What A Tangled Web We Weave - How-to On Marketing Yourself Online
December 4th, 2008

The internet, just like every other aspect of the business, you need to market yourself, your business and your products. Marketing on the internet is not hard to do and is cost effective as well. Here we will have a look at what you can do to get your internet marketing up and running so you too can have a good amount of traffic on your business website.

One of the first and most important things you should do is think who your target buyers are. You may have already done this in your business plan but if not here are some things you should take into account.

Who is your product for, is it gender or age specific?

Is your product for a certain type of person or occupation, like home businesses, executives, and students or stay at home parents?

Will your target consumer be able to afford your product?

A good way to find out what your target consumer spends on products and services are to get a hold of and have a look at some reports that detail such information like:

What your target consumer income is.

How much they spend on services and products.

How much they can budget for with products like yours.

How much they spend on the internet.

Once you have worked out who your target consumers are, it will be easier for you to find that group of people through specific marketing routes.

Below are some ways you can market your business effectively online.

Make your website search engine friendly. When a person looks for something on the internet through a search engine, that search engine sends out robot spiders. This robot spider goes through pages to find and index the user's keywords and places a link to those websites that have those keywords on the search page. You achieve this by having rich keyword content related to the products on your website. Have these keywords in your title, headings and all related content that you can fit them in, and construct Meta tags and descriptions. Once done submit your website to all the search engines that you can find, many host this service for free.

Linking to and from other websites will help you boost your search engine ranking as well as bring in more traffic. You can achieve this in a number of ways; the most popular is by joining directories. The best ones to join are the ones that are closest to your category of product and service. Another way you can link to other pages is to set up a link page on your website; it will contain links to websites who also host a link to your website. You could write articles for online newsletters that will give you a link at the end of the article, or have an article on your website that other sites will have interests in linking to.

Use your email to your advantage. When you write emails it is easy to include a signature, this can display your website link and a little of what it is about, but remember to keep it short. Another thing you can do is compile a newsletter of your own. This is easy to do and is a great way to build trust with potential clients. Consider putting in your newsletter things like new products, information that will benefit both your business and your reader and what is coming up in the future like sales. You can get people to sign up to your list by having a ‘subscribe to newsletter' form on your website. Remember not to spam. This service is usually free but you can always rent an email list, this is a list of people who agree to receive commercial email and offers.

Other things you can do in marketing your website are banner exchanges, promote in forums, discussion boards or online journaling, and ask visitors to bookmark your website.

You can always step up a notch and go with advertising; you can do this a number of ways like buying text ads in newsletters. Newsletter's ads are cheap and can be placed in newsletters that suit your target buyer. Affiliate programs, this works by someone having your link on their site and being paid a commission every time someone clicks on your link and buys a product. Pay per click ad programs, these are run by search engines and you only pay when someone clicks on your link. Listing your product with shopping comparison sites or with auction sites is another option you can take. They work by comparing your product and prices with other products.

The above is just some of the ways you can go about marketing your business website, there are others. Remember getting potential buyers to your website is only half the battle, next you got to them to buy a product

---

Please use the form below to comment on this page:

Name:
Email Address:	(kept private)
Comments:
Let me know if my message is replied to:	yes
Please enter the digits 513 in the box. This keeps away spam robots:

PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files\HSphere\3rdparty\PHP\PHP5\ext\php_curl.dll' - The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0 PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files\HSphere\3rdparty\PHP\PHP5\ext\php_gd2.dll' - The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0 PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files\HSphere\3rdparty\PHP\PHP5\ext\php_mysql.dll' - The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0