posted by Debra Unplugged on May 11
Here are a few ways you can improve your Internet marketing without spending a bundle. These are some basic tips that have much more involved solutions than the simplified summaries I provide below, but I hope it puts you on the right path. In this example, I’m going to assume you’re trying to sell gourmet steaks online.
1. WHO is your Market? – Do you really know your target market? What else are they buying online and offline? What websites do they visit with regularity? Figure that out, then find the websites that cater to them. Not sure what else they like? ASK THEM. Send your customers a survey, call them…do your homework. Then see what type of designs, slogans, and catchy verbiage these other sites are using to entice that audience. You may not be able to afford a gazillion dollars of website R&D, but you can bet that some of the top sites that already cater to your audience DO. Borrow from the best!
2. What is your Message? – Once you know your audience and the type of presentations that are proven to attract them, you need to define your message. What is the ONE thing that you want your audience to remember about your product/service on your site. Don’t get confused with two or three, although you certainly should have a page that espouses all your benefits. You need to pound home the ONE thing that separates you from the competition? Is your product easier, faster, cheaper, more luxurious? Do you offer better service, newer technology? I can’t tell you how many websites I’ve been to that do a miserable job of telling me WHAT they do or WHY I should buy it. Don’t be one of them!
3. Sell Benefits, NOT Features! – While it’s nice to tell me that your Omaha Steaks are USDA super special beef (that’s a feature) what is really important to most customers is the benefit of that feature, like that “it tastes great!” or “is healthier for me”.
4. Use CPC Wisely – Cost Per Click advertising on sites like MSN, Google and Yahoo is probably the fastest and most efficient way to get quality traffic to your site. You pick the keywords for which you wish to advertise, set the bid amount you’re willing to pay for a clickthru, then you only pay when somebody arrives at your site. AMAZING! But you need to track the results to really use this effectively. That means familiarizing yourself with phrases like CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition). You’ll need to have an order or inquiry page in order to know if the clicks you are buying are converting into actual leads.
5. Find Your ONE Keyphrase – Now that you know your audience and how you want to present your product to them, you need to choose the key phrase that you think is ideal for your users to find you on a search engine. This is a delicate and critically important task, as you want to be specific enough that you won’t attract bogus prospects or compete for a phrase that’s too general and difficult, but you also don’t want to choose a phrase so hyper specific that nobody searches it, ever. You can see how popular a phrase is by checking with Overture’s Keyword Tool, inventory.overture.com/.
6. Tune Your Tags – We’ve defined the key phrase you hope to rank for on the search engines, now you need to learn these three letters, SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the service of getting your page to rank “organically” (not paid) on the first page of results on the major engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. This is achieved by a combination of factors, including having Meta Tags that stress your key phrase. These tags are hidden in the HTML code of your site’s pages and tells Google and other engines what you think your site is about. There is endless drivel written on this topic, but I suggest you learn the basics enough so that if you do hire an SEO expert, you can talk basic shop. Check out www.seochat.com to get started.
7. Are You Buying Links? – Probably the most important new element to SEO, you will need to have as many back links (links to your site) from other websites as possible to have a good chance of ranking for your key phrase. This is done by link swapping, submitting press releases and other articles or just buying them. Read more at www.linkbuilding.org.
8. Simplify Your Content and Design – Ok, so let’s assume you’ve had a little beginner’s luck and are now getting traffic to your site. Are you maximizing the traffic? You can use excellent free tools like Google Analytics to analyze your traffic and see what they are and are not clicking. Your end goal should be to generate orders or inquiries, so tweak your site design until you increase your visit to inquiry/order ratio. That means trying different buttons, hyperlinks, text and content until you find the right combo. If you’re not tracking your stats, you can’t improve!
OK, so I realize this is a lot to digest in one sitting, but the key is to know what you do and do not know…and then go find the knowledge on each of these topics. There are thousands of articles and plenty of paid pros out there to help you!
