| Internet Marketing Is About Being In Front Of People - Without That Your Site Means Very Little |
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Can you imagine paying thousands of dollars for printing glossy marketing brochures that you just leave sitting in the back seat of your car? Not very effective yet for many websites that is about as much use as they make. Marketing your website is essential to being found on the search engines.
I don't know about you but if I went out and spent $5000 plus on printing up several thousand quality promotion or product information brochures that I then placed in the boot or back seat of my car to be handed out to people a few at a time when I called in on them or met them at some networking function then I would say that I had made a big mistake. And I am speaking from experience. Several years ago when I first went into business I did just that (well not $5000 worth but it felt like it to me). Well here I am almost 4 years later, not only did the business change but I still had them in my cupboard until a few weeks ago. They achieved nothing. So what has this got to do with websites? Well, quite simply most websites I have observed do little more than that by way of a positive outcome. The business owner created the website several years ago as something not much more than a glassy brochure or worse still they recently paid for their new website and apart from putting it up they have done nothing else. Right up there with "The cheque is in the mail" sits the other great misconception. Once I have a website the business will come my way. Sorry folks but "that just ain't gonna happen" ! People will not find you unless your website lends itself to being found by the search engines. And even once you are found unless the content is relevant, it is reputable and it is better positioned than your competitors, being in the index at position 372 is not worth the electricity is cost to see the result on Google. Your website is as good as that box of brochures sitting in the car boot. Sure you hand out your business card with your web address on it and sometimes people will remember it or even better they have entered it into their customer relationship management system (CRM). Will they remember you 6 months later - probably not. So when they want to find a product that does what yours does they go to Google and guess who they find on page 1? Sorry it wasn't you. Lost opportunity. Internet marketing takes into account a wide range of what we call on-page and off-page techniques and determines which of those will yield the best results for your own situation. Not all will work for everyone and no single technique is the silver bullet solution to anyone I am afraid. Essential to your internet marketing is to understand your overall marketing strategy for your business. Of course fro many smaller businesses this is not always quite so well thought out and invariably does not take a strategic view. If you can achieve this your internet marketing will be far more successful. Consider this - if you have not clearly identified who your key market segments are and which products or services are most relevant to each of those segments then how can you expect to run a targeted marketing campaign over the internet? Your market is too large to succeed in any other way different to being very focused. Remember, you are a very small fish in an extremely large pond. Do not fall into the trap of believing that internet marketing is all you need. It is only one of the many different initiatives that you need to apply across your business and it should be an integral part of your overall business and marketing plan. |
