Web Marketing

The marketing plan for your website should be well in place before your site goes live. Good planning over where and how to market your site can make a big difference in its effectiveness. The following areas should all be considered in your web marketing plan.

Optimizing Your Domain Name
Your domain name is your most important piece of "real estate" on the web. Your domain name should be easy to remember (and spell!) and, if possible, include the name of your product or service or company. Unless your company or brand is well known by its initials (i.e. IBM) you should try to use the entire company or product name in your domain.

Getting Listed In Search Engines
Getting your site listed in major search engines is another crucial factor in your plan, especially if you are trying to increase your customer base outside of your traditional advertising areas. Making good choices for your site's keywords and description, and having well written body copy can boost your visibility in searches. For more information, please see the article on search engines.

Continuing Your Traditional Advertising
If you already use traditional advertising for your existing business, creating traffic to your website can be as easy as adding your domain name to your current ads and company stationary. If you use email to respond to customers, make sure you use your domain name in your signature file.

Knowing Your Online Customer
Not only is it of supreme importance that you know who your customer is before you launch your website, you must also watch your site traffic to see if your visitors are the customers you need or want, and be able to alter your marketing strategy accordingly. Analyzing the search terms customers use to find your site is also important in determining who your site visitors are and where they come from.

Giving Something Away
One great way to drive potential customers to your site is to provide useful information relating to your product or service. Customers are people looking for a solution; if you can tell them how to solve a problem they may have, you just might be able to sell them the product to do it! And if you keep that material updated, you can gain repeat visitors and an element of trust.

Finding An Online Niche
Even if you sell a large variety of products or services, you may want to consider concentrating on one or two to market online and take advantage of niche marketing. You may even want to build separate websites for several different product lines if they appeal to a widely varying customer base. In this way, you can get better targeted search results than if you try to keyword for every product you sell on one individual site.

Resources:

Domain Surfer  Searches domain names based on word strings, i.e. will show every domain name containing the word carrot, wherever the word appears in the domain name.

WhoIs  Is your desired domain name taken?

Google  Best place to search on potential keywords or find out what keywords competitors are using.

Overture Search Suggestion Tool  Use this tool to find out how often your chosen keywords are actually used in search queries.

TOP