Dear Customer
Welcome to the first issue of our newsletter, Media Matters, In it we will share some useful insider tips and advice to help you promote and boost your web presence online.
In this month‘s issue:
An Introduction to online marketing
Online marketing is one of those terms which excites or scares people. There is very little in the way of a middle ground. In this article I want to give you an overview of some of the different techniques that make up marketing your business online. Not all of these techniques will be suitable to your business but there are definitely still some techniques that you can apply that can get some great results.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation is the name given to trying to get your site to the top of the search rankings. By optimising your site, the hope is that you rank higher and also therefore attract more traffic - and ultimately more business. That said, search engines ranking software is a closely guarded secret so it is difficult to just follow one plan and have your site stay where it is consistently. It is also difficult to quantify in terms of costs as it could take a while to see results and results are not guaranteed!
Pay Per Click Marketing / Search Engine Marketing
Pay per click is pretty much what it says on the tin - you are paying the search engines to advertise your site and you pay them, when users click on your listings displayed on their results pages. These are normally shown at the top and on the right hand side of the results pages. Pay per click can be good if you need to get traffic quickly but it can burn money fast if you do not know what you are doing.
Email Marketing
Simply put, email marketing is sending out marketing messages or information to a list of registered email addresses. The beauty with email marketing is that it can have immediate results. That said you do have to make sure you have permission to email out to people. You need their consent to send them marketing messages and you need to make sure they have the ability to opt out of future messages.
Having a good, responsive list can be a great asset to any business and all businesses should find ways to attract and capture email addresses from their site visitors.
Social Marketing
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace... not a day goes by without one of these sites being in the news. The Internet has given people the ability, via these sites, to network online. By networking online from a business point of view you are able to meet new business partners, potential clients and much more. But you need to maximise your time and efforts in this space as it can become a huge time vampire – trust us, we know! Social Marketing is about getting the biggest bang out of this phenomenon without it taking all day.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing can do two things. On the one hand, you can run an affiliate programme and build an affiliate network to pay referrers for their business. On the other hand you can sign up to other programmes, and make money by sending business to other programmes.
Article Marketing
Article marketing is a low cost way to drive traffic to your website by distributing content around the web. You can do this by posting content on article directory sites. By doing this you are allowing other site owners to take the copy and reproduce it on their own web sites in return for adding a keyword link back to your website which could attract some visitors. More importantly, this helps Google rank your website.
There are also other forms of online marketing, but this will give you enough food for thought for now!
Google Freebies to help your Marketing Efforts
While there are some that feel that Google is too big and evil, for the website owner, Google provides a nice array of freebies that you can use to good effect with your online marketing efforts.
Here are just three of the services they offer which you can use right now for free.
Google Alerts allow you to receive the latest news, content, blogs and videos sent direct to your email whenever you want it by setting up email alerts. Keyword alerts are great to track your competitors, protect your own brand online and to give you ideas for site content and much more.
Sign up for free here: www.google.com/alerts
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows to you track all kind of activity on your website. You can see where your traffic is coming from, what it is doing on your site, and where it leaves. This stuff is invaluable in helping you maximise and improve your websites ability to drive more sales and convert more traffic.
Find out more here: www.google.com/analytics
Google webmaster tools is portrayed as a one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions; introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site; and connect you with your visitors. The main thing with webmaster tools is that it allows you to submit a sitemap of your website so that Google will be able to easily index all of it.
Find out more here: www.google.com/webmasters
Do you need some pointers?
Having a website is no longer enough. Getting people to it and getting search engines to rank it well are two of the main success factors for a website. The best website in the world will fail if it does not have web traffic. But what to do? Do you have the time to learn all this stuff? Do you have time to learn and implement all of these strategies consistently?;
If you need help with one particular part of your online marketing, or, if you would like us to develop a full online marketing plan for you, then get in touch. We have a wide range of techniques that can be deployed to drive more traffic to your website.
© Multimedia Projects, 2009.
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