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What is online marketing?
Online marketing means different things to different people. One useful definition of online marketing is the process of driving traffic to your website and making best use of it once its there.
Online marketing and promotion should be an integral part of your overall brand strategy - not something tacked on the end as an afterthought.
Online marketing - driving traffic
How do you go about driving traffic to your website as part of an e-strategy?
A large part of online promotion boils down to search engine optimisation (SEO) and submission.
Optimising for search engines is something that needs to be considered at the very inception of your website.
Bolting it on at the end by subscribing to an online maketing "programme" will almost certainly be a
waste of time and money.
Online marketing - first steps
Firstly, you need to think about the words your target audience will use to search for you on the web.
This is not for the so-called META tag "magic bullet" - these are only used by one major search
engine now, so if your web design company is basing their SEO strategy on META keywords, you know its time to look elsewhere.
Having identifed your keywords you need to weave them into your website wherever possible. In online marketing content is king
and keyword density is its queen. Make sure your keywords appear regularly - especially in page titles. This is probably
the number one online marketing and promotion tatic.
Online marketing - submission
Having got your content straight the next thing to do is get the search engines to come by and index your keyword-laden content.
Start off with the free ones:
Do not spend any money on submission at this point - you won't be able to account for it in your online marketing budget.
Its important that you track the amount of traffic from these free search engines using your webserver statistics - page counters
are a complete waste of time to the online professional. If you're not getting proper webserver stats to support your online marketing and promotion
campaign you know its time to look for another hosting company.
Having established your baseline traffic, you're clear to try paid submissions. If traffic increases you know that was worthwhile spend.
If it doesn't, look elsewhere.
Online marketing - making best use of traffic
Your online marketing and promotion efforts have paid off -now what?
You need to make best use of your traffic. On which pages do visitors enter your site? Which pages do they leave the site from?
Have they seen the content you wanted them to see whilst there? Did they remain anonymous during their visit or were you
able to gain some information from them?
These are all important considerations. Web stats can help you to a certain extent. But what else can you do?
Online marketing - scratch cards
Electronic scratch cards can fulfill both elements of an online marketing campaign. They can:
- drive traffic and build brand awareness
- capture data from site visitors
In addition liveScratch can provide a powerful incentive scheme for others to promote your business. They make an excellent
online rewards program for your sales staff.
Find out more about online marketing....
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