Many will have you believe that internet marketing is a simple process. It would be nice to think that setting up a website will start drawing traffic from day one – in turn, producing vast quantities of sales and making the marketer a millionare over-night. Unfortunately this is not the case. I have been working in internet marketing for a number of years now and feel that I speak from experience. Internet Marketing requires a lot of hard work to get it right. I believe that it can be broken down like so:
1. Purchase your domain. With a good domain name you will find that people will be naturally drawn to your site. For example, if your site is for finance products that offer short-term loans then a domain such as quickcash.com would be ideal.
2. Develop the website. A lot of people on the web will convince you that this is a simple process and to some extent it is. However, it is important to consider a number of elements when setting up a website such as:
a) layout – i.e. is it structured and consistent?
b) Colours – i.e. for a corporate or professional looking website it is better to use
conservative colours such as grey, white and blue.
c) “Bells and whistles” – this is a phrase I use to describe a website that has too
much flashy content such as laden with Flash animations, javascript and other potentially draining resources that will look fantastic but will take a while to load up on the users computer. This can result in a high drop-out rate.
d) Content – this is probably the most important element. Not only will good, informative content help the customer make the correct decision but it will boost your SEO (search engine optimisation) rankings in search engines such as Google and Yahoo – thus driving higher quantities of traffic to your website.
3. Email marketing. In my opinion this is the best way of driving traffic to a website. With the right data you can essentially create a customer base by using this method.
4. Affiliate marketing. This is a very good method of driving traffic to your site – by paying affiliate companies to drive traffic for you. However, this is a costly exercise and should be well thought through before going ahead with it.
5. Pay per click (PPC) marketing is also an excellent, if very costly, method of driving traffic to your website. Some companies spend up to £5000 per day just to ensure they are number 1 on Google. This can be a good method of marketing if your startup capital is high.
There are a number of other methods to market your website but I believe I have covered the key points in this article.
