and provide solutions.

It is so important that you should start every day and meeting off by saying, “What are the needs of my prospects and how does what I am doing provide a solution to those needs?” If you cannot provide a quick, simple answer, you have wondered off the path to profits and need to refocus.

So, what the hell do I mean by “needs.” The trick with web ecommerce is to realize that there is lookie loo traffic and need traffic. A person shopping online for Christmas presents on December 15th has a serious need and is highly motivated to buy. A person that is drinking coffee on a Sunday morning and catching up on the news has no needs and isn’t going to get off their butt to find their wallet. Obviously, you are only interested in the motivated person.

Finding the needs of your prospects should be the first thing you do. Before you decide on a business name. Before you buy a domain. Before you even decide on the exact products or services you will offer. All of these subjects will be determined by your prospects once you understand their needs.

Okay, so how do you figure out their needs? In the real world, you would invest $50,000 on a market analysis, surveys and so on to find out their needs and the best location for your business. You are going to love this. With web ecommerce, you are going to spend under a couple of hundred bucks.

You first step is to identify the single word that best describes your business. If you want to open an online travel site, the word is “travel.” If you want to sell a book on investing, the word is “investing.” Whatever you business, pick the one word that describes it best.

Taking your one word, you want to use this program: WordTracker. With Wordtracker, you are going to do a keyword analysis. You will do an analysis for “travel” by entering the word in a provided form, hitting the return button and then watching the program kick out every keyword phrase that incorporates “travel” that has been typed into a meta search engine in the last 60 days.

Think about that for a moment. It is going to report to you the exact phrases used by your prospects to find something related to your business, in this case, travel. Each of those keyword phrases represents a need your prospect has regarding travel.

Let’s say you were going to build a travel site focused on cruises to the Caribbean. After you do the keyword analysis using the phrase “cruise”, you find there are tons of search for cruises to Alaska. Your prospects are telling you the subject the site should focus on. Instead of wasting time and money on the wrong area, you know where to go to pull in customers. Your domain name, advertising and search engine optimization should all be focused on the keywords you identify for your area of interest.

Of all the purported strategies for web ecommerce, there is one that always works. Identify the needs of your prospects and provide solutions to them.

Strategies – Web Ecommerce

Buy Targeted Web Site Traffic

Not all traffic is the same. Getting a gazillion hits is great, but not if it is from random subjects. Sometimes it makes sense to buy targeted web site traffic.
Buy Targeted Web Site Traffic

Many sites make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people. It is far better to stick to a specific service or product than it is to offer limited options to customers. If you are selling hiking gear, be the best damn hiking gear site on the net and nothing else. This same problem arises when sites target traffic generation strategies.

The key to cost effective marketing is to get targeted web site traffic. At first blush, getting as much traffic as possible, regardless of how, sounds like a smart move. It is not. Doing so wastes your money, distracts you from what you should be doing and diverts your time from doing just that. If you are paying for traffic, you must buy targeted web site traffic with the important word being “targeted.”

Targeted traffic is simply traffic from sources and locations that are relevant to your site. If you have looked into generating traffic, you have probably seen offers of 100,000 hits for $50. Yes, you will get 100,000 hits. Of course, the traffic is coming off of free lottery sites or the visitors are being paid to visit your site. This traffic is not targeted and will not convert into revenues.

The best place to buy targeted web site traffic is Google and Overture. These are pay-per-click search engines that list your ads directly on their search results. This means you can specific the keyword phrases you want to be listed under, to wit, targeting your advertising to your market. You can also create filters that limit the ad placements to searches from certain geographic locations, such as the United States or Europe. This further targets your traffic by excluding clicks from some country which you can’t possibly do business with.

You can also buy targeted traffic from web sites and traffic vendors. The sites handle it differently, but you can often buy ad space on their sites in the form of a banner. There are some credible services out there, but there are a lot more dubious ones. Personally, I would never use any of them, but it is your money.

Targeting your marketing is important if you want a good return on investment. You can buy targeted web site traffic from a lot of sources, but Google and Overture are the best.

Branding Goal – Internet Marketing Strategy

Internet marketing is all about hard results, not generic concepts of branding. Still, if you have a branding goal, there is an effective Internet marketing strategy you can pursue.

Branding Goal – Internet Marketing Strategy

Branding refers to the vague notion of creating an identity for a product or name brand with consumers. The classic example, of course, is Coca Cola. Being first on the scene, the company has been able to create such a strong name brand that most people use the word “coke” instead of soda even when they prefer Pepsi. In the world of marketing, all bow before the marketing team that accomplished this branding.

The Internet, however, is a different beast. That same marketing team would be crushed if they went after a similar strategy on the net.

The Internet is so large that branding is an expensive and difficult goal unless you are the first major presence in a niche. Sites like EBay and Amazon were the first major money players in their fields, giving them a huge advantage over subsequent competitors. Unless you are coming to a field with a lot of money and no current dominant site, your branding goal is going to meet with failure or limited success at best. If you want to stick with your branding goal, the only cost effective and ultimately successful Internet marketing strategy is a width search engine optimization campaign.

Search engine optimization is simply an effort to get pages on your site ranked high in search results on the three big search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. To meet your branding goal, the best Internet marketing strategy is to identify every single phrase your prospects use to find services or products in your business area. You then build optimized pages for every single phrase and get them ranked.

This strategy has two benefits. First, it will produce free traffic to your site. If you build 200 pages and each gets 50 visitors a day, your site will receive 10,000 visitors a day. The second benefit is your branding goal is met because the site appears in all the top 10 rankings. Regardless of what the prospect searches for, they keep seeing your site. This creates both brand recognition and credibility. As they visit your site over and over, they will also become readily familiar with your unique selling position as presented on the site.

To identify all the phrases being used by your prospects in searches, you must use a tool provided by Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a program that analyzes web searches on the major search engines. You simply enter a keyword and it kicks out every phrase being used by consumers, how often they use it and how many sites are trying to get ranked under it. This information is the equivalent of your Internet marketing bible. Give it a look:

Word Tracker

If you have a branding goal in mind, avoid wasting your money on banners and such unless you are in a niche that isn’t dominated by any single site. Instead, use the width search engine optimization Internet marketing strategy to establish your brand and pick up tons of free traffic.

Internet Advertising for Business

In this article, we are going to discuss a major internet advertising for business issue. In fact, we are going to focus on one of the biggest mistakes made in internet advertising.
Internet Advertising for Business

The two prime internet advertising platforms for business are pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Whether search engine optimization is technically advertising is debatable, but we will assume as much for this article. The issue we are going to discuss today applies equally to either of these platforms as well as any other internet advertising you undertake.

The biggest mistake most businesses make with internet advertising is keyword perspective. Keyword perspective refers to the point of view one has when developing keywords for any type of advertising. There are primarily two perspectives, but each only works with one audience. If you get them crossed up, your internet advertising will be a mess.

The industry perspective is usually the area where I see the biggest messes. Industry perspective refers to using industry terminology to develop keywords instead of using terms your prospects actually use. For example, a mortgage professional might view HELOC [home equity line of credit] as a keyword. Most prospects, however, are not going to search for this. Instead, they will search for home equity line of credit or simply line of credit. When you are marketing to the general public, do not use industry terms. Instead, use the terms your prospects apply to your services or products.

The opposite of the industry perspective is found in the business to business field. If you are providing services or products to businesses, than you want to use industry terms! If you sell medical equipment to hospitals, your prospects are going to be both sophisticated and using technical terms in their searches. They will search for medial collateral isolation braces instead of knee brace. In the business to business scenario, you must focus on industry terms or have your internet advertising fail.

Internet advertising for business is all about perspective. You need to focus on who your prospects are and the terminology they use. Failure to do so will lead to the failure of your internet advertising.

Internet Marketing – Short Term Strategy

After spending a lot of time and effort on building a site, many wonder where they should start with Internet marketing. Site owners can be bombarded with pitches about marketing and it is hard to sort out what should be done. In this article, a short term marketing strategy is discussed.

Short Term Marketing Strategy

The single best short term marketing strategy is pay-per-click marketing campaigns. A “PPC” campaign simply involves placing advertisements on the results pages of search engines. In essence, you open an account with the PPCs, develop a list of keywords and create ads for those keywords. The two best PPC platforms are Google Adwords and Overture.

Google Adwords lets you place ads on Google search results. In addition to its own search engine, Google also supplies search results to AOL and other sites. When you create your ads, you can choose to place your ads on “content” or “search” results. Select only “search” results until you are sure the advertisement and your site coverts traffic into revenues.

Yahoo purchased Overture a few years ago for 1.8 billion dollars. Overture places advertisements on search results for MSN and, ta da, Yahoo among others. To build your ads, you search for keywords from a list provided by the PPC and create individuals ads. It can take a long time, but it is worth it.

Which PPC is Best?

Both Google and Overture have serious benefits. Google will send more traffic to your site than Overture. Getting your ad in front of AOL users is particularly advantageous because AOL users are buyers. For whatever reason, they simply seem to be more amenable to buying what you’re selling.

If Google is so great, why use Overture? In many ways, Overture has serious advantages over Google Adwords. One of the biggest advantages involves the size of ads.

To effectively run a profitable PPC campaign, you must get the maximum bang for your buck. One strategy for doing this is to qualify your traffic by explaining details in your description. If you only carry one model of a product, say that so money isn’t wasted with people who are looking for a different model clicking on your ad. With Google, you only get two to three words in your title and 8 to 10 in your description.

PPC advertising is a tremendous short term marketing strategy for a number or reasons. First, the advertising gets traffic to your site immediately. Second, it allows you to test the ability of your site to convert traffic into dollars. If conversions are low, you can modify the site and get immediate feedback.

If its time to get working on your marketing, research the PPC possibilities. Google Adwords and Overture have a lot to offer.

Internet Marketing – Long Term Strategy - SEO

Once your site is up and running, the best method for getting immediate traffic is pay-per-click search engine marketing. Although you have to be patient, you should also be focusing on search engine optimization as a long term strategy.

Search Engine Optimization – “SEO”

Search engine optimization, or “seo” as it is better known, is the definitive long term Internet marketing strategy. So, what is it? Seo simply refers to taking steps to make sure your site appears high in non-paid search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The reason seo is considered a long term strategy is…well, it takes a long time. If your marketing is focusing on highly competitive keywords, such as “Europe travel”, there is so much competition that you could be looking at two or three years before getting top rankings. The time period is really a factor of how fast you can build links. Sometimes you can move up within 6 months, but sometimes it takes a few years.

Is it worth it to wait for 2 years to get into the top five for “Europe travel”? There are over 2,000,000 searches a month for the keyword phrase. What do you think? If you offer a service or product related to traveling in Europe, how much money would you make if even 1 million people visited your site each month? Think about that.

The Big Three

There are three, and only three, search engines that matter when it comes to seo – Google, Yahoo and MSN. What about Alta Vista, etc.? They simply don’t have enough traffic to make them worth pursuing.

There are four keys to seo. First, you must research the amount of traffic various keywords are receiving. Second, you must modify your site to include the exact keywords phrases in the meta tagging and text. Third, you must add and add and add content to your site. The more content, the more the big three will like your site. Finally, you must trade links with other sites that have content related to your site.

The keys to pursuing a seo marketing strategy are discipline and patience. Let’s take a quick look at each.

You must have the discipline to stick with your seo effort when you are seeing no results. The desire to throw one’s arms in the air in frustration is going to be strong. Just remember that every step you take today will pay off down the road.

Patience balances feelings of frustration and you are going to have a lot of those. Look, it is going to take a long time, so resist the urge to whine. Stick a sign up over your desk counting off the months or have a regular exercise routine. If nothing else, you can day dream about all of the free traffic you are going to get one day.

Search engine optimization is not for the weak of mind or impatient. If you can stick with it, this long term marketing strategy always pays off.

The Chicken and The Egg - The Internet Marketer and Site Designer

An age-old question is, “Which came first? The Chicken or the Egg?” In ecommerce, the same question can be applied to site designers and Internet marketers.

Before we settle the answer, we need a few parameters. For purposes of this discussion, a marketer is some formulating and creating Internet marketing strategies and campaigns. This includes search engine optimization. In using the term “designer”, we are throwing a bigger net to include programmers and people writing html.

Introducing the Designer

After deciding to start a site, most businesses will hire a designer or design team as one of the first steps. Intellectually, this makes sense. We need a site, thus, we need someone to build it.

Introducing the Marketer

After a lot of time and money has been spent on the design of the site, the first thought is given to marketing. Books are purchased, online articles such as this are read. PPC is often discovered and, typically, the business decides this looks easy and starts pursuing campaigns. The site starts making sales, but at a loss or a rate that can’t be increased despite a variety of tips. Frustration sets in and professional Internet marketers come on the seen. At this point, things start to get very ugly.

The business interviews a number of marketing professionals. All of them offer services, but on the condition major and expensive changes be made to the site. At this point, the business owner decides one of two things, the marketers are wrong or the designer is incompetent. Both views are wrong.

Holding Hands

Which came first? The marketer or the designer? Neither!

An effective site design combines the practical needs of the design team and marketer. While a designer will create a database to facilitate the showing of products, the marketer will want the designer to keep database parameters out of the sub-domain URLs. Other issues that must be jointly addressed include meta content, load times, abandonment issues and landing pages.

Both design and marketing have to be addressed at the outset of the creation of a site. There is simply no other way to approach an overall e-commerce effort.

How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website

Competitors' websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site. Here is an article on how to analyze a competitor's website.

Identifying the Leaders

Start off by identifying the major players. A good place to do this is Yahoo’s directory. It is good to view the major players in similar fields to your own so that you have a better view of your web site as perceived by others. You may want to print out the directory to take a closer look. Check some of the bigger companies and find out some of the innovative approaches and new products offered.

Sites like Media Metrix 500 can tell you which companies get the most traffic, and you can learn about the relative traffic by using Alexa. It is a free add-on to your browser that ranks the traffic for each site you visit and informing you whether it is in the top 100 or top 1000 ranking. This gives you a rough idea of where your competitors are in the ranking order.

Scrutinize the Leaders

The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors' web sites and analyzing them. These are the things that you should look for:

1. Make sure you check to see what products or services competitors offer, and note anything that’s different from your own offerings.

2. Look for gaps that you could fill.

3. Think about the look, feel and functionality of the competitors' web sites.

4. Check the advertising campaigns and offers they are running.

5. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customer’s point of view.

6. See if you can figure out their strategy.

If you are dealing with a public company then you can get detailed information from proper sources and write down the names of their key players. Then it is possible to look for any interviews, articles or speeches they might have made about relating to their web site.

Look for Strengths, Vulnerabilities, and Gaps

Now summarize the information you have found into few sentences for each competitor, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Note down the strategies to be followed to counter your competitor’s offering.

With this research, you can create or modify your marketing plan. Be sure to include how you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think you would require getting top rankings in the search engines. On the basis of your research on your competitors' websites, you need to make a decision of either to compete with your competitor or walk out of the competition and focus on other areas.

Don’t get frightened away prematurely, though – make sure you know what you are getting into before you start, and don’t let big companies intimidate you. Remember that you can move faster than your competitors if you have confidence in your abilities. All you need to do is offer your customers things that they cannot find anywhere else.

The Secret To Getting Indexed In Yahoo

Getting indexed in Yahoo has become very difficult in the last few months. The indexing robot, Yahoo!Slurp, has become erratic. For some sites, the robot will view all pages, but only add a few to the Yahoo database. For other sites, sub-domain listings actually start disappearing! So, what’s the secret to getting indexed?

Pleasing Yahoo!Slurp

The secret to getting indexed in Yahoo involves constant updates to your site. The updates, however, have to be done on both the site and through Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. Here’s how you go about getting indexed.

The first step is to start a blog for your site. You can build a blog on your site or use a free service. I prefer blogger.com because it is easy to use, but you can use whatever you like. Once you have your blog up, you should make entries that correspond and link to content on your site. For example, I will post this article on my blog, Moshing Search Engines, and link it to the article page on MarketingTitan.com.

To supercharge the impact of the blog, you should also link to a site map on your site. If you don’t have a site map, make one in HTML. The Yahoo robot will definitely follow it and index the pages. Don’t rely on the xml site map strategy Google is promoting.

Once you have the blog up with content posted, you must turn the blog into a real simple syndication feed. Again, you can use your own system. I prefer to use a free service because I really don’t have the time to waste on such things.

Feedburner.com seems to work find and is simple to use. Opening an account with Feedburner is so easy, I am not even going to explain it. At the end of the process, feedburner will kick out the link for your RSS feed. Here’s where the magic begins.

If you have a yahoo email account, you need to access you’re My Yahoo page. If you don’t have an account, get one! Once you are on the My Yahoo page, do the following:

1. Click the “add content” link in the upper left hand under the search box.

2. When the new page opens, click the “Add RSS by URL” link on the right of the “Find Content” search box in the upper section of the page.

3. Enter the exact link provided by Feedburner and click “add.” Do NOT add the url for your blog.

4. Click the “My Yahoo” tab at the top of the page and refresh the page.

At this point, you should see your feed at the bottom of the page. If you don’t, be patient. Yahoo is sometimes slow, so just try it again in an hour or so. When the feed is added, you should see the name of your blog and the title of each post under it. Yahoo can take up to a day to add new posts, so don’t panic if they don’t show up immediately.

Once you’ve completed the above, Yahoo will follow the links in the blog and index the pages on your site. If one of the links goes to a site map, you are in business. As an added bonus, Google will do the same thing. Let’s look at an example.

We are currently building NomadJournalTrips.com, which has been up for about a month. Roughly 10 to 20 pages are being added each day. Nomad Rick’s Ramblings is the blog for the site and the feed is included on four “My Yahoo” pages for various email accounts. Yahoo has indexed 95 pages and is about four days behind the page additions. Google has indexed 151 pages and is adding to the index every day. The blog and RSS feed are solely responsible for getting these pages indexed this quickly.

Depending on the size of your site, the process can take a few days or a couple of weeks. Every time you add new content, slap it into your blog with links. In no time, you will be taming Yahoo!Slurp.

Analyzing the Competition – Check Indexes

The beauty of the Internet is the inherent open nature of competition. It is so open, you can check indexes when analyzing the competition to improve your site.

Analyzing the Competition

A key step to any search engine optimization effort is to analyze the competition. The simplest way to do this is to simply go to their site and look at the code. Most browsers let you do this by clicking the “view” tab and then selecting “source.”

You competition isn’t stupid. Many sites will bar browsers from showing source code using the above technique. If your competition takes this step, is there anything you can do? Yes, there is.

Indexes

Almost everyone knows how to check if their site is indexed in a search engine. Simply go to the engine and search for “site:yourdomainname.” This technique can also be used to see what your competition is up to.

If you want to see a glimpse of how a competitor is pursuing search engine optimization, check how many pages are indexed in the relevant search engine. Do a search for “site:competitorsdomainname.” You’ll be presented with a list of their pages, the meta title and meta description. This works particularly well with Google.

The resulting list of pages can be analyzed in a couple of different ways. First, you can isolate the particular keywords being pursued by the site. These should then be compared to your site to ascertain whether you’re missing anything. You almost always are missing a key niche. Second, you can analyze the meta description to see both the layout and particular formation of sentences and keyword placement they are pursuing. Again, compare it to yours. Using this process, you can get an idea of how your efforts differ from a competitor.

Importantly, this approach should not be overvalued. It is only a glimpse of the competitor’s site, not a thorough review. It will tell you nothing about how pages are arranged, keyword density approaches and so on. You’ll have to hunt and peck around the site for that information. Still, the meta information gained from this approach makes it worth a go if you are shut out from the code of a site.

Analyzing Traffic – Visitors v. Hits

A key component to every web site is traffic analysis. When analyzing traffic, it is important to understand the difference between hits and visitors…and why both are important.

Be One With The Log

To analyze traffic to a site, you should be looking at your server logs. Server logs come in very raw data, but most hosting companies have interpreting programs that summarize the information into readable form. From these programs, you should be able to analyze who is sending you traffic, the number of hits and visitors among other information.

Hits v. Visitors – The Game Is On…

Many people, myself included, are lazy when it comes to discussing traffic results. We tend to use “hits” as a catch phrase for traffic hitting a web site. This isn’t entirely true. Traffic should always be analyzed in two categories, hits and visitors.

A “visitor” is a click from someplace on the net to your site. In your server logs, a visitor will be credited with visiting the site one time regardless of the number of pages the visitor views. For example, a person entering a brick n’ mortar bookstore is only one potential customer regardless of the number of books the person looks at.

A “hit” is a click on any page of the site and represents a multiple of the visitors. When you review server logs, the hits represent how many times visitors clicked site pages. Going back to our bookstore example, every book viewed by the person in the bookstore would be a hit. So, which information is more important?

Hits v. Visitors – And The Winner Is…

The simple fact is both visitors and hits are important statistics to analyze in your server logs. Obviously, the information on the number of visitors is important because you want to know how many potential customers are coming to your site. That being said, you should never focus on visitors without contemplating hits as well.

Hits are important because the number of hits tells you very important information about your site. Since hits represent the total number of pages viewed by all visitors, you can use the information to determine the effectiveness of your site. I call this by the very original and sophisticated name “hits to visitors ratio.” Let’s go back to our bookstore example.

Assume a person walks into a bookstore and only looks at one book. This may mean the person knew what they wanted, found it and bought it. Obviously, this is an ideal result. But what if a thousand people walk into the bookstore and only look at one book each? The bookstore would have a problem and start trying to figure out what it is. The hits statistics on your server tells you the same thing.

If your site has multiple pages, you need to find out if visitors are clicking into the internal pages. This is generally known as determining the depth of your site. The simplest way to do this is to divide the number of hits by the number of visitors for a particular time period. This figure will tell you if people are seeing one “book” or taking a look around.

Analyzing your server stats can be a real eye-opening experience. The information can be good or bad, but at minimum you will know if any corrective steps need to be taken.